In many large companies, CEOs usually hold meetings in comfortable corner offices, and lunch is also delivered to their offices. However, at noon, the employees of Ancestry will find that their CEO, Howard Hochhauser, is eating in the office dining area.
Hochhauser said that this habit stems from what he learned from Ace Greenberg while working at Bear Stearns, a Wall Street investment bank, in the late 1990s. At that time, he held several positions in the stock research department and eventually rose to the position of vice president and stock research analyst. Every lunchtime, Greenberg, who had long served as CEO at the company, would eat with the employees.
“Ace Greenberg is the founder of the company, and he sits on the floor every day, which I remember very clearly. It’s really a very noticeable gesture. He is truly approachable,” Hochhauser said to Fortune, “You can talk to him; he doesn’t sit in some lofty glass office.”
“I think one thing I will struggle with – and I imagine other CEOs will struggle with as well – is finding channels to obtain unfiltered information,” he continued, “People tend to wrap you in a bubble… So if you’re having lunch and chatting casually with everyone else, that’s often how you get that kind of information.”
Ancestry CEO What I Learned from Having Lunch with Employees
By dining with employees, CEO of Ancestry can gauge the acceptance of policies and decisions among the staff. Even when Hochhauser has to remind employees about the company's requirements for offline work, he indicates that employees will express their feelings candidly.
About two days before he officially announced the requirement for working offline to his employees, Hochhauser informally shared this idea with a group of them. The employees immediately expressed their concerns, especially regarding how it would affect their responsibilities such as picking up their children from school, whether they would be able to attend their children's soccer matches in the evening, and helping them move into university dormitories.
"People will appreciate this approach; tell them honestly what is required," said Hochhauser. "During lunch, everyone expressed their concerns quite frankly, but they also appreciated this openness."
These direct and honest feedbacks were taken into consideration. When discussing office policies, he clearly stated to the Ancestry employees: 'You are adults; you make your own judgments.'
Those who dine with employees, CEO: 'It's at that moment that the real things emerge.'
From obtaining candid feedback to building consensus during difficult transition periods, dining together can allow executives to see the true thoughts of their employees.
When ABN Amro, a Dutch bank with an asset size of $36 billion, announced that it would cut one-fifth of its staff over the next three years, its CEO Marguerite B é rard boosted morale by having lunch with employees every week to discuss the difficulties during the transformation process. Since the financial crisis, the bank has been under pressure and was once saved from the brink of collapse; moreover, ABN Amro its net profit in the fourth quarter of 2025 fell short of market expectations. To turn things around, ABN Amro plans to lay off about 5,200 people between 2024 and 2028. ABN Amro confirmed to Fortune that as of April this year, 1,500 employees had already been laid off by the end of 2025.
These days, this French banker eats sandwiches with eight to ten of his colleagues every week in order to "hear their views on the bank" during the transformation process. Earlier this year, Bé rard told The Financial Times: "In the Netherlands, it is often important to build consensus and alliances. This is not something that French people are always good at."
Even when Tim Cook was in charge of the $4.9 trillion tech giant Apple, he didn't always eat lunch in a corner office. This former CEO often sat in the company cafeteria with random employees during lunchtime – which is in contrast to his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, who frequently had lunch with design executives Jonathan Ive.
The leadership of Duolingo also enjoys dining in the office cafeteria with other executives, which allows them to interact with various types of employees. Severin Hacker, co-founder and chief technology officer of this learning platform valued at $7 billion, stated that these daily team lunches, including those with co-founders CEO Luis, von, and Ahn, are "the foundation of our company culture." He also added that interacting with employees is more effective than any survey on job satisfaction, as employees are more candid about the company's situation: "That's when the real insights emerge."
"Lunch is an opportunity for people who don't usually work together to have a real conversation. On any given day, Luis or I might sit next to a new employee who has just graduated from school, or next to someone from a completely different team," Hacker wrote in a LinkedIn post a year ago.
First Watch CEO Chris Tomasso also adopts a similar hands-on leadership style. The person in charge of this breakfast and lunch chain restaurant prefers to eat with the employees rather than hiding in a corner office. For chefs and dishwashers who reach career milestones within this chain enterprise with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion, he even takes the time to write letters of praise on a monthly basis.
“I try my best to minimize the presence of the title [ CEO ] when interacting with people,” Tomasso said to Fortune earlier this year. “I eat lunch in the lounge with everyone, and that always surprises the new employees for some reason—I just sit next to them and eat my lunch with them. I think that’s a pity.”
