At many large companies, chief executives are squared away in plush corner offices, taking meetings behind closed doors and placing elaborate lunch orders. At Ancestry, the Utah-based genealogy company known for family-history research and DNA testing services, midday looks different: employees will find CEO Howard Hochhauser eating his meal alongside them in the office's shared eating area.

The habit dates back to the late 1990s, when Hochhauser worked at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns—which collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis and was sold to JPMorgan Chase. He held multiple positions within the firm's equity research department, ultimately serving as a vice president and equity research analyst. And when it came time to step away from the keyboard for the midday meal, the company's longtime CEO, Ace Greenberg, would sit down to eat among his employees.

“Ace Greenberg, who founded the firm, sat on the floor every day, and it stuck with me. Like, gosh, that's really a visible statement. He's really accessible,” Hochhauser tells Fortune. “You could talk to him, he wasn't sitting in some glass office that's untouchable.”

“One of the things that I think I struggle with—I think other CEOs struggle with—is access to unfiltered information,” he continues. “People wrap you in this bubble…And so if you're breaking bread with people casually over lunch, you tend to get that [information].”

What Ancestry's CEO learned from lunching with staffers

Sharing meals with employees gives Hochhauser a temperature check on how policies and decisions land with staffers. Even when he had to remind employees of the company's in-person working expectations, he says, workers were honest about how they felt.

About two days before announcing the in-person expectations, Hochhauser informally ran the idea by a group of staffers. They immediately felt comfortable raising concerns about the impact on caregiving: dropping their children off at school, making soccer games in the evenings, and helping their kids move into college.

“People appreciate it, leveling with them and telling them what expectations are,” Hochhauser says. “And over lunch, people were honest and raised their concerns, but also appreciated the candor.”

He took the direct, candid feedback into account, and while communicating the in-office policy, he made one thing clear to Ancestry employees: “You're an adult. Use your judgment.”

The CEOs who break bread with workers: 'That's when the real stuff comes out'

From gathering candid feedback to building consensus during difficult transitions, shared meals can give executives a window into what employees are really thinking.

When $36 billion Dutch bank ABN Amro announced it would cut a fifth of its workforce over the next three years, CEO Marguerite Bérard rallied the troops by discussing the growing pains with staffers over weekly lunches. The bank had been taking hits since the financial crisis, having previously been rescued from collapse—and more recently, ABN Amro's fourth-quarter 2025 net profit came in lower than market expectations. In a bid to turn things around, the bank is set to let go of around 5,200 staffers between 2024 and 2028. By the end of 2025, 1,500 employees had already been cut, ABN Amro confirmed with Fortune in April of this year.

Once a week, the French banker now has sandwiches with eight to 10 colleagues to “hear their views on the bank” through the transition. Bérard told the Financial Times earlier this year that “Building consensus and coalitions is often important in the Netherlands. It's something that the French don't always know how to do well.”

Even Tim Cook didn't always take lunch in the corner office while running the $4.9 trillion tech behemoth Apple. The former CEO frequently sat down with random employees in the company's cafeteria during lunch—a shift from his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, who often dined with design executive Jonathan Ive.

Leaders at Duolingo also like to gather with fellow executives in the office's public commissary so they can rub shoulders with staffers all kinds. Severin Hacker, CTO and cofounder of the $7 billion language-learning platform, has said these daily team lunches—which include cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn—are “fundamental to our company culture.” Connecting with employees, he added, is better than any engagement survey, because people are more open about how things are going at the company: “That's when the real stuff comes out.”

“Lunch is an opportunity for people who don't normally work together to actually talk. On any given day, Luis or I might be sitting next to a new hire fresh out of school. Or people from completely different teams,” Hacker wrote in a LinkedIn post a year ago.

First Watch CEO Chris Tomasso takes a similarly hands-on approach to leadership. The head of the breakfast-and-lunch chain, which brings in over $1 billion in annual revenue, prefers to break bread with staffers rather than hide away in a corner office. He also takes time every month to write congratulatory letters to cooks and dishwashers hitting career milestones at the company.

“I tried to minimize the [CEO] title as best I can when I'm interacting with people,” Tomasso told Fortune earlier this year. “I eat lunch in the break room with everybody, which always, for whatever reason, blows new employees away—that I just sit down next to them and bring my lunch and have lunch with them. I think it's a shame that there's that feeling.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.