The $24 billion Dutch bank ABN Amro is cutting a fifth of its workforce over the next three years—so how is its CEO Marguerite Bérard rallying the troops? By sacrificing her long meals and talking over the growing pains with staffers over weekly lunches.
“I now take lunch early and at my desk,” Bérard told the Financial Times in a recent interview. “This is a big cultural change because French meals can be long. This has been one of my adjustments.”
The bank has been taking hits since the financial crisis, having previously been rescued from collapse—and more recently, ABN Amro’s 2025 fourth quarter net profit was lower than market expectations. Last November, the bank announced a plan to increase return on equity (ROE) to at least 12%, while keeping cost/income ratio below 55%. However, the bid to turn things around required some sacrifices, including cutting 5,200 staffers between from 2024 to 2028. By the end of 2025, 1,500 employees had already been cut, ABN Amro informed Fortune.
Now, once a week, the French banker has sandwiches with eight to 10 colleagues in an effort to “hear their views on the bank” through the transition.
“Building consensus and coalitions is often important in the Netherlands,” the CEO continued. “It’s something that the French don’t always know how to do well.”
The gesture is essential in getting staffers on board as the company reduces costs and staffers, the CEO explained, while attempting to boost profits and stay competitive. Bérard said that employees have “understood” the reasoning behind the company’s strategy, and that redundancies would be handled in a “very responsible manner,” as the European bank has committed to helping laid off workers find new jobs. However, it follows that not everyone would be satisfied with the plan, and Bérard is committed to making progress over time.
“[But] we also recognise that consensus may take time to build, and sometimes the status quo is not a good option and you have to move at pace.”
The CEOs who eat lunch with staffers to better their businesses
ABN Amro’s CEO isn’t the only leader of a billion-dollar business sitting down to break bread with staffers—others are leveraging the mundane meal as a powerful connection strategy.
Chris Tomasso, the CEO of breakfast and lunch chain First Watch, is uniting with his staffers through small moments that have an outsized impact. Not only does he write congratulation letters to his staff celebrating career milestones like 10, 20, or even 30 years at the billion-dollar business, but the leader also likes to dine among employees for his midday meal. Tomasso said it’s critical for employees to feel happy and appreciated.
“I tried to minimize the [CEO] title as best I can when I’m interacting with people,” Tomasso told Fortune in a 2025 interview. “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.”
Even the leader of one of the biggest companies in the world, $3.8 trillion tech behemoth Apple, doesn’t always take lunch in the corner office. CEO Tim Cook has frequently sat down with random employees at 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 their fellow executives—only in the public commissary, so they can rub shoulders with all kinds of staffers. The CTO and cofounder of the $4.5 billion learning platform said that these daily team lunches, which include cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn, are “fundamental to our company culture.” He said that connecting with employees is better than any engagement survey, because they’re 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.
“What’s important is that lunch lets us hear what’s actually on the team’s mind,” the cofounder continued. “There’s no rehearsed feedback or polished updates—I get to hear things I’d never learn in a formal meeting.”
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