The One Habit That Kept a Siemens CEO Honest for Seven Years
Every month, for seven years, Dale A. Martin — former President & CEO of Siemens Hungary — sat down one-on-one with two employees he'd never otherwise meet.
Not his direct reports. Not division heads. Two people, pulled from deep within the organization, six months after they'd joined.
No agenda beyond two questions:
"What's the atmosphere like?"
"What can we improve in our processes?"
That's it. No slides, no HR facilitator, no performance review disguised as a chat. Just the CEO of a 3,500-person company, listening to people who were still new enough to see the place clearly — and junior enough that, without this meeting, they'd never have had his ear.
Why This Works When Most "Open Door" Policies Don't
Most CEOs believe they're accessible. Most organizations believe information flows upward. Both beliefs are usually wrong, and not because anyone is lying — because of how hierarchies filter reality by default.
By the time something reaches a CEO's desk, it has usually passed through three, four, five layers of people who each had a reason to round it up, round it down, or leave it out. Bad news gets softened. Nobody plans this. It just happens, structurally, in any organization big enough to have layers.
Martin's monthly ritual was a deliberate workaround for exactly that filter, built on a few choices that made it effective rather than performative:
New hires, not veterans. Someone six months in still remembers what confused them, what didn't make sense, what felt different from what they expected.
Two people from each division, every month. Not a one-off town hall. A rhythm. Consistency signals that this is a standing part of how the company runs.
Open, not scripted, questions. "What's the atmosphere like?" and "What can we improve?" leave room for whatever is actually on someone's mind.
Seven years, without stopping. The value isn't the first meeting. It's meeting number sixty, when word has spread that this is real.
The Real Skill Isn't Meeting People. It's Staying Curious.
Any CEO can put skip-level meetings on a calendar. The harder part — the part that actually separates leaders who stay grounded from leaders who drift into a bubble — is doing it long enough, and asking well enough, that people tell you the truth.
That takes consistency and curiosity. Consistency, because trust that you'll actually be there next month is what gets people to open up. Curiosity, because a CEO asking "what's wrong?" out of obligation gets a different answer than one actually wanting to know.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
You don't need to run a company the size of Siemens Hungary to borrow this:
Pick a cadence you can actually sustain.
Talk to people close enough to the work to see it clearly, and far enough from you that they wouldn't normally have your attention.
Ask questions that don't presuppose the answer.
Do it long enough that it stops being an event and becomes something people expect.
This is the kind of leadership practice we dig into with the CEOs in our community — real habits, from real executives, that hold up over years.
