Young, fresh-faced graduates stepping into offices for the first time probably don’t expect the top boss to pay them much mind while they’re at the bottom of the totem pole. But the opposite was true for billionaire Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. When he was just a newcomer to the workforce, his boss would even secretly wash his huge pile of dirty coffee cups for him.
“This was my first job out of graduate school,” Hastings recently said in an interview with Graham Bensinger. “I was a programmer in a 30-person startup, and working hard and doing all-nighters and drinking lots of coffee. And then my coffee cups would pile up. And every week or so the janitor would clean them all, and I’d have 20 new cups, and [the] cycle would go on.”
At the time, Hastings was 28 years old, working at Coherent Thought under its CEO Barry Plotkin. Hastings was writing code every day, programming into the night and stacking up dirty coffee cups on his desk, which were always cleaned eventually. However, about a year into his habit, he found out his hoard of cups weren’t being scrubbed by the janitor.
“One morning I came in very early to the office [at] like 4:30 [a.m.], and I went into the bathroom, and there was my CEO. And he’s washing coffee cups,” Hastings explained. “And I was like, ‘Barry, are you washing my coffee cups?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Have you been doing that all year?’
“He said ‘Yes.’ And I’m like, ‘Why?’” he continued. “And he said, ‘Well, you do so much for us and this is the one thing I can do for you.’”
That routine, unspoken gesture from Hasting’s former boss has stuck with the self-made billionaire throughout the rest of his nearly four-decade career, founding billion-dollar companies like Pure Software and Netflix. In that early programming job, he said that Plotkin’s leadership style convinced employees to “follow him anywhere,” even if it meant the company was heading toward bankruptcy. But the Netflix founder has still taken a page from his book, bringing coffee “for everybody” he works with.
“I realized, wow, you not only have to be like this servant leader, you also have to be this strategy person,” Hastings said, adding that the coffee cup experience “formed such an impression upon me that I’ve tried to emulate that aspect.”
The CEOs who stay humble by eating lunch with staffers and writing appreciation notes
The CEO of First Watch, Chris Tomasso, also stays connected to his staffers through good old-fashioned notes of appreciation.
Similar to Hastings, the leader of the breakfast chain reeling in $1 billion in revenue yearly was inspired by a handwritten thank-you note from his CEO at Hard Rock Cafe when he was just 26. Now Tomasso carves out time every month to handwrite letters to workers, like cooks and dishwashers, who are celebrating major career milestones. Tomasso has penned hundreds of notes so far. Plus, he still grubs alongside First Watch staffers instead of eating in his office.
“I tried to minimize the [CEO] title as best I can when I’m interacting with people,” Tomasso told Fortune last 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.”
Mary Barra, the CEO of iconic car company General Motors, also stays connected to her staffers and customers by responding to “every single letter” that comes her way. Whether it’s a negative note from a kid worried about their family’s future after the closure of a General Motors plant, or a loyal Chevrolet driver sharing their car’s nickname, Barra puts pen to paper to show that she cares about the people supporting the business.
And the chairman and CEO of $428 billion energy giant Chevron, Mike Wirth, also believes in the power of meaningful gestures. Just like Tomasso and Barra, he sends out dozens of “old-school, on paper” notes each time he visits Chevron employees around the world. By the time he’s done rounds on a trip, he’s already written 60 to 80 letters, Wirth estimated.
“I think back to when I was early in my career, and if a CEO had sent me a letter and actually knew what I was doing, it would have been a really big deal for me,” Wirth said on the How Leaders Lead podcast in 2024. “And so I try to remember what it was like to be in the jobs that I’m visiting and that I had those jobs myself one time. And I want to make sure that people know that I appreciate them.”
