Bill McKeon

It probably is,

Not what you'd expect in my answer, because what I've learned is leaders get caught up with the fact of thinking about themselves as executives.

And the more that you can take yourself down into the bowels of each organization and really walk it and see it, to see how people deliver a service, to see how they answer phones.

The most important people in the organization are the ones that have the most touch points with customers.

And you've probably heard this

many times before, but if those people aren't extremely valued as they should be in an organization and the culture doesn't reinforce that, then you're missing the very greatest opportunity in a company.

Setting a culture really starts at the top and the way in which you treat people, the way in which you're curious and talk to them about their jobs, you can't do that from an executive office.

You've got to be able to walk through

and touch points of all throughout the organization.

And I often think CEOs try to behave like CEOs and think those things are above them and just the opposite.

I think it's the most important thing that a CEO does is touch everyone on the front lines to really kind of understand how they see the world, how they see the culture of the company and really building up from that base, because that's when you really learn about the business.

And I find too often CEOs put too many layers between them and the front lines of delivering a service or a product, and they lose really the beauty of the organization.

And so that's my advice to CEOs is de-layer as much as you possibly can get as close to the front lines of business and make sure the people there on those front lines are treated as well as any other person in an executive suite.

And they will know a culture.

You can't fake it.

It's not something that you put on the wall in a coffee room.

It's what you live every day.

And so how you conduct yourself and how you treat people that would consider themselves on the lowest levels are certainly not the lowest level of importance.

They should be almost in an inverse relationship to those people on the front lines.

And that's where you build a culture.