“Undercover Boss,” a new TV show, tries to portray CEOs in a sympathetic light. But it’s really staged tripe.

If you want to understand a CEO as a fully dimensional human being, strike up a conversation with an employee (preferably a low- to mid-level manager). Then ask that employee two questions:

1) Have you ever met your CEO?

2) What do you think of your CEO?

In a small business, managers will naturally know their CEOs and sometimes express strong opinions. The workplaces with the best morale, lowest turnover and highest productivity tend to be the ones with the most enthusiastic managers who trust and respect the top brass.

In a huge corporation, it’s unlikely that every supervisor has chatted with the CEO. But even if the answer to the first question is NO, you want to hear the respondent rave when asked the second question.

In a global corporation with many lines of business, the divisional president is just as important as the parent company’s CEO. Ideally, employees within each business subsidiary have met their division head and think highly of him or her.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, has a long-standing tradition of hosting monthly meetings with all employees throughout the company whose birthday falls within that month. Attendees (many from afar) ask him anything they want. He gives fairly blunt answers. And he prefers that VPs and directors not attend so people can speak freely to him.

From personal experience, I can attest that when you work for a big company with a down-to-earth CEO, you feel more engaged. But if you sense (or hear through the grapevine) that the Big Cheese is a fat cat who owns six homes, uses the corporate jet for junkets, enjoys disproportionately large stock options and rarely mingles with the rank-and-file, that’s a red flag.

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Tags: leadership