Culture Change Starts With the CEO’s Calendar

When Ron Swidler became CEO of The Gettys Group after 35 years inside it, he met weekly with every senior leader and waited more than a year and a half to reorganize. On the Real Leaders Podcast, he explained why that order matters, and why AI adoption follows the same rules as culture change.

Listen Now: Hear Ron Swidler’s full conversation with Kevin Edwards on the Real Leaders Podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts.

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“If you are not the CEO, you have a lot of opinions on how the company can be better,” Ron Swidler told Kevin Edwards on the Real Leaders Podcast. “And then as soon as you become the CEO, you’re expected to act on all those things.”

Most leaders answer that expectation by announcing something. A Reddit post Edwards read aloud during the episode describes where that usually leads: two days of slides and breakout groups, a new mission statement by Friday, and nothing changes, because the ceiling on any culture program is behavior that comes from the top. Swidler called it a brilliant post and said it matches how most change efforts begin.

His answer, built over three years at the head of a firm with 156 active hotel projects, is a sequence: listen first, hold everyone to the same behavioral tests, size each new bet before placing it, and walk people into new technology rather than hand it to them. The order is the part most companies get wrong. It matters to owners and developers too, because the firms that brand, design and furnish their hotels are working through the same pressures as the hotels themselves: tight capital, deferred renovations, and AI changing how guests choose where to stay.

Listen before you reorganize

A new CEO’s first job is intake. Swidler began weekly one-on-ones with all 11 senior leaders in a 75-person company, a habit he acknowledges not every CEO would choose. He called it a listening tour, and he is direct about the consequence: once he had asked where the company could be better, “it became my burden to act on it.”

He did not act all at once. Swidler waited more than a year and a half before reorganizing, then brought in an outside fractional chief operating officer to measure the team’s capabilities against what the business would need next. Nine positions were reset, including a new chief of staff role to own the firm’s internal software work, and nearly all were filled by moving people inside the company. He describes it as the hardest piece of three-dimensional chess he has played, and says he spent the time testing how it would work before moving anyone.

The pacing has support in the trust research. The Trust Equation, from David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford’s The Trusted Advisor (Free Press, 2000), adds credibility, reliability and intimacy, then divides by self-orientation: how much the other person suspects you are working for yourself. A leader who spends a year asking questions, and then explains each change and the reason for it, is lowering that denominator before asking anyone to follow.

Hold everyone to the same three tests

The Gettys Group brings together groups that think differently: procurement specialists, interior designers working on luxury hotels around the world, and the branding and graphic teams. Swidler says each had its own mindset and some silos had formed, and that getting them around one vision is “not easy to do.”

Rather than add a new set of values, he changed the criteria he used to evaluate people. Everyone, he told his leaders, should be credible, reliable, and have strong personal relationships with each other and with clients. Each maps to a plain question: do you know what you are talking about, do you do what you say you will do, and do you care enough about the other person to be trusted by them?

The message stayed that simple on purpose. What worked, he said, was “simplifying the message, reiterating the message regularly.”

He applies a version of the same discipline to himself. Swidler keeps a personal advisory board of about ten people he speaks with roughly once a month, one of them on walking meetings, and credits it with easing the isolation of being responsible for so many key decisions.

Criteria a leader can state in one sentence are easier to repeat, and to be held to, than a values document.

Size the bet before you place it

Swidler described a hotel market where capital is tight. Developers need more equity than they once did, the cost of capital is higher, and some brands are holding off on forcing franchisees to spend on renovations. He also expects AI travel planners to take over part of the role online travel agencies play today, and says no one yet knows how much influence a hotel will have over what those tools recommend.

His answer to that uncertainty is to stage commitments. His projects range from a $2 million renovation to a $200 million new build, and shipping, fuel, labor and material costs keep moving, so “the notion that you could de-risk this business is a fallacy,” he said. New initiatives are funded in phases, with KPIs for each phase and a board decision every quarter on whether to continue. Staging does not remove risk. It sets the price of finding out you were wrong.

Treat AI adoption as a culture problem

Gettys approached AI the way it approached culture: awareness first, then trial, then reinforcement. Swidler gave his chief of staff the role of AI evangelist and brought in an outside AI programmer to sit with employees across the company, watch them work, and show where the tools could save effort. People had not known what was available, he said, and cost was not the constraint because the firm already had enterprise access to several AI platforms. Senior leaders now share what they used AI for each week, and the tools people build go to everyone.

The firm then measured the result. On interior renderings for a hotel in Park City, Utah, a combination of AI tools saved more than 30% of the time the team would otherwise have spent. Swidler’s point about adoption is practical: until you hand a tool a task you believe it cannot do, you do not know what is possible.

The same logic changed what the firm builds and what it buys. After reviewing the software it licenses, Gettys used AI-assisted coding to write its own procurement software within six months. A single hotel project can carry more than 1,000 SKUs from hundreds of manufacturers, and the firm now owns a tool it can customize and that connects to its accounting and design specification software. Swidler says a comparable build would have cost a couple of million dollars a few years ago.

On brand creation, concepts get tested before launch. Through its partnership with Vurvey, a consumer-intelligence platform whose CEO, Chad Reynolds, sits on Swidler’s personal advisory board, Gettys tests ideas against simulated guest populations. On a recent brand project for a major hotel company, that meant testing everything from pricing to taglines to interiors to food and beverage before the brand went to market. Swidler’s comparison is the restaurant owner, who learns whether a concept works only after opening the doors and spending the money.

The measurable results trace back to the order: people saw the tool on their own work, shared what they found, and the firm counted the hours.

Hire for curiosity, then protect the wisdom

Asked for the most important skill he looks for in a hire, Swidler named curiosity and the ambition to drive. “The rest is teachable,” he said. He added wisdom to the list, because AI generates “its version of a solution” and still needs an editor with years of experience to sort the output and guide people. He also noted that AI is not yet good at understanding people, and that he looks for people willing not to get too attached to a single idea while things change this fast.

For owners and developers, the same logic produces a short list of questions to put to any branding, design or procurement partner:

• Who in the firm is accountable for AI adoption, and what have they measured? Look for hours saved on a named workflow.
• What does the firm build, what does it license, and who owns the result?
• How are concepts tested before your capital is committed?
• Who edits the output, and what experience do they use to decide whether a plausible answer is the right one?
• When did leadership last change course after hearing hard news from its own people?

Self-awareness comes before the program

Edwards closed the episode by asking Swidler for his definition of a real leader. His answer, which he called the October 2026 version, was self-awareness: being present with yourself, then bringing your best self to others.

That returns to the Reddit post, which argued that CEOs who surround themselves with agreement often do not know their feedback loop is broken. Swidler’s weekly one-on-ones, his advisory board and a leadership coach he has worked with for more than ten years are each a way of hearing how he lands with other people. For a leader who wants to change a culture, that is the first piece of information to collect, and every other step in this sequence depends on it.

Listen Now

Hear Ron Swidler’s full conversation with Kevin Edwards on the Real Leaders Podcast: Listen on Apple Podcasts