There is danger in managing from a distance. When department heads do not understand what their team goes through on the field, it is difficult to comprehend the details of their reports when submitted.

Leaders must truly inhabit the world their team members operate in every single day to enable them to distill the dashboards, reports, and second-hand information they receive. When a factory manager never walks the shop floor, the junior engineers learn quickly that their challenges will be acknowledged in meetings but never truly understood. When a supply chain director has never personally followed a supply chain manager on a field trip, every reported challenge about last-mile logistics, difficult terrains, or unreliable third-party vendors gets discarded.

Too often, I have seen organizations roll out policies that look great on paper but crumble in practice because the leaders never stepped into the fray. It is like trying to read a book with the covers closed. It is impossible to diagnose a problem without direct access to the system. The result is usually frustrated teams, missed opportunities, and a culture where problems fester unspoken.

The real lesson here is empathy through getting involved to grasp the true picture. This could be a game-changer for line managers overseeing daily operations and heads of departments steering broader strategies. By accompanying your team, you see the nuances reports can't capture, the customer hesitations, the workflow bottlenecks, and the morale dips.

When Sergio Marchionne took over as CEO of Fiat in 2004, he found a company that was bleeding money and widely expected to collapse. One of his most striking early moves was to tear down the executive floors and relocate senior leaders closer to the people building cars. He wanted proximity. He wanted leaders who understood what was happening on the ground, not just what was being reported upward. Fiat’s remarkable turnaround in the years that followed was built, in part, on leaders who were no longer insulated from operational reality.

Howard Schultz of Starbucks was famous for regularly visiting stores unannounced not to inspect, but to listen. He wanted to know what baristas were experiencing, what customers were saying, and what was not working. When Starbucks lost its way in the mid-2000s and Schultz returned as CEO in 2008, one of his first acts was to close every store for an afternoon of retraining. That decision was only possible because he had stayed close enough to the product and the people to know what had been lost. The leaders who consistently build strong commercial operations are invariably the ones who still visit markets, still talk to distributors, and still ask the sales reps what they are encountering on the road.

A field visit is not a ceremonial gesture. It is a diagnostic tool. It is how you separate what you think is happening from what is actually happening. There is a concept the Japanese call Genchi Genbutsu loosely translated as “go and see for yourself.” It is one of the foundational principles behind Toyota’s legendary operational excellence. Toyota’s leaders, at every level, are expected to go to the actual place where work is done, observe the actual process, and engage with the actual people. They are not to rely on the report or the presentation. They must experience the reality.

In management, numbers will always tell you a story. However, numbers are summarized, formatted, and presented through the lens of whoever compiled them. The unedited version of the story is in the field. If your team is struggling and you cannot quite understand why the numbers are not improving despite all the reports, go and see for yourself. If targets are consistently missed in a particular territory or department, before you increase the pressure, increase your understanding. Walk the ground and ask the necessary questions. Experience what your people experience.

If you manage a team of analysts, when last did you sit beside one of them and work through a problem together, not to review their output, but to understand their process? If you lead a customer service team, when last did you take calls yourself, even for an hour, so you could feel what your team feels when a difficult customer is on the line? If you are a logistics manager, when last did you ride with a driver on a delivery run? You are being asked to do this not because you don’t trust their reports. You are doing it because the reports tell you what happened, the field tells you why.

When leaders show up in the trenches, it signals "I'm with you," turning directives into shared missions. It fosters trust, encourages open feedback, and drives better results. Regular involvement keeps you grounded and your decisions sharp. To make this real, start small but consistent. Schedule one field accompaniment per month, whether it's a sales ride-along or a shop floor walkthrough. Ask questions without judgment. Listen more than you talk. Then, act on what you learn, adjust targets, tweak processes, or simply acknowledge the effort. In the end, leadership is defined by how deeply you dive into your team's world.

Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.