Walking the Floor: Where Strategy Meets Reality
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
Hello KSKOers
Every Friday, I write a little LinkedIn post, reflecting on my week. One of the things I wrote about on Friday, was the importance of leaders getting out and about, visiting frontline staff and talking to them about what’s going on, and meeting service users. In this week’s blog, I wanted to talk to you about the research behind my advice to leaders to go out, go visit and get talking.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
This is what I wrote in my end of the week round up on Friday:
🔹 I realised that I hadn't left the office to visit our front line services since week 1 of my time at Maggs Day Centre. This was week 3! I visited our Day Centre and Clothing Project in Worcester and Day Centre and Hub in Redditch. I think it's very easy to become engrossed in paperwork, red tape and organisational bureaucracy to the detriment of meeting and talking to the real people who are using the very services your planning and protecting. If you have a corporate role and you haven't visited the services, day centres, facilities, hospital, schools and homes of your service, please do set aside time next week and get out there to remind yourself why you do what you do.
When I encourage leaders to get out from behind their desks and visit frontline services, it isn’t just because it’s good to be visible. It’s grounded in the research behind my book, The Self-Awareness Superhighway.
One of the strongest themes in my doctoral research was what I called strategic-level disconnect. People I spoke to consistently described a gap between those making decisions and those delivering them. Strategic ideas made sense in executive meetings. They were rational, well-intentioned and often financially necessary. But by the time they reached the frontline, it was clear that in many cases, assumptions hadn’t been tested. Practical realities hadn’t been considered and the emotional impact on staff and service users hadn’t been fully understood.
The result? Frustration. Cynicism. A quiet erosion of trust and a growth in a feeling of “them and us”.
Several interviewees spoke about detachment at senior levels. Not necessarily cruelty or indifference (although they were mentioned), but essentially, distance. Emotional and experiential distance. One described it as leaders becoming removed from the human consequences of their decisions. Whether that detachment is self-protection, overload, culture or habit, the impact is real. It seems that when leaders lose proximity, they lose perspective.
In the research, detachment also appeared as a contributor to leader derailment. When leaders become overwhelmed, they retreat into process. They rely more heavily on spreadsheets, governance frameworks and formal reporting. All of those things matter, especially in regulated environments, but they can become a shield or a mask to hid behind. Reflection narrows, empathy reduces and decisions become technically accurate but relationally brittle.
This is where being deliberately self-awareness shifts ideas from abstract theories to operational realities.
Another theme in my research that speaks directly to this is inclusive decision making. In social care, there has been a shift from “doing unto” to “doing with”. That shift recognises something fundamental: if people don’t feel ownership of a decision, they won’t engage with it fully. The same applies inside organisations. If you design change without those who you need to implement it, you increase the likelihood of challenge, delay and resistance.
Inclusive decision making bridges the gap between strategy and operations. It strengthens emotional attachment and increases perceived fairness. It enhances problem-solving because it brings practical intelligence into the discussion early on. It also distributes cognitive load - we know that we’re better at problem solving when multiple perspectives are integrated rather than directed to the few leaders at the strategic top of organisations.
Importantly, inclusive decision making is not about endless consultation. It is about thoughtful involvement at the right stage. As one contributor to my research put it, front-load your engagement - it may make planning slower, but delivery will be smoother, quicker and less adversarial. When leaders skip that stage, they often spend far longer firefighting unintended consequences when their project is nearly over the line.
But, within all of this inclusive decision making needs contact and connection. You can’t co-produce solutions from a closed office in a building no one goes to in a site where no services are delivered. You can’t sense-check assumptions through a dashboard, stats and data. We know that feedback is filtered as it moves upwards through any organisation, so the higher you sit within an organisational structure, the more intentional you have to be about seeking unfiltered insight.
And that brings me back to my own small realisation last week: I hadn’t left the office for two weeks.
There were legitimate reasons, of course. Interim CEO life is busy. Governance, funding, safeguarding, HR issues: they are real and they demand attention. But my research tells me that is exactly when the risk of drift increases. The gravitational pull of paperwork is strong. It always feels urgent. It always feels responsible. It also creates an illusion of control.
But leadership can’t become entirely desk-based.
Getting out to Worcester and Redditch wasn’t symbolic it was very purposeful and intended to give me meaningful insight into both what we do and how we do it. Conversations with staff reminded me of operational pressures that don’t always make it into reports. Talking to service users reconnected me to why the difficult financial and strategic decisions matter in the first place. It sharpened my thinking. It didn’t distract from strategy, but rather it grounded it in the reality of operational service delivery.
When I spoke to Jon Rennie in episode 11 of The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast he talked to me about his Friday practice of ‘walking the floor’.
When Jon moved from the Navy into manufacturing, he was struck by the physical and cultural separation between office staff and the shop floor. On a submarine, proximity was unavoidable, everyone lived and worked in tight quarters and knew each other well. In manufacturing though, it was different. Offices were located in one space, production was in another. He said that it created a real “us and them” dynamic. So he created what he calls Fridays on the Floor. On the first Friday of every month, he spends four hours working side by side with his employees in a different department. Not observing from a distance, but actually doing the work. Learning the processes and hearing about their frustrations directly. He sees problems for himself rather than through reports or data.
In the early days when he brought in this practice, after those sessions, he would return to his senior team energised by what he\d learned, but he noticed they didn’t share the same insight or urgency. They hadn’t experienced it it themselves so weren’t feeling the same impact from the new information and relationship building. He expanded the practice to include all senior leaders. Each month they rotate onto the floor, then come together to reflect on what they have seen and heard. The impact has been significant. The leadership team gains unfiltered understanding of operational reality. Relationships strengthen and mutual respect grows. And rather than trying to solve problems from a conference room, they’ve started asking the people doing the work, who, more often than not, already have the answers.
There is something else that happens when leaders are physically present. It signals care. It signals interest. It signals that the frontline is not peripheral but central. That matters culturally. People notice where leaders spend their time. Time allocation is a leadership statement. When we say leaders cast a long shadow, this is exactly what we mean.
If we want to reduce strategic-level disconnect, we have to design against it deliberately. That means creating feedback loops, pushing authority and information down through the organisation and challenging cultures that equate seniority with distance. And sometimes it means something very simple and very human: showing up consistently, not occasionally.
Self-aware leadership is not just internal reflection. It is relational awareness. It is noticing when you are becoming distant and choosing to step back from visibility. It is understanding that strategy and humanity are not competing priorities; they are interdependent. Strategy needs regular contact with reality.
So if you’re in a corporate or strategic role and you haven’t visited your frontline recently, consider this your nudge, backed by research, not just opinion. Close your laptop. Go and see your colleagues where they are. And listen with intent.
The Last Word
Leadership rarely falters through bad intent; it drifts through distance. When diaries fill and paperwork expands, distance extends, and strategy risks becoming detached from the lived reality it’s meant to serve. Self-aware leadership is noticing that drift away from the business of the organisation and interrupting it: choosing contact over comfort, conversation over assumption, and presence with process. The higher you sit within an organisational hierarchy, the more intentional you must be about staying grounded. So go out, turn up and be visible, consistently and purposefully, because when leaders stay close to the frontline, decisions gain perspective, trust deepens, and strategy becomes both sharper and more human.
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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a strategy and operations leader.
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