I sat in another meeting where the same issue surfaced again. We had talked about this. I thought we fixed it. But here it was, still unresolved, still costing us time and money. My first instinct was frustration. Why can’t they just figure it out?
That instinct is a warning sign. When you find yourself repeating the same request, when progress feels slower than it should, when costs keep climbing and you keep saying “we already covered this,” you have a hidden problem. And the problem is not always the people doing the work.
The issue is that you cannot see what they see. You are managing from a distance, working from reports and updates and secondhand summaries. You are solving a problem you do not fully understand because you are not close enough to the work itself. The gap between what you think is happening and what is actually happening grows wider every time you assume the solution is obvious.
There is only one way to close that gap. You have to spend time in their shoes. Not observing from the side. Not asking more questions in a conference room. You have to sit down with the people doing the work and have them teach you what they do. Then you need to try it yourself.
This is not about proving you can do their job. It is about learning what they face every day that you cannot see from your desk. You will find the friction points, the workarounds, the small obstacles that add up to big delays. You will understand why something you thought was simple is actually complicated. You will see the tools that do not work the way you assumed they did, the handoffs that create confusion, the gaps in process that force people to improvise. You will learn more in one afternoon doing the work than in a hundred conference calls talking about the work.
I have seen this play out more than once. A leader gets frustrated with a team that seems slow or resistant. They push harder, ask for more updates, demand accountability. Nothing changes. Then they finally step into the role for a day, and within an hour they understand. The system is broken in a way that was invisible from above. The people were not the problem. The process was.
“You will learn more in one afternoon doing the work than in a hundred conference calls talking about the work.”
When the same problem keeps surfacing, it means something in the system is hidden from you. You can keep pushing from a distance, or you can get close enough to see it clearly. The second option takes more time up front, but it saves you from months of spinning in place.
If you are in senior management and something keeps coming back, stop asking why they have not figured it out. Start asking what you are missing. Then go find out. Sit with your team. Let them teach you. Try the work yourself. You will find the answer faster than any other method you have tried.
