Go Watch the Work

I was at the deli counter when the worker groaned while sticking the price label on my sliced turkey. I asked what was going on. She said "Corporate says these new scales are state of the art, but they make my job harder." Curious, I probed as to why.

Turns out the old scales printed a sticker that went straight onto the bag. The new ones print on a backing sheet that has to be peeled off first. Easier said than done when you're wearing plastic gloves, plus it creates extra trash with every order, and slows down the overall customer service. Someone approved that purchase after reviewing specs and probably a cost comparison. What they skipped was spending ten minutes watching her actually do her job.

This happens all the time in organizations. Watching the work doesn't feel like a high-value leadership activity. There are meetings to run, strategies to develop, decisions to make, fires to put out. The deli counter, the call center floor, the warehouse, the branch teller line? Those are places you visit occasionally, not places you linger. But that distance has a cost that rarely shows up anywhere it can be measured. It shows up in the groan of someone who has to peel a sticker off a backing sheet a hundred times a day because nobody thought to ask whether that mattered.

The people doing the work have a level of specific, practical knowledge about their jobs that can't be extracted through a survey or captured in a process document. They know where the friction is and what the workarounds are. They solve more problems on-the-fly than the corporate office will ever know. That knowledge doesn't make its way up the org chart on its own. You have to go get it.

My own L&D team is doing exactly this right now. Rather than staying in the corporate training room, they're going out to spend time in the field where the work actually happens. They're watching whether what we teach in onboarding translates into real on-the-job readiness. It's both humbling and clarifying in equal measure, and if you've done it regularly you know what I mean. You find out very quickly what's landing and what isn't, and you can't get that from a spreadsheet of assessment scores.

So if you're in a leadership role, find time to go watch the work. Not to evaluate it, critique it, or fix it on the spot, but just to see it and ask questions. You'll learn things that change how you make decisions, and the people you talk to will notice that you bothered to show up.