When you run a business, you often think you know what’s going on on a daily basis. Figures, reports, meetings with managers seem to provide a clear table. However, some French leaders have made a more radical choice: to spend an entire week in the shoes of an average employee, without warning the teams. An immersion of the manager Filter without filter, designed not to control, but to understand. What they remove from it goes far beyond a simple field observation: it is a transformation in their way of piloting, listening, and sometimes deciding.
Put an end to the silo vision
This is experienced by Aurélie Jeanblanc, founder of the Bordeaux startup Foodchéri, when she joined incognito the logistics team of her business for a week. By joining the command preparers at 6 am each morning, she discovers the offsets between the processes imagined at the headquarters and the realities of the field. “We had established a new quality control procedure that everyone found relevant on paper. But on the spot, it generated systematic delays that no one had dared to go up”she says. By living the constraints directly, it reviews certain strategic arbitrations and simplifies several validation circuits.
This type of experience makes it possible to break the filter effects specific to hierarchical organizations. The CEO of Michel and Augustin, Danone Venture, also lent himself to the exercise by integrating a sales team for a week, in the same way as a new hiring. He thus perceived how certain commercial objectives, however reasoned by the management committee, were perceived as disconnected by the field teams. Experience gave rise to a revision of performance indicators, but above all a flattening of the feedback mode between hierarchical levels.
Reconnect to the daily life of your employees
For Mathieu Nebra, co -founder of OpenClassrooms, this immersion was made in a voluntarily uncommunicative framework. For several days, he worked alongside customer service, responding to tickets like any learning relationship manager. “What struck me is not the nature of the requests, but the mental load linked to the rate and the type of solicitation. I had never perceived it with so much clarity.” Following this week, the company reviews the hourly distribution of shifts and introduces compulsory breathing times in schedules.
This return to concrete reality also transforms the way in which leaders perceive their collaborators. An immersion of the manager in the operational layers often allows them to better understand the non -said constraints, the invisible brakes and the individual initiatives which pass under the radars. At yes.sncf, Guillaume Pépy, then at the head of the SNCF, had led several successive immersions in sales teams. He had drawn a fine understanding of the customer irritation mechanisms, long before they became strategic irritants.
Bring down the internal resistances
The leading immersion is not only a tool of understanding, it can also become a lever for cultural transformation. In 2022, the CEO of Lydia, Cyril Chiche, spent a week as a junior developer in the team produced, with a concrete mission and tight deadlines. The objective is twofold: to live the pressure from Delivery and observe horizontal coordination dynamics. By discovering the intensity of collaborative work and the technical heaviness of the release cycle, it quickly unlocks a budget to automate certain tasks, without going through the usual validation process.
But beyond immediate decisions, it is the cultural effect that marks the most. Employees interviewed afterwards bear witness to a significant reduction in the perceived distance between top management and technical teams. The presence of the leader in the daily flow, not as an observer but as an actor, modifies representations and sometimes triggers an additional spontaneous commitment. This proximity experienced in the field is often more than a dozen internal newsletters.
Observe weak signals at source
Immersion of leaders also make it possible to capture weak signals before they become systemic problems. At Alan, the co -founders have regularly practiced immersion in different poles – HR, design, customer relations – to better understand the friction between the digital interface and the expectations of users. These are these observations, accumulated on the ground, which led to the overhaul of the member route in 2021. A structuring change that would probably not have emerged with the same clarity from a meeting room.
The capture of weak signals is only possible if the manager adopts a posture of real equality during immersion. It is not a question of playing a role, but of fully confronting everyday matter: responding to emails without having priority, solving problems without hierarchical appeal, managing your time without possible delegation. It is this direct friction experience that fuels a renewed understanding of internal functioning.
Reconcile strategic vision and lived experience
What an immersion of leaders reveals is often the gap between the strategy formulated and the perceived reality. But this gap, rather than being problematic, becomes a source of continuous adjustment. At Welcome to the Jungle, one of the co -founders joined the editorial team for a week, at a time when the company was thinking about a diversification of its formats. The immersion made it possible to redirect certain projects to simpler formats, better aligned with internal capacities. This redefinition would probably not have taken place if the decision had remained confined to the strategic level.
For leaders who dare this type of experience, this is not a symbolic exercise. It is a method of alignment, a lively piloting tool. Returning to the field is also giving meaning to decisions taken up. And sometimes, rediscover that the best ideas do not come from a strategic seminar, but from a workstation, between two everyday emergencies.
