WHY LEADERS MUST STAY CLOSE TO THEIR PEOPLE

People experience leadership through interactions, contends LINUS OKORIE

Power has a way of creating distance.

The higher a leader rises, the more layers begin to stand between the leader and the people. Assistants control access. Protocol regulates movement. Advisers interpret events. Reports summarize reality. Meetings replace conversations.

Eventually, a leader can become surrounded by people and yet become profoundly disconnected from them.

This is one of the paradoxes of leadership: the closer you get to the top, the easier it becomes to lose touch with the bottom.

Yet leadership is ultimately exercised through people. Decisions may be made in palaces, boardrooms and executive offices, but their consequences are experienced elsewhere.

This is why proximity matters.

Not because leaders need to be popular, but because leaders need to know what their leadership is actually producing.

History offers two very different illustrations of this principle.

The first is Akbar, the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor who inherited an empire marked by enormous cultural and religious diversity.

Akbar understood that ruling such a vast population could not depend entirely on military strength or administrative authority. His engagement with the Rajput kingdoms, including the royal house of Amber, reflected a broader approach to building relationships across differences.

He recognized something fundamental about governing people who were not all the same: you cannot build lasting allegiance to a system you have made no effort to understand.

His approach was not simply about bringing territory under control. It involved building relationships with communities, understanding their traditions and interests, and incorporating influential groups into the political order.

There was strategy in this, certainly.

But there was also something deeper: proximity gave Akbar access to a reality that could not be fully understood from the imperial center.

The lesson for modern leadership is significant.

Distance gives you information. Proximity gives you context.

A report may tell a CEO that customer complaints have increased by 18 percent. But speaking to the employee who deals with those customers may reveal why.

A performance dashboard may show that a department is meeting its targets. But a conversation with the people doing the work may reveal the exhaustion, shortcuts or hidden costs behind those numbers.

A government may announce that a policy is working. Yet the person standing in a queue to access that policy may tell a very different story.

Leadership becomes stronger when the person at the top remains curious about the experience of the people at the point of impact.

But history also gives us a darker demonstration of what happens when leaders fail to maintain that connection.

Centuries before Akbar, in the ancient kingdom of Israel, a young man named Absalom understood the political power of proximity.

Absalom was the son of King David. Over time, he developed ambitions that went beyond his position within the royal family. His strategy for building influence was remarkably simple: he went where the people were.

The royal system had a point of contact where people came seeking the king’s judgment. Absalom positioned himself there.

He spoke with them.

He listened to their complaints.

He asked about their concerns.

And, crucially, he created the impression that their problems mattered to him.

The result was significant. He gradually built a following among people who felt that the existing system was not sufficiently responsive to them.

What makes this historical episode particularly instructive is that Absalom did not initially defeat his father’s authority through superior military power.

He challenged it through relational influence.

He understood something the palace had apparently forgotten: People do not experience leadership as an institution. They experience it through interactions.

For Absalom, proximity was not primarily an instrument of service. It was a political strategy. He recognized a gap between the king and the people and positioned himself inside that gap.

That distinction matters.

The same principle that can strengthen legitimate leadership can also be exploited by someone with different intentions.

When leaders are close to their people, they understand their hopes, frustrations and aspirations.

When they become distant, someone else may eventually step into that space.

This is true in nations.

It is true in organizations.

It is true in families, institutions and communities.

Whenever there is a gap between leadership and the people, influence will fill it.

The only question is who will fill it, and with what intention?

This is why leaders must pay attention not only to results but also to relationships.

A leader can have excellent financial numbers and a disengaged workforce.

A political administration can produce impressive statistics while citizens feel unheard.

A manager can meet every quarterly target while losing the trust of the team.

Numbers matter. But numbers do not tell the whole story.

There is an emotional dimension to leadership that cannot always be captured on a spreadsheet.

People know when leadership is listening.

They know when decisions are made with their reality in mind.

They know when leaders understand the difficulties they face.

And they also know when leaders have become insulated.

The danger of insulation is not simply that leaders become unpopular.

It is that they begin making decisions based on filtered reality.

The further information travels from the point where events actually happen, the more likely it is to be edited, simplified or interpreted.

By the time bad news reaches the top, it may no longer look like bad news.

That is why wise leaders create deliberate opportunities to encounter reality before it has been processed for them.

They walk the floor.

They speak to junior employees.

They listen to customers.

They visit operational sites.

They ask questions that do not have predetermined answers.

They seek out people who disagree with them.

They do not confuse accessibility with weakness or authority with isolation.

The common touch is not about lowering the dignity of leadership.

It is about increasing the quality of leadership.

A leader does not become less authoritative by knowing the people they lead. In many cases, the opposite is true. Understanding people makes authority more intelligent.

Akbar’s experience demonstrates the value of relationships in governing a diverse society.

Absalom’s story demonstrates something more uncomfortable: when legitimate leadership becomes disconnected from the people, proximity itself can become a source of competing influence.

This should make every leader uncomfortable enough to ask a difficult question:

How close am I to the reality of the people I lead?

Not how often do they see me.

Not how many people report to me.

Not how many meetings I attend.

But how accurately do I understand their experience?

Do I know what they celebrate?

Do I know what frustrates them?

Do I know what they are afraid to say?

Do I know which of my decisions has created unintended consequences?

And perhaps most importantly, do people believe they can tell me the truth?

Because leadership is not measured only by what people say when you are present.

Sometimes it is measured by what they feel free to say when you are not.

The greatest leaders understand that power creates distance unless deliberately managed.

So they cross that distance.

They listen.

They observe.

They ask.

They learn.

They stay close enough to know whether the influence they believe they are having is actually the influence people are experiencing.

Because leadership from a distance can create an illusion of control.

But leadership up close reveals the truth.

 Okorie MFR is a leadership development expert spanning 30 years in the research, teaching and coaching of leadership in Africa and across the world. He is the CEO of the GOTNI Leadership Centre.