When Hubert Joly started as CEO of Best Buy earlier this month, he spent his first week on the job as many of the employees of the $48 billion company do, wearing a blue shirt and working the floor.

Joly, hired to turn around the beleaguered electronics retailer, worked at several store locations in Minnesota, being trained to serve customers, accept returns and stock items. “I want to not learn our businesses from the headquarters,” he said, “I want to learn from the front line.”

The most successful CEOs I know follow that philosophy. They walk down the halls of the office, around the manufacturing plant and through the aisles of the store. They stop and chat with people, asking Joe how his son is doing at college or Charlene about her husband’s knee surgery.

You can’t know everything about everybody in your company but the important thing is to engage with people, even if it’s just a friendly wave or by saying hi.

Not only do you show that you care about the people who work for your company, you will learn valuable information to help your business become more productive and profitable.

In addition, the employees get to know the CEO or owner as a real person, not just a face in a big fancy oil painting at the reception desk. Or a name on a memo announcing more lay-offs or plant closings.

Steve Jobs employed this simple strategy of what is known as MBWA, Management By Walking Around. He’d talk to his service reps, answer customer emails and would call customers who were experiencing problems. Can you imagine getting a phone call from Steve Jobs to answer your question about why the CD drive doesn’t work on your MacBook Pro?

When I’m running a business I’m usually given a nice desk, but you’d rarely find me there. When I’m trying to engage with people, that desk acts like a barrier. When I meet with someone, I come around the other side of the desk and sit in a chair beside them, or I suggest we go to a conference table, but I never sit at the head of the table, instead settling down next to the person with whom I’m engaging.

Of course, usually you won’t find me near that desk at all. I’m out walking around and talking with people because like Jobs and Joly I learn a lot that way.

It doesn’t matter what kind of business it is. Whether it’s a brokerage firm filled with cubicles or a manufacturing plant or retail stores, I still walk the floor.

When I took over as interim CEO of an automobile parts company in New Jersey, I told the owner I wanted to visit every one of our stores. “Give me a list of what you’d like to find out, but don’t tell them I’m coming,” I said.

I got quite familiar with the New Jersey toll booths that week as I drove 1,000 miles and walked into every store, operating as a “secret shopper.”

I learned how each store operated and got answers to what the owner wanted to know. I gathered a lot of information that was vital to turning that company around. Most of it was information that the owner didn’t previously have, because he hadn’t been visiting the stores.

It seems like such a simple and powerful concept to me, yet the most common response I get from CEOs or owners when I explain I’ll literally be doing “legwork” and chatting with the employees is, “They won’t talk to you.”

It’s actually quite the opposite. I can’t get them to stop talking to me.

Many owners also say things like, “I have an open door policy. If employees have something to say, they can just come to my office.”

But here’s the thing. Whether an open door policy is effective depends entirely on what employees will find on the other side. As author and motivational speaker Dr. Bob Nelson said, “An open door policy doesn’t do much for a closed mind.”

Your employees want to talk to you. Go take a walk.

(Photo courtesy Best Buy)