I was in a CEO’s office recently when she told me something startling. Tina confidently informed me that she had checked in with her direct reports and they had assured her that company morale was high.

Her message surprised me because I had spoken to several people on the front lines of the company who told me the exact opposite. They were frustrated about a perceived lack of communication and clarity.

Upon reflection, it strikes me that nobody in this story had bad intentions. She really wanted to know how things were going on the front lines, and the people on the front lines desperately wanted to be heard.

However, something was getting lost in translation.

The CEO was learning a valuable lesson: When a company grows, or when a leader takes on more responsibility, virtually everything gets better except for the leader’s proximity to the front lines and their ability to accurately assess what’s happening there. What was once firsthand experience now becomes second hand hearsay.

Why does this matter? Close proximity yields a firsthand understanding of operations, interactions, and morale. Loss of proximity can create disconnect, affecting engagement and an accurate grasp of the company’s challenges and opportunities.

Additionally, the leader now gets much of their information from the layer of management directly beneath them.

In a perfect world free of politics and unconscious bias, that communication would work smoothly. In the real world, leaders need to hear the truth, but the people talking to them may optimize their messaging to reflect what they think the leader wants to hear and/or what suits their personal agenda.

The leader ends up making decisions based on distorted data. Everyone gets exasperated.

We’ll never totally change the human behavior that causes this problem, but we can manage the process for better results.

First, leaders must spend time on the front lines. In my experience, as a leader grows, it’s very easy to lose that proximity with employees. Leaders have demands on their time from meetings, board members, and community obligations. It takes intentionality to prioritize “dance floor” time—getting into the action.

Secondly, leaders need to constantly be on the lookout for self-serving, political behavior beneath them. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to routinely ask managers to tell you the last action they took that did not help themselves at all but greatly benefited their team members.

Lastly, leaders can create a culture of total transparency. This takes time and trust, but the message must be that a bitter truth is always better than the sweetest lie.

Upon reflection, I can’t help but note the inherent irony in all of this. We all want to grow, but sometimes we can get so enthralled with that growth that we don’t realize what we lost along the way.