Management By Walking Around (MBWA) emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance at the workplace. It does not just cut vertical lines of communication but also builds trust and relationship (Serrant 2009). MBWA was developed by executives at Hewlett-Packard in the 1970s (Trueman, 1991). It became popularized by a book written by John Peters and Robert Waterman in the early 1980s.

The basic principle is that nothing is more instructive than seeing what actually transpires in the real world and learning from that. MBWA is a leadership technique that has stood the test of time and can be used by any manager. MBWA does not mean leaving your responsibilities behind and moving around the work areas; it does more harm than good if it is not executed properly (Jones, 2009). The idea of MBWA is that managers should learn about the problems and concerns at firsthand.

MBWA instills alertness among the employees and facilitates understanding of the problem from the customer point of view or service point of view. In the normal process, the information received by the top management flows through four or five layers, each layer filtering information in one way or the other; however, MBWA breaks this process and gives firsthand information. Hinners (2009) found that MBWA was providing improved commu-nication between nurses and admini-strators. He also found that despite the program’s success many administrators did not know how to behave while ‘wandering’ due to its ambiguous nature.

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