You probably won’t find it in a book on business leadership, but Faiz Shakir has a dictum for executives of major corporations who really want to understand what their employees’ jobs are like: “Know the coffee.”

The reference was in the context of unionization efforts by Starbucks employees, and what Shakir, the executive director of More Perfect Union, a nonprofit media organization that reports on labor issues, describes as “a management class buffered from its own employees.”

At a recent talk sponsored by the Corporations and Society Initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Shakir said labor relations with some companies have suffered in part because of the distance, figuratively speaking, that exists between employees and upper management. If C-suite executives are unfamiliar with the everyday challenges their employees face, they may view workers’ grievances as illegitimate or even disloyal. Such an attitude, Shakir says, creates an atmosphere of combat where organizing efforts are seen as “a middle finger to the boss.”

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