Over the next three weeks we will reflect on the experiences of the leaders who choose to step back down the career ladder to taste life on the front line in Channel 4's series Undercover Boss. We will examine their style, values of leadership and look at the learning points for their own - and others' - organisations.

Poor Andy. At the pinnacle of his career as Marketing Director of Park Resorts - a caravan holiday business set to make great profits off the back of the recession - he finds himself on his knees looking for vomit behind toilets, deep-frying sausages in frankly war-torn kitchens and making an impromptu debut on stage entertaining bored kids and generally having to ad lib his way (badly) through the routines. He was clearly away on the day when the TV crew asked for a volunteer.

Nonetheless, our leader takes to the task bravely and cheerfully, and has plenty of questions for the staff he is supposedly shadowing as a trainee. He discovers, much to his apparent shock, that money matters to people who are living close to the poverty line and that by giving people more freedom they generally tend to use their initiative more freely. He also discovers that some staff work damn hard and long hours without much support, while others feel distinctly less motivated and less inclined to please 'them upstairs'. Great lessons in the bleedin' obvious, as John Cleese might once have muttered.

In all, Andy spends time in a number of different jobs around the caravan parks, learning how to scrub, cook, serve, entertain and apologise to disgruntled customers. He has a genuinely likeable and upbeat attitude throughout the whole experience, and boldly struggles to maintain his positive approach to the week's chores, only occasionally wilting under the pressure that many of his staff are likely to feel on a daily basis. He engages readily with the staff and seems to be able to engage almost everyone in open discussion about their likes and dislikes of the job and the resort.

Towards the end of the experience Andy insists that he has learnt a huge amount from the experience. But that's where the problem for me seems to lie. Andy says that he's learnt a lot, but demonstrates very little that convinces us that he has actually learnt anything at all. What we see are lightweight discussions and superficial actions at the close of the programme. We see a promotion for a supervisor who hasn't actually applied for the promotion and may feasibly not want the promotion. Indeed, the one good idea that emerges during the programme is turned into an opportunity to give staff a quick holiday of their own, rather than replicating their methods company wide. We also see a ticking off for disgruntled staff and, with no shortage of irony, the move of the most outwardly negative employee back onto reception - the front line of customer service. And we witness Sean the chef being sent back to school to earn the certificates that he should actually have had in the first place.

So what did Andy really learn? I got the feeling that Andy learnt that it feels good to muck in and get his hands dirty; that he has some decent employees on the resorts who feel undervalued; and that his employees do still value money above most other incentives. His people skills are strong enough to engage and develop relationships in a short space of time, and he is certainly capable of delivering and doing his share of the hard work.

The missing element for me was Thought Leadership - I'm talking about the area within our own Radar model here. We saw little by way of ideas, limited decisions even when given some clear opportunities to change things for the better, and nothing of a vision or strategy evident in his conversations - even during the albeit brief Board meeting. Instead, his actions seemed to be short-term and lacking in imagination.

I suspect that Andy will remember his days back on the floor for some time to come. I'm less confident about his ability to make the most of the experience and really use what he saw and heard to the business' advantage.