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LEAD FROM THE FRONT LINES
Since the first industrial revolution, large corporations have operated in a top-down leadership model, in which decision-making resides with the senior leaders and there’s limited engagement and information exchange with the frontline employees who do the work. While that model led to many successes through the end of the twentieth century, it is too slow and bureaucratic to keep pace with change in the twenty-first century. Top-down companies fail to innovate fast enough and struggle to compete. Most go extinct or, at best, lose market share. In fact, of all the companies that were part of the Fortune 500 in 1955, by 2020 only 51, or just over 10 percent, remained.* This statistic hints at an important truth: top-down leadership lacks the agility that enables companies to compete and thrive in today’s marketplace, and those that continue to operate in this way will succumb to the ever-shifting environment.
Not only is technology and the landscape of the global market changing faster than ever, the innovations of the late 2010s have accelerated the shift of customer expectations across multiple industries. Two of the most prominent examples of this are Uber and Amazon, both of which used technology to deliver unprecedented leaps in convenience and efficiency. Uber disrupted an entire industry by making a car available at your fingertips at any time, while Amazon enables you to shop on your device for almost anything you want and have it delivered even on the same day. As these revolutions in transportation and retail were realized, they suddenly altered customer expectations for every other industry. Organizations that fail to adapt quickly enough will continue to suffer.
Fortunately, you need look no further than your company’s front lines to discover the key to its longevity. Ninety percent of employees in any given organization work on the front lines, and the few who don’t usually started there. An organization’s purpose is actualized on the front lines, and therefore it’s vital that its leaders stay connected to what is happening there. The front lines are where we interact with customers, solve the most problems, establish norms, and cultivate culture. Put simply, an organization creates (and demonstrates) its value on its front lines. Thus, to remain competitive, organizations must embrace frontline leadership.
Frontline leadership is a system in which top-level executives break through traditional silos and engage with frontline employees to develop and implement strategies. With this approach, frontline workers are empowered to make decisions and iterate processes on their own. At its best, frontline leadership pulls employees into the decision-making process, so that solutions are sought, found, and acted upon in the area that matters most—where the work gets done. It strives to obtain diverse perspectives on a single issue and to break down barriers to participation by extending knowledge and authority to each employee. The end result is an environment that relies on the horizontal flow of information and ideas, one that fosters radical trust and inclusion.
Frontline leadership doesn’t mean that employees and senior executives share the same responsibilities. A top-level leader’s job is to provide the vision, to think ahead to what the company will look like 5, 10, and 15 years down the line. These leaders seek to understand the markets the company serves and the trends that will change those markets. They need to maintain a strategic plan for how to compete and win, and to share that information and their vision with employees in a way that empowers them to move in that direction. The frontline employee’s primary job is to respond to what happens in the present—to adapt to changing customer needs and new expectations as they arise.
This leadership style can be difficult to imagine. It was for me, until I saw frontline leadership modeled successfully during my time as a procurement specialist at Honeywell. I had a chance to join our vice president of operations during a daily meeting with the supervisor and a few other employees from every manufacturing team on the site. We met in a huge room that could hold well over a hundred people. The room buzzed with energy as the VP welcomed everybody, and then asked them to report on how yesterday went, what needed to get done today, and what help they needed. Then he did something remarkable: he stopped talking. Each team took turns sharing their successes, needs, and struggles. When one team mentioned that it required support in a certain area, before the vice president could say anything, three or four other teams had jumped in to offer assistance. They collaborated across teams and across departments, combining their collective knowledge to develop richer solutions on the spot. The VP only spoke when he needed to—to give context about the state of the company, to allocate resources, or when a problem had no evident solution. For the most part, the teams ran the meeting.
This experience was transformative for me. Before that meeting, I thought that effective leadership required making the most decisions and being at the forefront of any effort to solve an issue. I used to measure my daily success by how many problems I’d attacked and how many decisions I’d made. This one meeting changed all that. I witnessed how frontline leadership was infinitely more powerful. It was obvious from the energy and engagement in that room, in the efficiency with which we resolved problems, in the joy the employees expressed as they worked together. It also bore out quantitatively, as that vice president oversaw a 40 percent improvement in supplier performance and a 20 percent improvement in output without adding resources. He did it simply by improving the utilization of labor and equipment and creating a culture in which people could attack any challenge they faced together.
As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve seen the myriad of benefits that frontline leadership offers. Because top executives have intimate contact with and take guidance from the front lines, they have a much better sense of whether their decisions and initiatives are working and unfolding as planned, and they can course correct early if problems arise. And because employees have the freedom to work as autonomous, engaged, and driven individuals, they feel more respected and fulfilled in their jobs. That degree of satisfaction encourages people to contribute everything they can—all their discretionary effort, creative thinking, and unique ideas. All this dramatically improves efficiency and agility, which translates to higher profits and a greater market share.
Finally, and most vitally, because frontline employees have the clearest view of the customer at the point of delivery, a company that leads from the front lines always has the customer in sight. That means that each initiative and each investment can be crafted to respond to current customer needs, which improves return on investment and protects large corporations from losing market share to smaller, up-and-coming companies that might recognize a gap and fill it before the established company even knows it’s there.
I’ve also worked in a top-down leadership model, and I’ve seen its shortcomings. Employees feel no ownership over new initiatives, so they don’t buy in. Senior leaders waste the opportunity to shape culture and company values because they don’t open up effective two-way communication with the front lines. The culture diverges. The executives might believe in quality and efficiency, but because they don’t take the time to connect their workers to those values, the rest of the workforce operates based not on what is expected by the main office but on what is accepted at different sites.
The same lack of communication also means frontline workers don’t have a deep enough understanding of new strategies to be able to implement them. This slows learning, and makes change and innovation nearly impossible. If you don’t innovate, you will lose your competitive edge and your customers soon after.
There are two essential processes to establish a practice of frontline leadership. The first is that executives need to lead from the front lines themselves, meaning that they gather input and partner with their frontline workers to ensure that the solutions they develop together are effective. The second is to create a climate where individual employees are empowered to become leaders in their own right, with the knowledge, authority, and support to make their own decisions, iterate their own processes, and make course corrections on the fly. This much power residing in the front lines may trigger anxiety for some executives, with good reason. If done incorrectly, an empowered workforce can run in a hundred different directions, and pull the company out of alignment. That’s partly why so few companies fully embrace this approach, even when they may believe in the benefits. That said, the risk of sacrificing agility by sticking to a top-down leadership strategy far outweighs the risk of embracing frontline leadership, especially when the company invests in the proper infrastructure to support frontline leaders. In fact, if you can successfully implement the ideas in this book, you will improve the quality of decision-making in your organization and gain speed, effectiveness, and buy-in among your workforce. The person best suited to solve a problem is the person who is closest to it. In most organizations, that is the person on the front lines. All they need are the tools and the support to do it.
These two processes—executives leading from the front lines and empowering frontline workers to become leaders—are interconnected. Progress in one leads to progress in the other. The transition from top-down to frontline leadership begins with upper levels of management recognizing the need to shift their leadership approach and then being willing to make the necessary changes—to be transparent with information, allow others to make decisions, and trust that the organization will move faster with a flatter distribution of authority.
Frontline leadership promotes inclusion and creates the conditions for others to lead, which fosters a long-term advantage for any organization. The primary factor that determines how well your company will make the shift to frontline leadership is how you show up as a leader. The first habit management must build is to lead by example. Go to the front lines to gather input from and collaborate with frontline employees. Once you master that, you can facilitate widespread frontline leadership by empowering each worker to become a leader.
Through my experience, I’ve identified five keys to help you make the transition to frontline leadership:
• Find your authentic leadership approach.
• Establish a dialogue with the front lines.
• See the whole person.
• Coach rather than direct.
• Roll up your sleeves and pitch in.
Find Your Authentic Leadership Style
I’ve spent a long time thinking about what inspires me, and I’ve come up with two answers: one, a leader who believes in his or her mission and purpose with such absolute conviction that I believe in it as well; and two, a leader who believes in me so much that I have no choice but to believe in myself. I’ve since strived to cultivate these two characteristics in how I lead. I advise any executive or manager who wants to shift to frontline leadership to think about what inspires you and to work to incorporate that into how you lead authentically.
Frontline leadership requires that you challenge employees to accomplish more than they thought possible and foster a shared belief that they can achieve it together. Higher-level leaders can spread that belief among frontline workers and create a ripple of positive energy that will spread throughout the entire organization, bringing people together. Inspiring employees on the front lines to lead will help people cultivate their own leadership practices and eventually grow to become strong leaders themselves.
However, before you can start to have that positive effect, before others believe in you, you must do the work to believe in yourself and develop your own authentic leadership style. You can do this by understanding your strengths, your values, and how you contribute most effectively to achieve the goals of your team or company. Inauthentic leaders—those who don’t take the time to connect with people and aren’t genuine and transparent in their intent—will struggle to inspire others. They might sugarcoat information about the company’s status or an employee’s performance. They may rely on canned feedback or platitudes, or even avoid giving feedback at all. An authentic leader can communicate to employees about where they stand and still show respect for them as individuals. An authentic leader knows how to provide guidance and support to help employees grow and move forward, and demonstrates that by listening and incorporating feedback. Authentic leadership relies on a robust, ongoing practice of self-awareness. It requires that you clarify your values as well as become aware of your strengths and weaknesses so you can position yourself to be your best while acknowledging you have your own challenges. Everyone is different, and everyone has something to contribute. By understanding how people work, you can strengthen relationships across teams and assure you’re hiring people whose values are compatible with those of your organization.
I began to develop this awareness and explore my authentic values and leadership style in 2005. I started to keep the first couple of pages in my planner open as a space to reflect, record quotes that stuck with me, and keep track of key areas where I wanted to grow. To prompt my reflections, I would recall all of the times that I felt energized and excited about what was in front of me. By identifying the commonality in those moments, I recognized what kind of work and the type of work environment that really inspired me. This awareness was the start of my journey to understanding my own purpose and values.
Of course, values and purpose extend beyond the workplace into your personal life. Identifying these allows you to invest your free time in alignment with those values. Some good questions to ask to discover your values include: When given the freedom to choose, without any concern for other people’s judgment, how do I choose to spend my time? What are the top five ways I would prioritize my time and energy? Is it with family? Pursuing personal development? Serving others? Contributing creatively?
In my personal reflections, a few core values kept cropping up: family, optimism, and hard work. It didn’t take long to understand where these values came from. My value of family came from my parents, who lived that value their whole lives; my commitment to hard work was from my father, who was an electricianand was always there to help others; and my sense of optimism was from my mother, who always exuded confidence that we would figure out any problems, no matter how difficult they seemed.
As you grow in your career, other mentors and role models emerge, and many throughout my career have informed my values. I remembered how they embodied and led with their values, and how these were reflected in the ways that they conducted themselves. The qualities I saw in my mentors, including my parents, slowly shaped how I live my values in my everyday life. A constant struggle I had was to balance my career with my duties as a father and a husband. It’s something I shared with my colleagues, since family was so important to me and it’s the first challenge I began to openly share that started to get me comfortable being vulnerable as a leader. This helped to set a tone within any team I led that we would respect each other’s commitments outside of work. I shared optimism by highlighting all of the amazing opportunities the future held in my communications with my teams, instead of fixating on the challenges that we faced. And I underscored the importance of hard work by always setting ambitious goals for my team that required everyone to work together, get out of their comfort zone, and try new things to acheive. The more challenging the goal, the greater the sense of accomplishment. Together, we discovered the joy of a job well done.
Growth is constant, and there’s always a deeper level of self-knowledge to attain, so I still practice note-taking and self-reflection. It’s provided something of a fossil record of my personal development, and it enables me to go back and see which experiences and thoughts have shaped my thinking. With this clarity, I can better articulate my values to my teams, continue to live in alignment with them, and lead in a way that’s authentic. Beyond that, it provides a greater sense of empathy, as it’s helped me recognize the accumulated experiences and struggles that go into shaping a person.
During my time at Aviall, one of the most successful approaches that helped others do this was to invite all team leaders to a series of workshops designed to help them discover their authentic leadership voice. We would always start out with an exercise in which they would identify two or three of their core values and then research a leader who demonstrates each. Everyone had to identify specific examples of how the leaders embodied those values, and then write down two or three concrete ways to express those values in how they lead. For example, one of my core values is serving others. In alignment with that, I prioritize mentoring team members.
This is one of many ways to help others develop personal awareness and lead more authentically. Experiment. Find a strategy that works best for you, whether it’s my method, an adaptation of it, or something entirely different. What matters most is that you consistently reflect on and refine your values and get feedback from others you trust to see if you have any blind spots. Hold yourself accountable for living your values while recognizing nobody is perfect and we will all stumble, learn, and grow. And those challenges and how we recover are often what shape us most.
Establish a Dialogue with the Front Lines
For an organization to lead from the front lines, upper management and frontline teams must engage in a robust, ongoing dialogue and abandon the top-down communication style of executives passing down direction with little context or explanation. Dialogue operates like a rubber band wrapped around the executives and the frontline teams, binding both groups closer together. The ability for leaders to generate and nurture this bond with the front lines will pace an organizations ability to respond to the constantly changing environment in which we do business today.
To do so, start by cultivating two practices: listening and transparency. Executives and managers need to prioritize time in their day to listen actively to employees on the front lines and understand the challenges they face and what support they need. This broadens the perspective of the leadership team, giving executives access to deeper layers of knowledge and expertise that enable them to craft more dynamic, comprehensive solutions to the complicated problems of the twenty-first century. Transparency means that leaders at all levels communicate the honest, full truth about the financial health of the company, the markets the company competes in, and the rationale behind key decisions and actions. This transparency gives frontline leaders the information they need to make better decisions on the ground.
The way the vice president of operations at Honeywell led his meetings became a paragon of listening excellence for me. After taking over as CEO of Aviall, I wanted to replicate that same level of communication, engagement, and continuous improvement. To set the stage for increasing transparency, my leadership team and I hosted a quarterly all-employee meeting to discuss the state of the business, during which we encouraged everyone to highlight the successes and failures experienced in the quarter, to share the challenges they faced in their attempts to improve, to provide feedback on strategic initiatives, and to describe some real customer experiences. We also adopted the same kinds of weekly and daily team meetings I’d seen at Honeywell and had further developed over many years by that point, which became part of our natural operating rhythm.
But we wanted to go further, and we found a few great ways to do so. The first was a monthly meeting with all of our managers from around the world. Because of the time zone differences, we did each call twice, with 50 to 100 managers on each. For the first 30 minutes, I discussed the state of the company and shared the key decisions we’d made and actions we’d taken in the prior month, as well as the reasoning behind them. After that, I outlined our strategy for the next 30, 60, and 90 days, taking time to explain why we’d decided to follow the paths we chose. Finally, because all effective communication is a dialogue, I opened up the last 30 minutes to questions and input from the managers, so people from different teams could share and coordinate their efforts. I soon started inviting frontline leaders to join these meetings, and had them share the actions they’d taken, ways we’d found to better serve customers, and opportunities that had been identified for improvement.
We also published a weekly newsletter to highlight different teams around the company and how they contributed to our mission and purpose, and we held roundtable discussions at sites around the world to better understand the unique challenges of our global teams and incorporate their feedback.
We emphasized transparency in all of those initiatives at Aviall. We didn’t just call meetings to give instructions or hear from employees, but also to share information and to answer the most important question: Why? Why are we, as a company, doing what we are doing? Why are certain decisions being made and actions taken at all levels of leadership? Why is your job important in serving our customers? When frontline employees understand the thinking behind a decision and the reason for a goal, then they can solve problems as they arise without the need for micromanaging from above. This is a key part of creating an inclusive organization in the age of knowledge workers. In traditional leadership models, siloed information serves as a major barrier that prevents frontline workers from participating in the daily course corrections needed to keep organizations performing at thier best.
In a transparent organization, employees know exactly what they’re striving for and why, so they can draw upon their own knowledge to make informed decisions. Even better, frontline employees often work directly with customers, so they can easily extend their decision-making process beyond the confines of the company and consult with their customers directly. This increases agility, as it enables employees to respond to customer needs as they arise. Executives can monitor what happens on the front lines and see almost immediately the effectiveness of whatever changes are being made. With this information, an organization can iterate its broader strategies, and make course corrections in the middle of initiatives, which ultimately leads to better solutions for customers and shareholders. That’s why I spent so much time in all of these meetings providing context and connecting everything we did back to the company’s purpose—to empower our frontline workers through knowledge. To have frontline leadership, you must do the same. Many companies today have presented a vision for where the company is going, which is a great start. But you also have to connect with your purpose to reveal the why behind the moves you make.
See the Whole Person
To have an empowered workforce, you can’t just focus on employees as workers. You have to uncover who they are as people. This requires you to create an environment in which everyone feels comfortable bringing his or her full, authentic selves to work. So much of the success of frontline leadership relies on employees putting in extra effort, approaching their jobs creatively, and being willing to rush in and fill any gaps that they see. There are two prima facie traits that all employees need before they will do that. The first trait, is the desire or motivation to expend that extra effort, and the second is the energy to execute. The fact is that being an empowered employee takes more effort. It requires more effort and the ability to feel comfortable with the vulnerability inherent in taking risks or innovating.
Being empowered makes work more meaningful for most people, even though they have to invest more of their time and energy. Yet if there’s even a hint of bitterness or lack of trust in the workplace, then most employees won’t make that investment.
The same worker can do the same job for two different companies with different cultures and produce opposite results. To thrive, employees need to be immersed in a culture that empowers them, in which they can leverage their strengths, learn through trial and error, and find the team camaraderie that reinforces their contributions. By creating an environment where people can be their best and find meaning in their work, you’ll increase engagement and retention of employees who share your purpose and values.
When helping small businesses establish processes to manage employee performance, provide feedback, and develop their teams, I’ve used a few approaches to enable leaders to connect with their teams.
Make Sure All Employees Know How Their Jobs Support the Purpose of the Company
Your company’s purpose is a description of the impact you want to make for customers—what you strive to achieve by solving a problem or providing value. Use every opportunity, from the first day a new employee walks in the door, to weekly or monthly one-on-ones, to all-team meetings, and so on, to keep the company’s purpose front and center for your team, so employees can draw meaning from how they impact the world. Make sure every employee knows why customers choose you above your competitors, reinforcing that employee’s work.
Understand the Aspirations of Your Employees
Discuss where they want to go with their careers, what they’re passionate about, what’s most important to them, and then help them move toward those goals. This could mean connecting them with a mentor who’s aligned with their chosen career path, investing in training and development that supports their goals alongside the goals of your company, or providing opportunities to work on projects or external engagements that align with their passions outside of their normal job responsibilities. Not only do you recognize the whole person but you invest in the whole person, and thus develop leaders in your own ranks.
Integrate Work and Life
Create events that bridge the gap between work and people’s lives outside of work. I experienced this as an engineer at Pratt & Whitney, my first job out of college. I moved from upstate New York to south Florida, where I didn’t know anyone within 1,000 miles. Soon after I arrived, the company hosted a Family Day, and invited us to bring our families onsite to see the products we made. My parents visited Florida for the first time and saw the F-14 Tomcat and F-15 Eagle, two of the engines I’d worked on, which sat in the parking lot of our office building. It was one of the most impactful moments of my early career. I never imagined working on such amazing products and felt genuine pride in what I did. The cherry on top was that I was able to share that with my parents.
Many years later, with that experience in mind, we launched the Aviall Friends and Family Day in 2011. We invited employees and their families to tour our operations and see some of the aircraft we supported, with a Chinook, one of the largest rotorcraft, as the main draw. We got great feedback from our employees and continued to evolve the event to incorporate new activities. It allowed everyone to see different aspects of one another and to build connections beyond work.
Support Through Struggle
Like it or not, everyone will face huge challenges in their lives, and often, those challenges affect our work. Inclusive leaders will not only know when their teams are struggling with something difficult, they will help them through it. It’s easy to achieve results when everything is perfect. A truly great leader helps employees through these challenges, and enables them to come back just as strong, or stronger, knowing that the company and its leaders are behind them. This might mean giving employees time off to grieve the passing of a loved one, connecting them with resources to support a specific need, or just providing them with the space to get through a difficult time. Because each challenge is unique, and each person reacts individually to it, there is no handbook for how to help your employees through tough times. But you’ll never be able to if you haven’t already established a relationship with open communication that allows people to talk about what’s on their minds.
One approach to become better at noticing when employees are struggling, so you can help them through challenging times, is to practice mindfulness. Be present with team members by giving them your full, undivided attention, which will strengthen your ability to empathize with challenges they face. Empathy is one of the most beautiful, fundamental human connections you can make by experiencing what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. But it’s also one of the most difficult to experience in a high-pressure business environment—not because most leaders lack feeling, but because the day-to-day demands of business require so much attention, they prevent most people from slowing down enough to perceive the needs of others. This is compounded by the fact that many leaders feel a pressure to always be busy, taking on as many projects as possible. I fell into this trap early in my career, and it hindered my ability to remain present with my team members.
A leader who finds it difficult to slow down and focus on one person also stunts the ability of frontline employees to grow into leaders. One of my mentors said, “I try not to make any decisions that someone on my team can.” That orientation alone represented mindfulness: my mentor had slowed down and thought through who on his team could best handle whatever came up. It also required him to provide support to his team members as they made their decisions. He had to stop and ask thoughtful questions to help employees work through problems. Doing this might seem hard at first, but not only does it lead to more intelligent decision-making, it accelerates the development of frontline employees and empowers your team in a way that multiplies success. Developing a practice of mindfulness—whether it’s meditation, focusing on one activity at a time, or conscious breathing exercises—will enable you to be present with your employees and connect with them in a meaningful way.
The bottom line is that, as a manager, you have to take an authentic interest in your employees as people, get to know them, discover what they value, and understand what motivates them. Many managers and leaders lean toward the impersonal and construct an imaginary, yet unbreakable boundary. They talk to their employees only about work, which means they’re acknowledging only a small part of what makes up that person. If you believe that people do their best work and are most engaged when they can be fully themselves, then you must acknowledge the other parts of their lives that make them who they are.
You can take this commitment to seeing the whole person further with your actions. My favorite way to do this is to acknowledge that people have other interests beyond work, and then do everything I can to ensure that they are able to pursue them. Although it may seem like doing so would lower productivity, I’ve found the opposite. When given the space to pursue what they enjoy away from work, people come to work with more energy to contribute. They don’t dread the Monday morning alarm, watch the clock in the afternoon, or take sick days just to get a mental break.
When people can be themselves at work, leverage their strengths, and build true relationships with their coworkers, they get excited to see their teammates. People enjoy working with one another, knowing that they are contributing to something bigger, and sometimes lose track of time. I’ve felt this way at work many times, and even though it’s not every day, it’s more often than not. The benefits go the other direction as well. Having had a fulfilling day at work makes me a better father and husband because I leave feeling energized, not drained. I don’t need time to decompress when I get home. I jump right into family time.
Once your employees experience joy and camaraderie at work, you can raise the bar and challenge them beyond what they thought they could achieve. They’ll surprise even themselves. When a team is fully engaged and working together toward a common purpose, amazing things happen. My wife, a career Human Resources professional, has described my approach as setting a high expectation and then empowering people until it hurts. I think she’s right. I believe that it’s a leader’s responsibility to bring out the best in people. Although it may be uncomfortable at times, the feeling of accomplishment for most when they have the autonomy to do their work their way and a leader who believes in them is one of the most rewarding things in life.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to help employees maintain balance in their lives. First, simply respect their time. My family is my top priority, and I respect that for others, so I rarely send emails or call my team in the evening or on weekends. Second, pay attention to how you transition from the end of a workweek into a weekend or holiday break. Personally, if I don’t end every workweek with some sort of acknowledgment or evaluation of how that week went, then I won’t be able to enjoy the weekend. I’ll be thinking about the week, my work, and the week ahead, and I won’t be fully present with my family or friends. I’ve heard similar things from employees. This is why, during my first frontline leadership job at Honeywell, in a factory in San Diego, I wanted every employee to know how we were doing at the end of the week. On Fridays, I’d recap the week—close out initiatives and highlight our objectives—and then specifically call out what we would work on the next week, so employees didn’t need to worry or wonder about it over the weekend.
Give people permission to take a break and enjoy other parts of life. This might seem small, but it’s one of the most important things you can do as a leader. All of the people your employees impact are impacted by you as well. When you see the whole person, you can have a positive impact on your employees’ lives, as well as the lives of their entire families. You empower them to grow as parents, partners, and members of their communities. They might never meet you, but in a small way, you’ve made a positive contribution to their lives. That’s huge. At the same time, you have created a culture where people buy in with enthusiasm, are eager to work their hardest, and invest in the company that’s invested in them.
Coach Rather Than Direct
Empowerment is an ongoing process of learning and development for your employees, and you have the opportunity to create the conditions that allow them to continue to grow. This requires a shift in mindset, from thinking like a manager to thinking like a coach. A manager usually will delegate tasks, lead meetings, collect input, make strategic decisions, and so on. All of this is important, but an overly controlling management style will stifle your employees’ development. They will become so accustomed to you providing road maps or scheduling every aspect of their day that it will weaken their ability to think creatively on their own. Worse, they won’t have the time or energy necessary to survey the landscape—one that they, being on the front lines, know better than you—and discover process issues, much less the solutions to those problems.
Instead of micromanaging your employees, empower them by providing clear direction and guidance on priorities. Set goals that align with company objectives, and then coach your employees. Gain an understanding of their challenges and enable them to work it out on their own. Be available to answer their questions, but give them the space to make decisions. In doing so, you gift them with the opportunity to practice on their own, to make mistakes, and to learn from these, so that they can grow.
Any sports fan knows that there are hundreds of different coaching styles, all of which can be successful. You can find success with the hyper-professional Zen of the NBA’s Phil Jackson or the high-energy exuberance of the NFL’s Pete Carroll. No matter your style, there are two fundamentals upon which any successful coaching strategy is built. The first is setting a high, clear bar for your team members, which shows that you believe in them. The second is doing everything you can to help them achieve that standard, which demonstrates your unwavering commitment to their success.
First, the bar. Set specific goals with your team members. If the goal is quality, discuss what quality looks like for their position, what it looks like for the people supporting them, and what can be measured daily or weekly that would indicate how well they’re meeting that objective. When they know which metrics they’re striving to improve, they can see more opportunities. They can find and fix design flaws in a product. They can say, “Hey, maybe the material we’re getting isn’t high quality enough.” Or they can find places to streamline the supply chain, to automate processes. To take it a step further, encourage them to set their own goals. This will help them establish ownership and increase motivation to achieve those goals.
The high bar you set should include more than just quantitative individual goals. Be sure to make it also about the unreachable peak, the quantitative and qualitative successes, that the entire company is working toward. But the highest expectations in the world won’t help you coach your teams if you don’t help them achieve these ambitious goals. In fact, there are few things more toxic than a leader who asks a lot from a team, and then makes it almost impossible for the team to deliver. If you do that, your employees will feel like you’re just setting them up to fail.
On the other hand, if you set a high bar with your teams and then support them by investing time and resources, you show that you believe in them. This belief alone is empowering, and makes employees feel valued, challenged, and excited at work, even before they start to see their goals come to fruition. When, with your support, they achieve those goals, that moment massively increases their own confidence and sense of empowerment within the organization.
You can support their development in a myriad of ways. The most obvious are new training and skill development programs, or giving them the resources (e.g., money, technology, time, access, information) that they need to succeed. For example, you could share aspects of your experience, or help them develop relationships within the company and the industry, so that they can expand their personal networks and learn from their peers.
A quick note: You can only ask your employees to do all this extra work to continuously learn if you make an equal, consistent effort to grow yourself. They are all experts at their jobs, and you can learn just as much from them as they do from you. Invest time in developing yourself, to embody a commitment to continuous learning that will inspire others to follow.
All of this is in stark contrast to the legacy top-down model, which requires employees to fit a mold that can be plugged into the machine—people who are expected to execute orders without contributing input of their own. With frontline leadership, you’re disrupting this model by challenging your employees, demonstrating your belief in them, and helping them excel.
Reward Positive Behavior
A vital part of successful coaching is to ensure that you reward positive behavior. It seems obvious, but in large organizations, it can sometimes be easy to misinterpret a situation and react negatively to what is a positive development. For example, suppose an employee who reports to you rises to your challenge, sees a process problem, and fixes it. Another employee might feel like the first person stepped on that employee’s toes, overreached from his or her position, whatever it might be. The second employee reports the first employee to his or her boss, and that other manager comes to you and says, “Hey, your employee is stepping out of his lane. He’s creating conflict with my team. Can you talk to him?”
What you do here matters, as a wrong move can have tremendous consequences and undermine your own efforts toward building frontline leadership. Before reacting to the information you received from the other manager, it’s vital that you assess whether your employee really was acting in a rude or counterproductive way, or whether he or she was doing what you asked and it triggered a negative emotional response in the other employee. If your employee was doing what you asked and contributed a good improvement to or shift in the process, then you commend that person for that. You want to reward the effort and, importantly, acknowledge the improvement. At the same time, it might also be worthwhile to take this opportunity to coach the employee on how to work across silos in a way that doesn’t undermine others. Change is hard, so understanding everyone impacted and engaging them early is important.
If, on the other hand, your employee was way out of line and made a mistake that somehow made the process worse, you still don’t need to take a disciplinary approach. Obviously, have a conversation. Help your employee learn from the mistake and extrapolate from it, but—and this is key—still commend the person for taking that initiative, for trying something new. You want to empower effort in the direction of your goals in an environment where people challenge each other constructively.
In either situation, if you just had a knee-jerk reaction and moved straight to disciplinary action against the employee for moving across silos, especially after you’d explicitly encouraged employees to do so, you’ll breed bitterness in your workforce. That employee will conclude, “OK, I tried to go above and beyond, I tried to fill the gaps, but I’m the one who got punished for it. I’ll never do that again!” Then you’ll have something much worse than a disempowered employee: a disengaged, resentful one.
Left unchecked, this can quickly turn toxic for the entire organization. One disgruntled or disengaged employee will vent to other coworkers who will then spread the story of this managerial slight throughout the ranks. For this reason, it is vital to remain consistent in your expectations and reward structure. It’s even better if you can prevent these situations from occurring in the first place.
For frontline leadership to truly empower employees, everyone on your team needs to understand the importance of working together, as one unit, toward a common goal. The type of corrosive infighting, in which one employee feels threatened by the actions of another, doesn’t occur naturally. It comes from a competitive culture that is so focused on individual performance that employees are incentivized to gain an inside track on a promotion or a raise, even if it means undercutting their coworkers instead of focusing on how they can help the company grow as a whole. In fact, trying to switch to a flat leadership structure in this kind of environment can cause catastrophic damage, as people will use their newfound freedom and power to stay within their silos, promote themselves, and undermine the team as a whole.
To prevent this, make sure that everyone works as a team, and that starts with fostering empathy and connection with one another. Effective communication relies on more than speaking and listening; it relies on a true understanding of others and their viewpoints. Often, in large organizations, uncontructive rivalries spring up between different departments. Marketing thinks its job is harder than sales, who think its job is harder than fulfillment, and on it goes. When this happens, communication between groups on how they can work on coordinated and integrated growth and development becomes nearly impossible. Of course, work in each silo poses its own unique challenges, and oftentimes a failure in one arena can affect the others. In a toxic environment, these communication breakdowns breed resentment that fractures the team. I’ve found that the best way to avoid this is to foster understanding, to help your employees see the world through their workers’ eyes. When you set the example as a mindful, empathetic leader, it goes a long way toward cultivating this interdepartmental connection. Use a shadowing or job rotation program, where people from one department either shadow or take over for someone in another department. To generate empathy and build mutual understanding, there’s nothing like walking in someone else’s shoes.
Roll Up Your Sleeves and Chip In
In order for a company to truly be one team, everybody has to embrace that value, including, and especially, the executives. Any executive who wants to lead from the front lines needs to consistently spend time there. If executives stay on the sidelines, it breeds an us-versus-them dynamic between management and employees, and makes people believe that your priorities aren’t aligned with theirs. When you go to the front lines of the teams you lead, roll up your sleeves and chip in. It helps build relationships and empathy with your employees, which will lead to better decision-making, allow them to feel seen and truly valued. It also makes you more approachable.
My first leadership role was as a manufacturing supervisor in a casting shop that made pressure switches for thermostats. Every day, I’d go out to the shop floor right after our first meeting and see where I could be of the most help. Of course, there were days when I was overwhelmed with work and needed to spend time writing a business case to support the purchase of new equipment or creating budgets for the next quarter. But effective leaders find the time to build their teams, create repeatable processes, and delegate tasks, all of which increase efficiency and provide opportunities for your team to grow. When you have a well-trained team working in sync, you can dedicate more time to the most important responsibility of a leader: coaching and developing your team members. Working on the front lines is one of the best ways to do that. It enables you to role model responsibility, hard work, and humility, and it also builds essential trust between you and the people on the front lines.
To be successful, you have to go with an authentic desire to help, and with ample humility. Recognize that the people on the front lines know how to do their jobs better than you do. Make sure that you don’t go there with an attitude of “Well, I’m the boss, so it’s my job to know how to pack boxes and write code better than you, so let me show you how it’s done.” That approach will have the opposite effect—people will see you as condescending and will most likely end up less engaged. Just go and see how you can help, and do it.
In that first leadership role, the factory floor was as dirty as manufacturing gets. There were metal chips and machine fluids all over the place. I asked, “How can I help?” and somebody said, “Grab a mop.” So, I did, and I did the same the other times I went there, until eventually, I didn’t have to ask.
Spending time working side by side with my team, I began to see the challenges they faced in their day-to-day work. I noticed whether they had the proper tools or enough supplies. I observed how their direct supervisors behaved and what their leadership styles were. I could tell if we had the right number of employees to do the job safely, and see if the workplace environment was safe and clean.
This practice has become an essential part of my leadership strategy. It’s something you can start doing tomorrow to kick off the transition to frontline leadership, though you can take it even further than just mopping the floor.
While CEO of Aviall, I spent time either shadowing or directly working at every frontline job, just so I could understand what life was like in each position. Then I reflected on how to make those jobs more meaningful, how to better communicate our strategy to that team, and how to support employees to develop and grow on their own. The more time you can spend on the front lines, the better. The front line is where change actually happens and where new ideas are implemented.
On top of that, going to the front lines can give you an excellent way to measure the effectiveness of your decision-making and communication as a leader. You can find out whether your employees understand where the company is going and the reasoning behind the various decisions that have been made.
Whenever you or someone in the upper levels of management makes a major decision—where to open a plant, whether to shut down a product line, when to break into a new market, etc.—a companywide narrative springs up around that decision. If you honestly communicate the reasoning behind it, exhibit transparency, and rely on the relationships you’ve already built with your employees, then they’ll believe what you tell them. But if you’re not open and upfront in sharing information, or lack a strong relationship with your employees, they’ll disregard whatever you say and generate their own narratives, which will erode trust and undermine performance.
Go to the front lines and build those relationships. Make it your informal office, and try to break down as many barriers to participation and access as possible. Make sure that your commitment to working alongside those on the front lines is more than cosmetic, or your attempt at creating frontline leaders will fail.
That’s why, back in that first leadership job, I mopped, even if I was alone and no one was watching. During my last week, before I left for a new role within a different division at Honeywell, I was out on the floor mopping, and one of the guys on the shift found me there. He was stunned, and said, “Eric, what are you doing? You know you’re leaving, right? You don’t have to do that anymore.”
I knew that. But I did it anyway because the floor needed to be cleaned and I had made a commitment to my team to work beside them to do what needed to be done.
* Mark J. Perry, “Only 51 US companies have been on the Fortune 500 since 1955, thanks to the creative destruction that fuels economic prosperity,” AEI, May 26, 2020, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/only-51-us-companies-have-been-on-the-fortune-500-since-1955-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/.