C H A P T E R 17

A Field Day for Executives

The Benefits of Knowing What Your Organization Actually Does

IN THE SPRING OF 2004 my wife and I flew into Newark airport on a Continental Airlines flight from Madrid. We had an airline-scheduled window of a little less than two hours to make a connecting flight to San Francisco, but 70 minutes later, in the crowded international baggage arrivals hall, our suitcases had yet to appear. During our wait, we observed a phenomenon all too common in many corporations: customer-facing employees scrambling to make up for management misjudgments. Continental ground personnel were doing their best to calm irate passengers waiting interminably for their luggage and book new connecting flights for those who were missing their scheduled connections, all the while providing cheerful, professional service. This customer service heroism, displayed on an almost daily basis according to a few of the employees we talked to, was made necessary by some genius at corporate headquarters who had decided that more than half of Continental’s flights from Europe—at that time 13 wide-body aircraft, most of them full—should arrive between 12:30 and 2:30 p.m, creating a peak load spike in work that the ground personnel simply couldn’t handle, regardless of their efforts.

In case you haven’t noticed, airline employees seem to be continually apologizing for decisions made by higher-ups—awful food or no food at all, little legroom, no pillows and blankets, no magazines, poor scheduling—but they’re hardly the only people who find themselves in this position. Help desk personnel at software companies make excuses for buggy software. Call center staff at mail-order companies have to explain order fulfillment gaffes and product quality problems. Nurses and physicians find themselves answering for the difficulties created by health-insurance policies drafted by people who never see patients.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor and the scientific management movement began what has become an inexorable march toward separating the planning of work from its doing. It has become almost axiomatic in today’s corporations that status is measured by how far you are from the actual work of the organization—like the vice president of Macy’s West. A Macy’s employee told me how, when this august personage visited the store, he did not deign to greet customers or employees but went straight to the private meeting room to be briefed on the store’s merchandising strategies. In the typical company, it is amazing how little contact senior management typically has with daily operations.

This sorry state of affairs leaves executives hopelessly out of touch and unable to empathize with or even understand the situation faced by front-line staff. Being removed from the front lines also flies in the face of the wisdom of Honda, which years ago, as it taught its U. S. suppliers how to improve quality, revealed one of its keys to success: its problem-solving motto “actual part, actual place, actual situation.” Honda understood that when you sat in a meeting room discussing some problem—for instance, with the paint finish—you necessarily dealt with an abstraction of the real situation on the shop floor. No matter how well-intentioned and well-motivated people are, it’s inevitable that if they’re not where problems occur they will forget or overlook seemingly small details that could prove crucial to actually fixing the trouble. That’s why Honda recommended that people go to site of the problem—to the place on the factory floor where the paint was applied, in our example—to experience and see the problem firsthand.¹

It is imperative that executives who are going to make decisions about situations and lead people who work in their companies have firsthand experience with what the company does. Promotion from within is useful in this regard—it is beneficial for those at the top to actually know something about the business they are leading. But outside hiring of senior executive talent is increasing, and fewer and fewer people actually start in front-line positions before acceding to the senior executive ranks. And even in case of promotion from within, memories can be short, particularly when the new executives are surrounded by the perquisites of high corporate status.

That’s why some companies—albeit not enough of them—do something quite simple to provide executives with a sense of what it is like to do the organization’s work: they have those executives actually do that work—not just visit and chat with employees, but actually do the job—for some period of time. At Southwest Airlines, this program is called a “day in the field”; and once a quarter, senior leaders are expected to do a front-line job such as answering calls, handling baggage, checking passengers in, or serving as flight attendants. At Men’s Wearhouse, the off-price retailer of tailored men’s clothing, regional managers and senior executives are encouraged to visit stores regularly and, if they are in the store and a customer needs attention, to wait on that customer. AES, the independent power producer, used to have a program in which senior leaders, including the CEO, would spend a week working at a power plant. Once, when we checked in at the Regent Hotel in Sydney, Australia, the person at the front desk apologized for being less-than-proficient at her task. As she explained, she was normally in accounting but the Regent had a program to make sure that all people, including those in support or back-office roles, had occasional experience with the guests who were the hotel’s bread and butter.

DaVita, the second-largest provider of kidney dialysis services in the United States, has a program called “Reality 101.” Anyone being hired in from the outside or promoted to a position of vice president or above must spend a week working in a dialysis center, interacting with patients and staff and seeing what it is like to get up at 4 a.m. and be at the center by 5 so that it can be set up and open for its first patients at 6. Their chief of information technology showed me, some years later, copies of patient treatment records he had filled out during that week and proudly told me about actually inserting needles into patients. These front-line experiences provide an appreciation for the work and its many subtle complexities that would be otherwise missed.

And working on the front lines can even help provide information that is useful for improving procedures. Take Kathryn Clubb, formerly a senior partner at Accenture, who early in her career worked as a financial analyst at Northwest Airlines. As the airline sought to keep operating during a strike by ground personnel, managers and analysts were thrown into the breach and expected to do jobs temporarily vacated by striking employees. Clubb spent time loading and unloading baggage, which, she says, helped her design more efficient baggage-handling procedures.

Companies benefit in another way from having their executives occasionally do front-line work. Word of such behavior gets around and builds enormous credibility with the workforce. Similarity, an important basis of interpersonal attraction, is created in part through shared experiences. Employees will believe that a senior executive who has actually done their job will understand what they face and empathize with them more, so they will trust executive decisions to a greater degree. And executives, knowing more about the actual operations of the organization, will be able to answer more questions and speak more knowledgeably about organizational issues.

Critics occasionally point out a couple of downsides to days in the field for senior executives—or for that matter, boards of directors—but I don’t find either argument compelling. The first is that having senior executives, who probably aren’t as proficient with the front-line tasks, do that work instills some inefficiency into work processes. Although this is invariably true—I am sure DaVita senior leaders are less proficient in the tasks in the dialysis centers than the people who do them every day—learning anything always requires the expenditure of resources. Learning isn’t free. If you want yourself and your colleagues to know what the front-line work is like, doing it for a while seems like a small price to pay.

The other criticism concerns the potential of this practice to disrupt the lines of authority. After all, while senior Men’s Wear-house executives are in-store, wardrobe consultants or tailors may confide things about their district-level or regional managers that those folks would prefer to have not disclosed. But I actually think this is an upside. The big problem that senior leaders face is not knowing what is actually going on, and many things conspire to ensure that they hear only good news, carefully scripted. If you believe, as I do, that fixing problems and making things better requires more accurate information, cultivating input from multiple sources, including front-line employees, would seem to be a useful first step. If people fear communication between front-line staff and senior leadership, that fear probably reflects some deficiencies in leadership that need to be fixed.

Of course, one of the privileges of rising in an organization is graduating from the demands of grunt work. And it would be impossible for leaders to spend all their time serving customers or producing or designing the company’s products. But more organizations should follow the lead of Men’s Wearhouse, DaVita, Southwest Airlines, and Honda. By doing the work, leaders build more credibility with those they lead through the experiences they share. And managers develop insight and understanding that can only come through direct experience.

Direct experience might have changed Continental Airlines’ behavior. I’ll bet that after spending one week in baggage claim at Newark’s Continental international arrivals terminal, the airline’s scheduling gurus—or even its directors—exhausted and fed up with angry and frustrated travelers and exposed firsthand to the stress the company’s employees experience daily—might find a way to expand the flight arrival window beyond 120 minutes.