The Frontline Advantage

The Frontline Advantage

1. Summary

This article stresses the importance of frontline managers who are directly responsible for managing their employees, for example shop-floor supervisors, leaders of R&D or sales teams, managers in restaurant chains or call centers. They are at the very first level of management across a company’s business operations and functions. Generally they make up 50% to 60% of a company’s management ranks and directly supervise as much as 80% of the workforce. In addition, due to the nature of their job they can get the information about what’s going on in the business more easily and frequently than other high-level managers. However the importance of frontline managers has been ignored. So the author mentioned “leading through the front” approach that CEOs need to do: singling out frontline managers as a critically important group in the management ranks, spending significant personal time in direct interactions with them, and using those interactions to mobilize the entire organization. Through direct and regular interaction between the CEO and them, he or she can detect something which is hard to know before the interaction such as unanticipated problems within the organization or its potential for development. Also, personal exchanges give executives an opportunity to explain the strategy to frontline managers and get them to own it. As a result, the organization is charged up and aligned by making them engaged and energized. In other words, the companies can be more agile and responsive in rapidly changing markets.

2-1. Communication

Fred Hassan, the author of this article, mentioned the ways to communicate with frontline managers by giving some examples during his period of CEO. First, when communicating with them he didn’t care the communication channels whether it is formal or not. Actually he got their phone calls no matter what he was doing and even gave some of them his personal cell-phone number. Of course, he...