3 Pillars of Frontline Leadership

‘Frontline Leadership’ is the leadership framework that has driven my work throughout my career. In essence, it’s a way to stay calibrated with how work gets accomplished in your business so you can make more informed decisions and incorporate input from all levels of the organization, increasing buy-in and providing the opportunity to cut through traditional organizational layers that hinder transparency.

Back in September 2021, I published a book titled, “The Frontline CEO: Turn Employees into Decision Makers Who Innovate Solutions, Win Customers, and Boost Profits”. Throughout the book, I go into depth on how ‘Frontline Leadership’ serves as a powerful framework for encouraging CEOs and executives to build connections with their managers, spending more time leading from the frontlines of their organizations.

Now, I want to share with you three essential pillars to frontline leadership, which will strengthen your company and shore up your chances of success in the future.

Pillar 1 | Diversity & Inclusion?

Ensuring that you’re hiring your team from diverse backgrounds is essential to creating an inclusive and equitable culture within your organization. When teams are diverse, individuals can bring a wide range of perspectives to the decision-making process, leading to increased innovation and creativity.

Indeed, Harvard Business Review research based on a survey conducted across 1,700 companies in eight countries found that diverse companies had a 19% higher innovation revenue. Moreover, a 2019 analysis conducted by McKinsey found that companies with gender-diverse executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability.?

One element of diversity that is often overlooked is disability inclusion, which Ted Kennedy Jr. (co-chair of the Disability Equality Index and board member of the American Association of People with Disabilities) has described as the “new frontier” of corporate social responsibility.?

According to the recently published 2022 Disability Equality Index, 126 companies (30% of those who responded to their survey) have a senior executive who openly identifies as having a disability. Moreover, there is little surprise that companies who topped this year’s index are among some of the world’s leading businesses – Amazon, Bank of America, 3M, Google, and Starbucks.

Pillar 2 | Equality

Democratizing and creating greater equality within the decision-making processes of your company is one of the key foundations of frontline leadership.

Contrary to popular belief, the most efficient approach to making most decisions doesn’t come from the top – it comes from your employees on the frontlines who interact with customers and can see and respond to the shifting landscape before anyone else. Every day, team members make hundreds (or even thousands) of decisions that are minor course corrections to keep the business on track and moving forward.

The best people to make those decisions are the ones closest to the work, know how to best implement them, and will see the direct impact those decisions have on assisting the way in which they do their jobs. Only major decisions (e.g. shifts in direction for the company and significant investments) should be made by the top leaders with a broader perspective – and even then, it’s usually more effective to get input from the frontlines.

In the day-to-day chaos of running a company from the top, it’s easy to become disconnected from your team, causing bottlenecks, silos, and missed opportunities. As such, you should ensure that you’re always engaging with your team members on the frontline, taking their thoughts, comments, feedback, and concerns into account whenever you make any decisions for your company.

“People want to work, to contribute, to be able to leverage everything they have to offer, but their voice isn’t being heard.”

The Frontline CEO

One company that serves as a fantastic example of how the pillar of equality works in practice is SalesForce, which – under the guidance of Chief Equality Officer Lorri Castillo Martinez – is driving a focus of: accelerating representation; taking employee experience into consideration; designing intentional systems; and engaging stakeholders.?

If your team members feel that their voices are being heard by leadership, they are more likely to be engaged, empowered, and energized, leading to improved productivity and outcomes for your company.

Pillar 3 | Alignment

In any organization, be it big or small, aligning team members toward a shared mission and purpose is challenging. As time goes by, team members naturally drift into their own functional silos, leading to a lack of shared vision and focus across the team.?

Most of us can relate to situations in which top executives become disconnected from the frontlines, leading to a breakdown in alignment of goals and objectives with middle management. Although this might seem more common in larger organizations, small to midsize companies are equally susceptible to these bottlenecks when the right systems aren’t in place.

Whenever embarking on a large project, setting a small, first-step goal that your team is able to quickly achieve can serve as a powerful method of ensuring alignment across your organization.?

Early in my time at Honeywell, I saw this approach yield tremendous success. While working in a division that made pressure switches for thermostats, my boss at the time and our team set out to transform our division by focusing on improving productivity, performance to customers, and employee engagement.?

The operation we oversaw was a perfect storm for potential misalignment – we had to coordinate bilingual teams across six different factories in two different countries with two sets of regulations in two different languages, all while producing 20,000 units per week in a highly competitive market.

In order to avoid misalignment as we embarked on the transformation of our division, we began working side by side with frontline leaders at each site, starting with a first event in which we outlined our objectives and how it would fit into the company’s wider purpose. Next, we began running weekly Kaizen events with each team, in which we taught them about the continuous improvement practices, how you move from identifying a process failure to planning a solution, implementing that solution, checking the results, and course correcting where necessary.

Moreover, we made sure to engage in dialogue with frontline employees to co-develop goals and metrics, which were consistent across all the departments. After establishing these goals, we posted them all on large boards at the entrance of each building and at the end of each assembly line – allowing leaders to track daily progress and reference them at stand-up meetings.?

All of this created alignment and shared language among departments, which in turn gave team members a shared vision and sense of direction; increased motivation and engagement; and built a solid bedrock of trust in the company.

Executive Strategy Leadership Workshop

Learn ways to create sustainable growth for your company, while developing your team, aligning stakeholders to your company’s core mission, and fostering inclusive leadership. Our 2-day Executive Strategy Leadership Workshop features the SUMMi7 signature Business Scaling Method? process developed by Eric Strafel, Founder and CEO, who is a former Fortune 50 Executive and award-winning author of The Frontline CEO.

Reserve your executive workshop session if:

• Your business has 50 or more employees with more than $5 million in annual revenue.
• Your business has experienced barriers to growth.
• Your team lacks alignment on strategic direction and morale is low.

What it includes:

• Pre-work to develop an outside-in perspective of your business, inclusive of market research, customer insights, and employee interviews.
• A 2-day facilitated workshop session for you and the executive members of your team to collaboratively develop a strategic roadmap supported by data and market insights.
• A strategy playbook custom to your company to help you implement your plan with all levels of your team.
• Access to SUMMi7 Chief Growth Office engagements for continued strategic execution support with a team of implementers working side by side with you.

If this sounds like a fit for you and your company or for more information, contact Shelli Howlett at [email protected].

The first 10 companies that register for a workshop will receive signed copies of “The Frontline CEO” for each executive leader in the company.