How I Discovered the Power of Frontline Leadership

How and when did you develop your leadership philosophy? It took me over a decade of observing leaders in action and a book to clarify it.???

I first experienced a flawed approach in action during a hot summer day in 2003 in a refugee camp on the Kosovo border in Southern Serbia. It was bustling with energy. Entrepreneurs everywhere, selling haircuts, and small food vendors competing for customers. However, a large source of income came from selling coal to the local community. Coal that the government kept supplying for UNHCR-provided ovens, except that they only worked with wood. When I spoke to the displaced families, I saw the ovens used as bulky clothing cabinets in their small tents. The staff on the ground had given up any agency. I could not understand why they, the people on the ground, could not make any decisions. In the following decade, I studied and experienced humanitarian and development organizations that made detailed plans and decisions hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the action.?

During my time with Save the Children starting in 2013, I became fascinated with leaders who led with a frontline philosophy, even when most incentive systems would nudge them otherwise. Four of those leaders stood out to me for specific traits:?

Janti Soeripto , whom I first met in 2013, stood out as a role model for leading with a client-focused vision. Regardless of whether you encountered her during a visit to a project in Northern Guatemala or with partners and donors, she would always remind everyone that we are here to deliver for children. She brought discipline to her vision with clear KPIs that ensured everyone focused on the frontline programs and how to support leaders close to them. I remember a tense board meeting in which we debated without much outcome. At the end of the meeting, Janti Soeripto , then the deputy CEO in London, dropped the mic on all of us. She said we should all be dissatisfied with how we showed up for this meeting and urged the Board members to be committed to delivering for children together. Few leaders I have met in this space show such courage in front of the people they report to and fight for a focus on the people on the frontline of serving children.?

David Wright , the Managing Director of Save the Children International, embodies living and breathing a frontline-focused culture more than anyone I’ve met. He’s led humanitarian teams for decades in Gaza, Pakistan, and many other places and has had important life lessons that taught him to value others’ perspectives. As a young student from Ireland, he shared how he was made feel incompetent while hearing frequent jokes about his Irish background while working on farms in England. This experience shaped his understanding as a leader. When he came into his global role after decades of leading work on the ground, he repeated over and over that everyone’s job in this organization was to enable our program operations and advocacy teams to do more and better quality work with more children. This alignment around the frontline mantra began to permeate the culture of a complex federation across different leadership cultures. David Wright ’s leadership and experience would become crucial in helping steer the organization through its pandemic response, impacting more children’s lives than ever before.?

Chet Kuchinad , who grew up under modest circumstances in India and worked his way up to senior HR leadership roles at Nike and Starbucks, obsesses over talent. When he joined Save the Children in 2016, he brought a passion for frontline talent and their autonomy to the organization. From day one, he challenged the entire federation to focus with discipline on how to know, grow, and flow the right leaders from the diverse pool of local talent the organization has in over 120 countries of operation. Chet Kuchinad also gave autonomy and clarity to frontline leaders by defining critical leadership skills and mission-critical roles. This new approach to talent development led to a 20% decrease in voluntary turnover and cost savings of over $15 million within five years. And the number of female leaders from non-OECD countries almost tripled.?

Carolyn Miles , the former CEO of Save the Children US, embodied the principle of “living on the line” to me. In her CEO role, she would spend 40-50 percent of her time on the road, visiting our teams on the ground and the children and their families we serve. Her understanding and connection to the frontline were unmistakable to anyone within the organization. I remember working with her during the 2015 refugee crisis. Carolyn Miles and her team had won over Johnson & Johnson and Facebook to showcase the lives and stories of newly arrived Syrian refugees and broadcast them to millions of people on their feeds. After listening and engaging with every one of my frontline emergency team in the large hangars of Berlin’s former airport field in Tempelhof, Carolyn and I sat outside with a Syrian mother and her two girls. The team had just filmed her story of escape . At the end of the conversation, she began to cry. Carolyn asked her if we had asked the wrong thing. She shook her head and said smiling, "I'm just so grateful that someone listens to me and tells our story!"?

These leaders have helped Save the Children become a more frontline-focused organization by embracing this philosophy and mindset in their roles.?

Yet I only realized how important this mindset and these traits were while reading Chris DeRose and Noel Tichy 's book "Judgment on the Front Line: How Smart Companies Win By Trusting Their People ". Based on decades of on-the-ground consulting work with large companies and organizations across sectors, they found that while most organizations claim that “people are our most important asset”, few have developed methods and the leadership characteristics for systematically building a frontline organization. Even fewer know how to give their frontline leaders a toolkit for problem-solving and innovation and learn from them. Building on case studies of more than a dozen companies from Amazon to Zappos, they developed a toolkit for building a frontline-focused organization and key responsibilities and characteristics that leaders need to embody. The leadership traits of my four Save the Children colleagues are the exact traits DeRose and Tichy have identified as crucial.?

Building a frontline-focused organization is hard work and goes beyond individual leaders. Teaching people to think for themselves, breaking down unnecessary hierarchies, and embedding an experimentation culture, for example, takes time and leadership discipline. However, as DeRose and Tichy show, some well-known companies have figured out decades ago that giving agency and trust to their frontline leaders makes them more successful. It’s worth the effort and it’s a philosophy and approach I believe in deeply. Regardless of the incentive structure or sector, DeRose and Tichy’s advice can help organizations unleash the engagement and creativity needed to make a difference for the people they serve.?