Management Insights

Unlocking The Potential of Frontline Managers

Frontline, or supervisory, managers are critical to the success of most organizations. They are responsible for the execution of strategy and direct up to two-thirds of the workforce. They are frequently responsible for activities that define the customer experience. However, the potential of frontline managers is often wasted. This makes companies less productive, less flexible, and less profitable.

The key difference between good and bad frontline managers is how they spend their time. Effective managers spend between 60 and 70 percent of their time on the floor providing hands-on support and individual coaching. Unfortunately, the majority of frontline managers only spend between 10 and 40 percent of their time doing this. They commonly spend 30 to 60 percent of their time on administrative work and meetings, and 10 to 50 percent on other non-managerial tasks such as travel or manual labor.

In my experience, there are two key reasons for this critical difference in how frontline managers spend their time.

1. Skills

The traditional view of frontline management was merely to oversee a limited number of direct reports, often in a passive "span breaking" capacity. Frontline managers were meant to communicate decisions, not make them; ensure compliance, not contribute ideas; and to oversee implementation, not to use judgement or discretion. In an attempt to change this, many organizations have tried to empower their frontline managers, with mixed results. In many cases, frontline managers lack the necessary skills or experience required in their new role. The largely technical skills that had seen them promoted from the floor are not the skills required as a frontline manager. Lacking the necessary skills - such as team building, problem solving, and coaching - they often feel insecure and exposed. Rather than providing hands-on management they busy themselves doing the work they should be supervising or finding reasons to hide in their office.

2. Bureaucracy

Many frontline managers are overwhelmed by unnecessary bureaucracy and needlessly complex paperwork. There are reports to be generated, plans to be created, and meetings to be attended. Much of this administrative burden is a hangover from the days of top-down management when senior managers made all of the decisions and needed to be kept informed of everything. Unfortunately, most organizations are very good at adding layers of administration but very poor at eliminating them. As a result, frontline managers are often occupied with the busy work of administration rather then the value-adding work of hands-on management.

So what should you do to unlock the potential of your frontline managers? Firstly, help them develop the skills to be successful through a combination of training, coaching, and peer feedback. Secondly, help them eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and reduce the complexity of administrative systems.

Dispelling Management Myths

John F. Kennedy said, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Unfortunately, many management principles are falsely premised and are nothing more than enduring myths. While they might provide comfort to managers looking for simple answers to complex issues, they often fail to stand up to rigorous analysis. With this in mind, here is a brief selection of common management myths:

1. Management is modular

A manager from any given industry or discipline should be capable of managing any enterprise. If this were true, a winning football coach should be able to successfully switch to coaching basketball. This argument fails to recognize that management is contextual and underestimates the value of tacit knowledge and accumulated experience.

2. Bigger is always better

Economies of scale can be achieved by consolidating operations and business units. If this were true, the majority of mergers and acquisitions would have created value instead of destroying it, as they have. Beyond a surprising small scale, transaction costs - the costs of communication, coordination, and decision making - outweigh any other potential improvements.

3. Money is a valuable motivational tool

If someone is not performing, paying them more money will motivate them to improve. If this were true, performance should increase after every pay raise or bonus. In reality, people leave high-paying jobs if they are unfulfilled by their work or dislike their co-workers. Money is only a motivator at the margin once all other needs have been met.

4. Organizations need charismatic leaders

The leaders of successful companies are charismatic, inspirational individuals. Jim Collins' research in Good To Great demonstrated that the leaders of the most successful businesses demonstrated a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They were characterized by their humility, modesty, resolve, and determination.

Myths arise out of our desire to distill the essence of management into a few simple universal principles. This is intellectually appealing since it produces simple and seemingly logical explanations. However, there is just one problem: people are complex and irrational. If the purpose of management is to create value by organizing and motivating people to work together to perform a task, then it is unlikely that one approach will work for everybody. However, we routinely fall into the trap of believing that just because something worked once, it should work all of the time in any situation. In reality, management is contextual and relies heavily on experience and judgment. Management is as much an art as it is a science, perhaps more so.

Practical Autonomy and the Roman Empire

Why did the Roman Empire grow so large and survive for so long? The Roman Empire lasted for 500 years in the west and then continued as the Byzantine Empire for another 1000 years in the east. At its peak the Roman Empire controlled approximately 6,500,000 square kilometers. There are few businesses today that could manage such a sprawling and diverse undertaking for so long without collapsing under their own weight.

From In Search of Excellence: "One reason the Roman empire grew so large and survived so long - a prodigious feat of management - is that there was no railway, airplane, car, radio, telephone. Above all, no telephone. And therefore you could not maintain any illusion of direct control over a general or provincial governor, you could not feel at the back of your mind that you could ring him up, or he could ring you, if a situation cropped up which was too much for him, or that you could fly over and sort things out if they started to get into a mess. You appointed him, you watched his chariot and baggage train disappear over the hill in a cloud of dust and that was that ... There was, therefore, no question of appointing a man who was not fully trained, or not quite up to the job: you knew that everything depended on his being the best man for the job before he set off. And so you took great care in selecting him; but more than that you made sure that he knew all about Rome and Roman government and the Roman army before he went out."

The key, it seems, was pushing autonomy to the lowest practical level. There is evidence that organizations that do this are able to be big but act small at the same time. Furthermore, people thrive when they perceive themselves as somewhat autonomous and demonstrate greater commitment when they are given discretion in how they do things. However, simply pronouncing that individuals have been granted autonomy is a formula for chaos, as the failure of many workplace empowerment initiatives have demonstrated. So how are we to give people practical autonomy?

The most important pre-requisite is a rigidly shared value system. Everyone must understand and be aligned with the organization's purpose and goals - why the organization exists and what its priorities are. Once the why and the what are clear, individuals should be allowed to exercise judgment and creativity in how things are done. Discipline around shared values provides a framework and gives people confidence to experiment based on stable expectations about what really counts.

Managers also need to demonstrate tough-minded respect for individuals by establishing clear accountabilities and mutually high-expectations. The organization should support this though frequent peer-reviews and a willingness to train, open dialogue and the sharing of goals, targets and performance measures, and by eliminating unnecessary complexity from centralized processes, systems, and organization structures.

The most difficult step for many managers is then giving-up the illusion of control by allowing individuals the freedom to do their work as they see fit, and then accepting the resulting messiness, overlap, and duplication.

The Romans may not have had much choice in how they managed given the practical constraints of the time. Today, we do have a choice. By establishing shared values and clear expectations we can provide the framework in which practical autonomy can be effective.

Complexity At Starbucks

In a previous post I explained that not all complexity is bad. Complexity resulting from the proliferation of products and services can be good when the customer values it and are willing to reward a company for it. Consequently, businesses must eliminate any complexity that their customers do not value. They must then find a way to either reduce the cost of the remaining complexity or capture its value by charging their customers more for it. So it was interesting to note that Starbucks recently announced that it is to raise the price of complex drinks and cut the costs of simple ones.

Complexity: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

We have all experienced the ugly side of complexity: angry customers shouting at customer service representatives, frustrated employees complaining to management, and disappointed share-holders perplexed why returns failed to meet expectations. We are also familiar with the bad things that can arise from complexity: additional layers of supervision and oversight, excess inventory and work-in-process, and unnecessary duplication and redundancy across processes and systems. When confronted with complexity, our knee-jerk reaction is to assume it is bad and to eliminate it.

However, not all complexity is bad. Does anyone seriously think that a business can grow by reducing the number of products or services they offer, or by reducing their footprint and the number of markets they compete in, or by reducing the number of customers they serve? Of course not. Complexity resulting from the proliferation of products, services, and customers can be good when the customer values it and are are willing to reward a company for it. For instance, Starbucks grew by increasing complexity and providing customers what they wanted, where they wanted it - at the beginning of 2008 they offered over 87,000 possible drink combinations in each of their 15,756 locations. However, by the end of that year, it became clear that customers no longer valued this complexity and Starbucks was forced to reduce the number of products it offered and shutter many of its locations.

Complexity is neither good nor bad when considered in isolation. It can only be determined by considering customer needs and the value it adds. The challenge for management is to identify and exploit good complexity, and where possible eliminate bad complexity from their businesses.