Who is a frontline manager

Before beginning to look at what specific skills these managers need, we will start by looking at the numbers. The Harvard Business Review conducted a survey on whether frontline managers are given the leadership tools they need to succeed. The results were astounding. These numbers further highlight how important it is for organizations to make significant investments in their frontline leaders.

These are the people who directly connect with consumers and employees, and can have a major impact on your bottom line. Room for improvement was shown as needed in vital leadership capacities such as strategic and innovative thinking, developing talent and inspirational leadership.

When there is leadership development for these managers, it tends to be ad hoc, sporadic or too brief to sufficiently cover all the responsibilities of modern-day frontline managers.

Now that you are convinced about why leadership development is so important for frontline managers, what specific skills do they need? Versatility: Frontline managers need to be able to keep up with the ever-developing technological and business changes that occur in every organization. The ability to learn quickly from experiences and then turn around and use that knowledge to recognize, analyze and address new problems gives frontline managers the learning agility to deal with a variety of problems.

Communication: Frontline managers need to communicate with people at all levels in the organization. These managers acquire knowledge daily that any level of the company could need, whether employees, executives, or those in the c-suite. In addition, frontline managers need to be able to communicate their goals and expectations to those who report to them. Ability to Set Attainable Goals: Leaders need to know what is important not only to their department, but the overall organization, and why.

In addition, there will be times when supervisors must inspire and guide team members to exceed expectations or put in extra effort or time — without financial incentives.

Effective supervisors are able to accomplish goals by influencing the actions, decisions, and thinking of others. The ability to build relationships and collaborate with other frontline supervisors across the organization is critical — especially when implementing strategic initiatives that are directed from executive leadership.

Managing internal stakeholders and navigating organizational politics to achieve goals are key competencies for frontline supervisors. Supervisors who understand their own strengths, weaknesses, biases, and working styles are better equipped to influence and interact effectively with their own team — and colleagues — who have different working styles and personalities.

As a leader on the frontline, you need to be able to communicate well with your manager, but also with your direct reports, customers, and stakeholders. Effective communication requires both empathy and assertiveness, especially when managing diverse teams. To do this effectively, training and practice is needed. Part of being a great leader and coach is providing team members with ongoing, meaningful feedback to objectively communicate what employees are doing well and what needs to be worked on.

Everyone wants to know their work matters, understand what is required of them, be recognized for their efforts, and be treated with understanding and respect. Frontline supervisors are traditionally promoted from functional roles where the focus is on a singular job task.

No longer individual contributors responsible for their own performance, newly-minted frontline supervisors must direct and manage the performance of others as well as their own. With a new role comes new challenges: How do you problem-solve on the fly?

How do you handle conflicts involving your staff, suppliers, or contractors? At one point, for example, it became clear that our improvement efforts were falling behind schedule. Everybody had a theory about why this was happening, but I wanted to know what the supervisors thought. As they understood it, their job was to make sure production targets were met. So the CEO Biweekly group came up with a new policy that was widely communicated and reinforced: Engineering improvements were as high a priority as production—and the schedulers had to work with the improvement teams to manage the trade-off between those two goals, not just optimize one.

Here, too, the CEO who leads through the front has a crucial role to play as champion and chief motivator. Lead times are long, and failure rates are high. Because the recipients of human growth hormone are children, device technology is important: The less intrusive and painful the mechanism for delivering the drug, the better.

The prototype was a penlike device with a spring-loaded needle that allowed for a quick injection. But there was some concern because using the device required injecting the drug into the belly, which children might find scary.

The moment I was handed the saline-filled prototype, I proceeded to inject myself. In part, I was gathering data. I realized, for instance, that the injection could be administered so easily and so quickly that it would be over before most children had even focused on it.

But I was also sending a message. The people standing around me were startled to see the CEO engage in such a visceral way. They understood that I really felt the issue was important.

Researchers at Organon had developed a medication called asenapine that showed promise for treating bipolar disease and schizophrenia.

The company had licensed the product to Pfizer, but the compound had been languishing in late-stage trials for years. In October , Pfizer had walked away from the drug. But in getting to know the researchers who had developed asenapine, I was impressed by their commitment to creating drugs to combat serious mental disease, a major area of unmet medical need.

Their determination made me think the drug just might have a future—but only if they put their all into getting the compound approved. I told them that patients suffering from mental disease were counting on them. Eventually, they were able to resolve the obstacles keeping asenapine from final approval, and today it is one of the few new medications that have been approved in the United States for use with patients suffering from bipolar disease or schizophrenia.

And when it comes to sharing information, leading through the front is an open system. It is not permissible for anyone to use the chain of command to hold on to—let alone hide—information that ought to be shared. At the same time, however, you should never use the information you get from frontline managers to discipline or punish their bosses.

The response should always be at the level of company policy, not individual performance. Never use the information you learn from frontline managers to discipline or punish their bosses. In the course of working through the problems facing our manufacturing operation at Schering-Plough, I got to know a number of manufacturing supervisors who were informal leaders in their plants.

I treated these shop-floor influencers as my eyes and ears in our manufacturing operations. I went out of my way to develop personal relationships with them. I told my administrative assistant to put through their calls no matter what I happened to be doing. I even gave some of them my personal cell-phone number. One evening, I got a call at home from one of these supervisors. Our senior manufacturing executives had recently made a decision to shift production of one of the drugs made in his plant to a facility in Canada.

The supervisor had called to tell me that, in an effort to save money, the plant manager had decided not to purchase an important piece of equipment necessary to keep up with state-of-the-art quality-assurance standards. The supervisor was worried that the decision would compromise our new emphasis on high quality. Frankly, I agreed with him.

After all, we were also emphasizing the efficient use of capital throughout the company. I could see how, from his perspective, the decision to move the production line might look like a good opportunity to save on his capital expenditures. Still, if the savings were going to compromise quality, even temporarily, then the decision was a bad one. Instead of going directly to the plant manager, I worked with my senior management team to establish a new company policy: As long as a manufacturing plant was responsible for producing a specific drug, it was required to invest in the production line—right up to the moment the drug was transferred to a different site.

In the end, far from opposing the empowerment of frontline management, the other management ranks at Schering-Plough came to welcome it. Over the course of the past year, more and more organizations have started to recognize the value that frontline leaders provide to their business. And that expanded role calls for frontline managers who are also leaders.

This means that frontline managers must not just have a well-developed managerial skillset, but a well-honed strategic mindset as well. Life at the center of everything Why is the role of frontline manager so crucial? Challenging times on the front lines Life on the front lines is one of unprecedented challenge.