Member-only story
Front line leadership is often defined as “where the company meets the customer.” Oftentimes, your front line leadership is also your middle management — and that’s not necessarily a good thing. (More on that in a second.) If a company reaches $5 billion in valuation, it typically has between 9–14 levels of management between the CEO and the most rank-and-file worker. That’s a lot of levels and, in turn, a lot of front line leadership.
You need your front line leadership to be effective, because ideally that’s the level where this stuff happens:
- The trains keep moving
- There’s an alignment between “strategy” and “day-to-day tasks”
- Projects are polished before being kicked up to the brass
If you’ve ever had a standard office job for 12 seconds, you know that middle management is one of the least productive slices of a given organization. It’s mostly chest-pounding, relevance-seeking, KPI-yelping, hiding-behind-technology ass clowns topped off with a “sense of urgency” cherry. The amount of real, priority-driven work assigned to you by most middle managers (“front line leadership”) plus $2.25 could get you on the subway in most cities. Phrased another way? None. It’s mostly “Hey, you’re here and a warm body. Can you call my dry cleaners and make sure I can pick up today?” (Saw that at…
