“If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.” -- Dr. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Learning cannot be disassociated from action.” -- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

“The most important measures are both unknown and unknowable.” -- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis

Back on the Front Lines by Kevin McManus

First published in Industrial Magazine September 2001

Back in 1993, I, like many others in business at the time, was part of a restructuring event. In essence, the company I was with had decided to eliminate its Industrial Engineering positions at the plant level (along with other positions), and I in turn had a choice. I could be reassigned as a Production Manager, or I could look for a new job. Needless to say, I took the reassignment.

I had wanted to fill that type of role anyway for the past five years or so. When I took the job however, I was totally unaware of the true learning that I would take away from the next two years as a member of front line management. You see, I had worked in office (management) positions for the first twelve years of my career. While I had been in the type of job that required me to interface with people and processes on the front lines, I had not had a front line job. At that time, I really did not think that it would be that different. Boy, was I wrong.

The front lines are called the front lines for a reason. Nothing is wasted on the use of the military analogy and all of the sounds and images that it conjures up. If you have personally worked on the front lines in a manufacturing plant, at a call center, or in a restaurant, you know what I mean. The two worlds of work are very different, and there are some significant lessons to be learned from those differences. Such learnings would end up serving me well in the years to come.

More than anything else, you notice a heightened sense of stress and pressure on the front lines. The work is always coming at you – you do not have the luxury of escaping to the break room, the restroom, or your office when things get a little (or a lot) crazy. Instead, you have stand there and take on the work. The people there may make the job look easy, even when things are not necessarily going that well, but every day is a challenge. Sometimes the challenges have been seen before, and other times they are new. The key distinction to note here is that you have to stand there and take whatever comes your way, at least until your first official break of the day comes.

The front lines are also where the money is made each day. In you are in a service industry, you are interfacing with the customer on an almost continual basis. If you are working on an assembly line, your daily efforts directly affect the quality and cost of the product. You are a direct cost, and as such, the fruits of your effort are readily visible. That is the most positive thing about working on the front lines – there is not a struggle to determine if you really are adding value to the product or service you are associated with.

I chose to share these thoughts and learnings with you for a simple reason. I recently made the decision to return to the world of manufacturing as a Production Manager. I could have continued to work with people primarily in the training rooms, board rooms, offices, and hotel conference rooms of America , but the lure of the front lines was too great. I wanted to be back where it was easier to tell if I was making a difference or not.

This attraction was only increased by the fact that for the past seven years I had been teaching others how to be great front line managers and supervisors, even though I was no longer working in that capacity myself. In other words, I would have the opportunity to ‘practice' what I had been ‘preaching.' In addition to gauging my personal value on the job, I would also have the chance to try out a lot of the new tools, techniques, and concepts that I had been writing, speaking, and otherwise teaching people about.

As you read this, I am hoping that you are looking at your own personal perceptions of the front lines. In general, I feel that this type of work is taken for granted. I think we discount what it is like to ‘restricted' to a three by three square of floor space for a majority of the workday. I think we fail to appreciate the luxury of being able to go to a relatively quieter place when things begin to get a little crazy. I think we often lose sight of the degree to which we are personally adding value to our organizations each day.

This is not to say that filling a management role away from the front lines is not hard, a daily challenge, or something that causes stress. There are challenges and stress in any job, but there is also something to be said for the ability to roam the halls during the day, to sit in air conditioning for most of your working hours (or simply just to be able to sit), and to take a few minutes for casual conversation at the start or end of a meeting. The jobs are different, and finding and exploring distinctions between work systems is one of the keys to learning more about each of them.

You might also argue that people chose to do the type of work they do, and to make the decisions that they make that lead to filling different roles in life. While this is true, we cannot deny that both types of work are needed, and that both types need to be highly value added. The challenges lie in learning to appreciate the type of work that each group performs, continually search for additional ways to add value as we perform our own jobs, and work together to identify system changes that will make work a better place for all of us, and our product or service better for our customers.

I like working on the front lines, but it is definitely a different world than the one I experienced as an industrial engineer, a Director of Quality, a trainer, or a consultant. It is a world that I thought I understood back when I was filling those roles, even though no amount of reflection, listening, empathy, or insight can actually take the place of doing the job itself. Unfortunately, some of us may not have such an opportunity, at least in the near future. If that is the case for you, please give some thought to the ideas and perspectives that I mentioned above. If you do, I think you will find that they will definitely help you build stronger relationships and get better results when you are interfacing with others on the front.

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