For frontline managers and executives, performance is fairly straightforward. Good judgement, strategic skills, creating something new, tactical skills, and personal drive dominate it according to “The Leadership Machine” authors Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger.
Promotion is another matter entirely. While it has a strong ‘getting work out’ element, relationships, networking and learning agility largely determines who gets ahead.
What’s really interesting is what gets frontline managers and executives fired.
For frontline managers, low ratings in approachability, patience, managing diversity, managing and measuring work and organising have people shown the door.
For executives it is low ratings in comfort around higher management, peer relationships, drive for results, functional/technical skills and managing strategy; along with high ratings in defensiveness, political missteps and failure to staff effectively.
Lack of ethics and values is a big no-no at all levels of leadership.
In my experience many organisations want their frontline leaders to:
- increase productivity and performance
- ensure a greater retention of key talent
- improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
- and maximise employee engagement/motivation
To achieve this I believe the key difference between frontline leaders and senior leaders is this. Frontline leaders need to act tactically, while senior leaders need to act strategically. A simple story attributed to Steven Covey clearly illustrates the difference.
A group of loggers is busy chopping away doing great work under the supervision of their frontline managers, and achieving high productivity and throughput. Someone from a mountain overlooking the forest notices something and shouts, “Hey you down there.”
In reply, he hears the response, “We’re busy and we’re making great progress”. The person yells back, “Wrong forest!”
Strategy is about taking action to figure out and communicate which is the right forest to chop down. That’s the role of senior leaders.
Tactics is about getting people to work productively and get the work done. That’s the role of frontline leaders.
While there is some basic commonality between frontline leadership and senior leadership, senior leaders get promoted for certain abilities that aren’t necessarily required of frontline leaders, they get fired for different things, and their role is fundamentally different.
Yet, perhaps astonishingly, some organisations insist on implementing ‘one size fits all’ leadership training where frontline leaders and senior leaders are trained in exactly the same concepts and skill sets. From both a Return on Investment and organisational effectiveness perspective such an approach is a surprising misstep.