Your front line team.
It’s where the rubber meets the road, where your C-Suite strategies are executed, and where your brand becomes a face to your customer.
Without a doubt, it’s one of your most critical and valuable resources in making sure your business plans are executed.
So, how good are you at leading that team?
A must-have leadership tool
Let’s say you have all the characteristics of strong leadership. You have a reputation built on integrity and credibility. You are a team player who strives for excellence day in and day out. And, you are able to create a compelling vision that inspires people to achieve your business goals.
But how do you get people to follow you when your business goals are distant from their day-to-day concerns? When following you may require that they make sacrifices to help you achieve your goals?
Whether you are already in the C-Suite, or hope to get there someday, the ability to lead the front-line team effectively is a critical skill for leadership success. It’s a skill that does not appear often in the leadership literature and that I was fortunate to learn along my own leadership journey, and that I wanted to share with you.
Make your leadership personal
It’s tough for people to care about your business goals when you don’t care enough to fix their issues.
That’s where leadership needs to become personal. Before people will follow you along a difficult path you have to respect them, listen to them, and let them know that you are going to take care of their issues first.
If you are able to do that, your front line will take care of your customers and they’ll help you succeed.
She fixed the gate
Earlier in my career I placed a young female executive in what was then a non-traditional job: general manager of a telecommunications operation. As if that wasn’t tough enough, she was replacing one of the most respected general managers we had ever had: a man who had been on the job for a number of years.
So you can imagine my surprise when I checked in with her team 90 days later and they all said: “She’s the best general manager we’ve ever had.”
I was amazed. Here was a young person in a non-traditional job without the experience of the legend she was replacing, and in a short period of time managing to turn around a seasoned team of professionals.
When I asked them what made her so good, they answered: “She fixed the gate.”
Here’s the context. These employees worked in an inner-city location that was protected with a barb-wired fence. Unfortunately, the gate did not function well and the team didn’t feel safe. They had mentioned this situation before but it had not been corrected.
Enter our new general manager. As soon as she hears of the problem and senses the team’s frustration that no one cared enough about them to fix the gate, she turns around and fixes it.
Suddenly, the team thinks she walks on water. From then on, they would do anything to help her succeed. And, in fact, she had a very successful tenure in that assignment.
Take care of your people first
Every manager worth his or her salt realizes that employees have families, personal lives and concerns beyond work. Yet sometimes, when an emergency threatens the business, a manager’s first instinct is to worry about customers.
But in those cases they’re forgetting something: the pressing needs of the employees who need to take care of those customers.
Living through the reconstruction of South Florida’s telecommunications network after Hurricane Andrew, the most destructive hurricane to hit U.S. soil at the time, I saw employees paralyzed in shock by the damage to their own homes and the devastation to their own lives. We had to make special arrangements to take care of the impacted employees before we could count on them to help us restore service.
That taught me that the best disaster-recovery plan needs to include a provision to take care of the employees who have been personally impacted by the disaster, so that they can take care of your customers.
I hoped I would never have to live through a similar situation again. But I did 13 years later when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and I was the COO of Cingular Wireless.
This time we had prepared for the hurricane record-setting seasons of 2004 and 2005 with a disaster-recovery plan that incorporated the prior learnings and had an added layer of preparedness: taking care of our employees first.
So, when Katrina hit, we had a much better system to track employees and their status. We had a system in place for getting water, ice and fuel for them. We put up our own tent city—complete with food, diapers, washing machines, baby-sitters and peanut butter for the kids—where our employees whose homes had been damaged were able to stay as long as they needed.
Once employees knew we were going to take care of their fundamental living needs, they were eager to refocus on work. Cingular’s network was restored much faster than if our people had to fend for themselves. And that, in turn, brought a big lift to a community that depended on our wireless service.
Here’s the lesson: When disaster hits, put your people first. Before people can go out and fix the storm damages you have to help them take care of their own families.
That’s the surest way to take care of your customers and get the business back and running as fast as possible.
In fact, I believe that’s the only way.
On a personal note
I will never forget a lady who worked in the call center near the tent city. She came up to our CEO Stan Sigman and me and asked us if she could bring her grandmother to the tent city. We said, sure, of course. Right then and there she started to cry in relief and gratitude. Her house had been blown away. She couldn’t take one more thing going wrong.
It was personally satisfying to help her and so many other Cingular employees during such an incredibly difficult time. But that’s not the only time when the lesson applies. It applies every day.
Take care of your people first and they’ll take care of your customers.
