A retail manager responsible for more than $80 million in annual revenue, an airline manager who oversees a yearly passenger volume worth more than $160 million, a banking manager who deals with upward of seven million questions from customers a year. These aren't executives at a corporate headquarters; they are the hidden--yet crucial--managers of frontline employees.  Found in almost any company, such managers are particularly important in industries with distributed networks of sites and employees. These industries--for instance, infrastructure, travel and logistics, manufacturing, health care and retailing (including food service and retail banking)--make up more than half of the global economy. Their district or area managers, store managers, site or plant managers, and line supervisors direct as much as two-thirds of the workforce and are responsible for the part of the company that typically defines the customer experience. Yet most of the time, these managers operate as cogs in a system, with limited flexibility in decision making and little room for creativity.  In a majority of the companies we've encountered, the frontline manager's role is merely to oversee a limited number of direct reports, often in a "span breaking" capacity, relaying information from executives to workers. Such managers keep an eye on things, enforce plans and policies, report operational results and quickly escalate issues or problems. In other words, a frontline manager is meant to communicate decisions, not to make them; to ensure compliance with policies, not to use judgment or discretion (and certainly not to develop policies); and to oversee the implementation of improvements, not to contribute ideas or even implement improvements (workers do that).  This system makes companies less productive, less agile and less profitable, our experience shows. Change is possible, however. At companies that have successfully empowered their frontline managers, the resulting flexibility and productivity generate strong financial returns. One convenience store retailer, for example, reduced hours worked by 19% to 25% while increasing sales by almost 10%. It achieved this result by halving the time store managers spent on administration; restructuring their work (and that of their employees) to focus on the areas most relevant to customers, such as the cleanliness of stores and upselling efforts at the cash register; and creating easy-to-understand performance metrics that managers now had enough time to coach employees on daily.  The key is a shift to frontline managers who have the time--and the ability--to address the unique circumstances of their specific stores, plants, or mines; to foresee trouble and stem it before it begins; and to encourage workers to seek out opportunities for self-improvement. In difficult economic times, making employees more productive is even more crucial than it is ordinarily.  The Reality of the Front Line To unlock a team's abilities, a manager at any level must spend a significant amount of time on two activities: helping the team understand the company's direction and its implications for team members and coaching for performance. Little of either occurs on the front line today. Across industries, frontline managers spend 30% to 60% of their time on administrative work and meetings, and 10% to 50% on non-managerial tasks (traveling, participating in training, taking breaks, conducting special projects, or undertaking direct customer service or sales themselves). They spend only 10% to 40% actually managing frontline employees by, for example, coaching them directly.  For the complete article, click here.
Instead of administrative work and meetings, they should focus on coaching their employees and on constantly improving quality.