Four practices for maintaining focus on the front line

MAINTAINING an obsession with the front line – where the company meets the customer – is fundamental to achieving sustainable growth. But as companies get bigger, they have a harder time staying close to their customers. How can leaders of growing companies maintain this essential focus?
Here are four practices that can help you remain focused on the front line:

1. Reach directly down into the organisation:
Spend time on the front line, talking with employees and observing processes. It will help you understand the company and signal to the employees that your interests, theirs and those of the customers all come together where it matters: at the front line.

2. Constantly translate your strategy decisions into front-line routines and behaviours: As a successful company grows and becomes professional, it adds new functions, leaders and staffs. Each new function comes with a new leader and a new staff determined to improve that function, creating disparate agendas that can quickly cause a company to lose focus. Before things spin out of control, ask functional heads of department to focus on two or three things they can do to support your innovative mission – and that mission only.

3. Identify the key players in your organisation and ensure that they are valued as company heroes: ultimately, your most important employees are the ones who do whatever it takes at the front lines to make sure your customers are well served. Do you know who these employees are in your company? Do you have a way of regularly identifying and celebrating them?

4. Give your heroes the authority and resources they need to serve customers better: employees on the front line should be individually responsible for creating value for the customer. Each has the discretion to make decisions as he or she sees fit to make a customer happy.

(Adapted from Maintaining Your Focus on the Front Lines as Your Company Grows at HBR.org)
Harvard Business Review