Why Leadership's Decisions Never Reach the Front Line, and the Supervisor Step That Fixes It

Leaders think they have communicated, and nobody checks that they did

The usual gap is not a bad decision. It is an assumption. The executives and vice presidents settle on something, it goes to directors and then to managers, and everyone above the supervisor assumes the last step happened. Leaders spend their days in meetings and on other work, so nobody has first-hand knowledge of what reached the floor. They believe they have communicated it, and they do not verify.

I have seen what that lack of awareness can cost at a company that provides services in people's homes. The gap there ran in both directions. A contact center took the calls from customers who needed something taken care of at home. The work then went to operations, where a dispatch center matched each request to the people and trucks available to roll to the house.

Leadership did not know that hundreds of customer calls a week never matched up with a dispatch. There were issues in the system, and when things were not done correctly a request would hang on the contact center side, or the job would never get carried out in the field. The customer called back, made another appointment, and eventually something got done.

People in different places knew about the problem. Nobody raised it to a level where it would get fixed, and it stayed buried somewhere between the front line and the executives. Customers had an appointment and no truck came. Communication was poor in both directions, down to the front line and back up from it, and that is why leadership did not know.

Our recommendation was for the executives to get out into the field and talk to the people on the front line directly, so that nothing stays buried on the way up.

A rollout status report cannot catch the downward half of this, because it measures what was sent, not what landed. What landed is what an agent says to a customer on Monday morning. From the front line we also hear a related version of the gap: sometimes employees are not told about a policy at all, and the first they hear of it is from a customer. That leaves a customer who knows more than the person on the phone.

A sound decision can pass through five layers and still not arrive

The airline contact center scenario is an example where the policy is invented and the table carries no measured figures. After a storm week, the executive team decides that agents may rebook a stranded customer without a supervisor's sign-off. This is what happens to that decision on its way down, and what the customer gets at the end.

The dashboard's view of the same week: policy published, yes. Announced to all leaders, yes. Every step was done, and the decision still did not arrive, because it stopped at the supervisor with nothing to pass on. (Cascade is the relay from the top down, each layer passing the decision to the next.) The decision was sound. The path was the problem.

Research looks at the same layer. A 2010 study in the Journal of Management Studies, by Yang, Zhang and Tsui, looked at frontline employees, frontline supervisors and middle managers. It found that a middle manager's leadership reaches frontline employees in two ways: directly, and indirectly through the first-line supervisor's own leadership.

Some of our assessments end in a recommendation about the supervisor layer: how leadership uses its supervisors to pass information along.

A decision lands when the supervisor has a place to say it and something to say

A decision that did reach the front line, in one case I know, came from a very operational organization that was upgrading a computer system. That is common in big organizations: an enterprise resource planning system, a financial system or a work management system goes in, and daily work changes around it.

The organization provided bullets of what needed to reach the front line, and it did not have to invent a way to deliver them. It was a well-run organization, and its supervisors already held a daily huddle with their teams, in a fixed format with three standing items:

• Safety. How to be safe that day, including any severe weather warning, and, from time to time, where to evacuate and what to do in a fire.
• The day's job specifics. What the team is going to accomplish today. In manufacturing, that is the day's production volume. In a call center, it is who is working and how many calls to expect on that day of the week. It is also who is on break and when, who the supervisor of the day is and who the lead is to help.
• Company information they need to know. The upgrade bullets went here. Examples are two team members out today because they are helping review the system before it goes live, or other systems that may be down today as a result of the upgrade.

The supervisors were already equipped to do the talking. They only needed the content. Whether the channel was a huddle or an email, it was in place before the decision arrived.

A standing meeting is necessary but not enough. The airline supervisor above had a shift huddle too, and still had only one sentence to say. In the system upgrade case above the slot came with a fixed format, and what went into it arrived as bullets. If your supervisors have no standing huddle, building one comes before the next announcement.

The second thing a supervisor needs is prepared material for huddles and one-on-ones, so that they have something to use and not just a sentence in a meeting. It addresses customer issues. The preparation can be a role play, or a note on what is coming up. It works because it is interactive and keeps people focused on the customer.

The channel is part of the message. Plan the message for each audience: what it is for this group, what they want to hear, and when, how often and by what channel they want to hear it. An email, a text and a town hall reach different people.

Ask the front line, without the boss in the room, whether a decision landed

In an assessment we hold focus groups with front-line reps "without any supervisors there" to find out how well they are supported. We then speak with the first-line supervisors on what they are communicating and what they are driving toward.

You can run a small version yourself. Ask a handful of front-line people, in a room without their supervisor, three questions:

1. What changed this month? Listen for whether the decision comes up without a prompt.
2. What were you told, and by whom? Listen for the form: a huddle, a sheet, a sentence in passing, or nothing.
3. What will you do when a customer asks about it? An answer that starts with checking with the supervisor tells you where it stopped.

Then ask the first-line supervisors what they were handed. If the answers point at a decision of yours that stalled, you can walk it through with both partners in a free CX Review.

In low-performing companies the front line stays quiet, and in high performers it does not

In low-performing organizations the reaction to something new is often "we tried that 10 years ago and it didn't work," so people stay quiet and mind their own business. They do not talk about the customer. They talk about the time they have to spend on the phone and how many emails they have to answer. Ask what the company's strategy is and you may get a blank look.

High performers sound different. People are energetic, and executives who spend time in the contact center and out with the front line are not unusual. The trait nobody puts on a slide is transparency. Top performers are not hiding things, and they are willing to help others.

Check what people are rewarded for, and put leaders on the floor every week

We define culture as what is rewarded and punished in an organization. Before a decision goes out, check whether it shows up in pay plans, bonuses and job performance objectives. On the front line, check whether people are rewarded for providing a good customer experience, or whether it is even considered in their jobs. A vendor contract that paid per call taken shows how a reward can undo a message, and the full story of that per-call contract is in our earlier article.

The leader's half of the fix is the first thing we hand clients: directors and above listen to live or recorded customer calls every week, just to hear the actual voice of the customer. Where service happens somewhere other than the phone, leaders go there instead. It has to be weekly, not a once-a-year "Easter Sunday type thing", and it changes how a leader behaves. In the strong companies, senior people out on the floor are never a shock to anyone, and that is the tell.

The same gap runs upward, and it closes the same way

Front lines often give up on telling leaders what they need, and in poor performers people say they have never seen a vice president or a director on the floor. In the home-services company, people in several places knew about the unmatched calls, and the knowledge went nowhere. Front lines and supervisors have messages they want to send up the chain, and part of the work in an assessment is carrying them.

That gap closes the way the downward one does, with something specific in hand and proof that it arrived. When people give feedback and nothing happens, they see that it provides no value and they stop giving it. So when you collect the front line's view, say back what you heard and what happens next.

You can do a lot of this yourself, and an outside party still helps

The weekly listening, the prepared huddle material and the round of questions with the front line need no special tools, and a company can start all three this month. A company "should be able to do things themselves," and we say so.

It is still good to have outside help, because people inside have vested interests to protect and tend to steer things a certain way. We compare it to internal audit and the external auditor: both can spot things, and the outside one brings experience from many other clients. That is how our change management work runs: we lead the change alongside your team, then hand it over.

Before the next announcement, write down five answers

1. Who tells the supervisors, and in what form. A named person, a format and the standing meeting it goes into, not a line saying leadership will cascade it.
2. What the supervisor will say when an agent asks.
3. What people are rewarded on today. If the old behavior is still what pays, the new one competes with it.
4. How you will hear that it landed. Pick the person, the room and the question before you announce.
5. How the front line will hear that you heard them. Silence after feedback ends the feedback.

In practice it comes to this: a decision reaches the front line when the supervisor receives it in a form they can say out loud, and when someone checks that they did. Give supervisors a standing slot and prepared material, ask the front line what landed, and have leaders listen to customers every week.