Leading From The Front

Don't look back.

Leading from the front means leading where the action is happening.

Here we’ll talk about three critical aspects of leading from the front:

• Why you should do it

• Finding the front

• Leading when you’re there

Why you should do it

Leading from the front is important for two main reasons:

• It makes you a more effective leader

• It motivates your team

Learning from the front

First, leading from the front makes you a more effective leader because you learn from the front.

Being on the front lines - in the incidents, in the customer calls, in the meltdowns - gets you critical information with first-hand knowledge. There’s a major difference between “an engineer made a Jira ticket that I saw that said this was an important incident followup” and “I saw this happen and if we don’t do this followup we deserve to fail. It’s not a question - we’re doing it.”

But it not only gives you the information, it also gives you the motivation. Being woken up at 3am, or having a $1M customer scream at you, catalyzes action like few other things can. Leading from the front gives you the literal incentive and neurological shock to overcome the forces of inertia, politeness, and busy-ness that normally hinder action.

Motivating from the front

Second, effort is contagious.

Most people will try really hard as long as they know there’s at least one person who will storm the hill, who will go into oncoming fire and spit bullets back at the enemy.

The problem with large organizations is that those people often get promoted and then stuck in meetings all day. They’re no longer on the frontlines. They might swoop in to help, but that’s not the same as being in the foxhole.

This is why leading from the front is so important. You literally just need one single leader with general stripes who is in the foxhole with the team saying I ain’t going nowhere. I have nothing more important than fighting with you.

That’s the difference between a motivated org and a disengaged org. Somebody who has authority and power is in the stuff with you.

You might say - but everyone is incentivized to try hard, why do we need this? Incentives are necessary but only go so far. In fact, they don’t cover two critical cases.

The first case is collective action. I might be incentivized to try hard, but if my whole team is phoning it in, I don’t believe my efforts are worth it. But if a leader comes in and gets these bozos to rise to the occasion, I’m ready to charge the hill. Nobody wants to be the hardest worker on the last place team.

The second is that you can only unlock the higher order gears like professional pride, duty, and honor with the moral authority of putting yourself on the line. Yeah, I’ll try hard enough if I’m incentivized. But if there’s a leader out here who looks just as intense at 5 hours into this incident as they were 5 minutes in, with no inkling of quit in them, if there’s someone who is just hardwired to never give up, I can sprint.

This is why coaches matter.

Finding The Front

To be that contagion, to lead from the front, the most important thing is that your leadership is predictable and consistent.

Most leaders think that the most important thing is that they are reachable if things get bad enough. While this is a worthy goal, it regularly and quickly falls apart.

A leader says “if things get bad enough, call me, page me, I’ll come running”. And when the leader says that, they mean it. But then that leader:

• Goes to a dinner with new investors that absolutely must go well

• Has an all week onsite with a partner company where they absolutely must finish the integration while they’re in San Jose

• Goes to a conference to speak and will be out of pocket for at least 8 hours

Quickly you find that even though that leader genuinely wants to help when things get bad, they’re simply too busy.

The right away to lead from the front is to be predictable and consistent. There’s a lot of ways to do this, but this can look like:

• I have an operational standup every other day. I never miss it twice in a row. Ever.

• I will not do big blocking events more than one or two weeks per quarter.

This is what committing to leading from the front looks like. It means a commitment to being present.

When your team is sinking under the weight of a terrible incident, if they know they can count on you, whether it’s to join and help solve the incident or first the next morning to make sure people mobilize to never have it happen again, it gives them the drive to finish the incident.

Being present and consistent as a leader requires calendar discipline and personal endurance. Not every leader should lead from the front. It’s impractical given the requirements. But if no leader is leading from the front, your team will flounderx when times get really hard.

Note that not every role can be on the front with these time requirements. That’s ok. It’s important to be clear if you can actually commit to leading from the front. It doesn’t make you less good at your job to admit this.

Some leaders might also say - hey traveling and being out of pocket is the front lines, isn’t it? Well yes, it is, but it’s often just a different front line than the one your team is on. Some generals need to go to Washington to secure funding. They’re just as important - if not more - than the frontline generals. The problem arises if the general in Washington believes they’re both (and doesn’t find someone to man the front).

Finally, it’s important to note that some vocations simply have more battles than others. Sales and engineering are fighting constantly. Design and Marketing have lots of battles, but not quite as many. Leaders can scale their frontline leadership to be appropriate to their vocation.

Leading At the Front

Ok, you’ve decided to lead from the front, you’ve actually set yourself up to be able to do it and be there. Here’s how to lead when you’re there.

First, you have to know what you’re doing. Most leaders avoid leading from the front by never investing enough to actually know what to do when they’re there. To lead from the front you must be ready when the battle starts with skills that matter. These include:

• Coordinating resources to drive outcomes. Most proverbial battles involve multiple-stakeholders and a specific outcome - a sale, an incident, a decision. Organizing stakeholders to decide and deliver outcomes is the core of almost every activity on the front.

• Basic debugging skills. Whether it’s technical debugging, or product behavior, or the intricacies of pricing and packaging - knowing enough to drive an outcome is essential.

This is why it’s so important for engineering managers to go on-call - to learn the basics of how to debug in a system. It’s why it’s important for, for example, design leaders to use and test the products under their remit.

To learn to coordinate resources you must simply do it. Shirking away from hard product decisions, or arbitrating disagreements, or late night incidents will only entrench your lack of ability. Confidence in how to wrangle people, how to organize thought and action, and how to drive next steps is only learned from experience.

Second, your demeanor must be poised and determined and urgent. If you enter an incident hysterical or say “how the hell did this happen”, you are a distraction. Go fly a kite. Instead, your presence must imbue the team with a sense of “it does not matter how we got here. We will fix this and I will be here until we do.”

You must also, critically, have the energy. One of the most common things to fail at in frontline leadership is giving up too early. We’ve already been at this for 8 hours, do we really need to dot this i and cross this t. In incidents small and large, if you leave an ember burning you will be woken up by another fire. As a leader, you likely won’t be in the deep deep weeds. Your job is to make sure that people don’t give up before the fire is out. Your job is to be measured and calm, while being urgent and intense. You will not quit and you will not yell. Inhabiting this duality is one of the most powerful skills of leadership.

Finally, you must follow through. You must make sure the things that caused this fire drill will never happen again. Lots of people can help out when things fail, but to have the grit to follow up on the root causes and drive the change to prevent recurrence in a super-power.

If you can put all of these together, you will be a great leader.

Summary

Most people will not lead from the front. They won’t learn what’s needed to be useful when they get there. They won’t block the time to be able to show up. Or when they get there they’ll be a distraction. Or after being woken up twice at 3am in a month they’ll say “this really just isn’t for me.”

But those that do will earn the respect of their team. They’ll motivate their team to be better than the sum of their parts. And they’ll deliver outcomes that are outsized to their resourcing.

In summary:

• Leading from the front is important because it gives you the information and motivation to impact change. It also is incredibly motivating for your team

• To be on the front you must be available. Blocking time to deal with operational issues and being available for issues is key.

• To lead once you’re on the front lines, you must be capable, poised, and able to manage follow-ups with intense focus.

The Anti-patterns

For those who learn better from anti-patterns, reminder that great ways to not lead from the front are:

• Being on the road and unavailable all the time

• Being hysterical and blameful

• Being forgetful and unable to track follow-ups

• Being afraid to work hard off hours

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