What is your origin story as a leader, and how does it compare to the people working on the front line of your team?
Did you start off operating at the sharp edge of the field and work your way through different roles until joining senior leadership? Or, did you enter the organization through a different path than the front line, picking up skills and experience from different fields and traditions before taking on the work of leading your current group?
At the Mission Critical Team Institute, we work with high-performance teams across medicine, fire, sport, aerospace, and the military. Recently, we have noticed two distinct patterns of organizational structure in these elite teams that differ considerably in their leadership pipelines.
In some organizations, the pathway to leadership always starts on the front line. Every chief in the fire service started as a firefighter, and the medical director of every intensive care unit spent time as a practitioner before taking on leadership duties.
In other organizations, most leaders come from different professional backgrounds. The CEO or COO of a hospital system may come from business, finance, or operations, for example, and step into the role with no direct experience at the bedside.
While both patterns can yield high-performing teams that work complex problems successfully, there are substantial differences in how these teams operate.
In this post, we define the front line-to-front-office (F2F) distance as a structural and experiential metric of a team and explore several features that differ between organizations with high and low F2F distances.
Defining the F2F Distance
We define the F2F distance as the difference in lived experience between individuals working on the front line and individuals working in the front office. Organizations where front-office leaders have front line experience have low F2F distances. Conversely, organizations where front-office staff and front line operators come from very different backgrounds with little overlap have high F2F distances.
Two important aspects of the F2F distance are worth highlighting:
- First, the F2F distance of a team does not describe the differences in current environments and operations between the front line and the front office. By necessity, almost all teams will have significant differences here, and while these differences can be extremely important to team effectiveness, that is not our focus. Instead, we are specifically looking at differences in the paths individuals take to reach the roles where they work. F2F distance, in other words, is a measure of a team’s history, not its present.
- Second, the F2F distance of an organization likely varies across its different parts. Within a hospital, the F2F distance might vary by department (ER vs. ICU), by role (nursing vs. respiratory therapy), or even by shift (which sets of doctors and administrators are on call when a crisis strikes).
So, while it is useful to think of an aggregate F2F distance that looks at the average career and life paths of the front line vs. the front office for an organization, it is also important to look at the similarities and differences in lived experience of a specific group working a specific problem.
Working on Low F2F Teams
On teams with low F2F distances, the majority or entirety of leadership previously operated on the front line. There is real strength in an experienced fire captain talking a junior firefighter through their first mistake. Both people have felt the heat, the fear, and the energy.
These shared lived experiences can help build trust between parts of the organization. Front line operators on these teams are more likely to buy into front-office decisions, even if they do not immediately understand them.
At the same time, front-office leaders are more likely to make decisions that work for the whole organization, since their decision-making typically reflects operational reality on the ground. In a crisis, low F2F teams can operate quickly, with front-office leadership rapidly understanding the needs of front line operators.
However, since all levels of the organization came through the same training pipeline, low F2F teams can lack the diversity of thought that comes with the broader set of skills high F2F teams can call upon. Skill sets gained outside the traditional pipeline might be viewed with suspicion and inappropriately discounted.
As the realities the organization faces drift from the problems senior leaders used to work, the similarities of their lived experiences can become a liability rather than a strength. Similarly, when new types of crises arise, these organizations can struggle to pivot rapidly in new directions.
Working on High F2F Teams
On teams with high F2F distances, individuals on the front line and in the front office have very different professional backgrounds. There is also real strength in this configuration: the skilled heart surgeon can concentrate on surgery while the skilled CFO can concentrate on keeping the hospital system open and the OR operating.
The diverse set of experiences in these teams can allow complex systems requiring multiple high-level skill sets to operate successfully and dynamically across a variety of situations. As individuals join the organization from different directions, they bring multiple methods of solving problems, so high F2F organizations can be more adaptable and may be able to work a broader array of problems than low F2F ones.
However, differences in professional background in high F2F organizations can easily become a source of friction and mistrust. Front line operators may view front-office staff as out of touch with reality or untrustworthy. Front-office teams may view front line workers as cogs in a machine only they understand.
In a crisis, the different mental models that front line and front-office individuals use may initially challenge efficient action, even as they may eventually provide more tools to solve complex problems.
Recommendations
Both low- and high-F2F teams can achieve exceptional results across mission-critical environments. Both types of teams can also fail spectacularly.
We recommend that every team discuss its F2F distance openly and proactively consider the strengths and weaknesses of its current structure. For teams with low F2F distances, we recommend actively seeking outside views, especially when confronting a crisis. For teams with high F2F distances, we recommend active efforts to bridge front line and front-office communities, especially before a crisis strikes.
