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At companies that have successfully empowered their frontline managers, the resulting flexibility and productivity generate strong financial returns. This system makes companies less productive, less agile, and less profitable, our experience shows. 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). Such managers keep an eye on things, enforce plans and policies, report operational results, and quickly escalate issues or problems. Our case evidence suggests that 12 to 15 direct reports at the front line is typically the most appropriate number, depending on the complexity of individual jobs, the typical number of new problems to solve, and the overall experience of the frontline staff. Various management studies have defined the optimal number of direct reports for a single supervisor as anywhere from 6 to 30. In a majority of the companies we’ve encountered, the frontline managers’ role is merely to oversee a limited number of direct reports, often in a “span breaking” capacity, relaying information from executives to workers. Yet most of the time, these managers operate as cogs in a system, with limited flexibility in decision making and little room for creativity. 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. 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.

These aren’t executives at a corporate headquarters they are the hidden-yet crucial-managers of frontline employees.įound in almost any company, such managers are particularly important in industries with distributed networks of sites and employees.

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.