The Front Line

After the Super­bowl I spent an hour watch­ing the new CBS pro­gram Under­cover Boss.  The show fea­tured the CEO of the com­pany Waste Man­age­ment pos­ing as a new hire for the com­pany in numer­ous front line ser­vice jobs.  He picked up lit­ter on a hill­side, helped man­age traf­fic at a land­fill, cleaned portable toi­lets, and rode on a trash col­lec­tion route — learn­ing about his com­pany and his peo­ple all along the way.

The show reminded me of my first “real job” after col­lege, which was with the Cin­tas cor­po­ra­tion.  Cin­tas, among other things, rents uni­forms to cus­tomers and then once a week picks them up to be washed.  One of my many jobs there was to drive the big white truck, drop off clean uni­forms, pick up some filthy gar­ments, and take them back to be cleaned.   The work was hard, but I learned a great deal about the things that make a busi­ness suc­cess­ful.  Cin­tas had a sim­i­lar pol­icy very sim­i­lar to the premise Under­cover Boss — one that I really liked.   It man­dated that every full time employee of spend one day per year out on the front lines rid­ing along on a uni­form route.  Every­one truly meant every­one.  The CEO, accoun­tants, admin­is­tra­tive assis­tants, sales, and oth­ers showed up early, put on a uni­form, and hit the road.

Why was this pol­icy important?

First, it gave every­one an under­stand­ing of the busi­ness.  All too often lead­ers become removed from what is hap­pen­ing on the front lines.  They for­get about the work being done and the great peo­ple doing it.  Get­ting every­one out of the office built real empa­thy and appre­ci­a­tion for the hard work going on every day.  This shared under­stand­ing per­me­ated the deci­sion process at every level of the com­pany.  The route dri­vers at Cin­tas took great pride in the work they did.  They appre­ci­ated the oppor­tu­nity to show off how dif­fi­cult the work actu­ally was and how easy they made it look.

Sec­ond it pro­vided new insights.  Get­ting a fresh set of eyes inside the oper­a­tions of clients pro­vided a great source of inno­va­tion.  Peo­ple rid­ing along were prompted to think “why do we do things this way?”  “what other prob­lems could we solve for cus­tomers?”  “where could our ser­vice improve?” We all think dif­fer­ently.  Involv­ing new peo­ple in exe­cut­ing old processes brings invites new per­spec­tives.  The result was a steady stream of new ideas, busi­ness con­cepts, and innovations.

Third it built cama­raderie.  Spend­ing sev­eral hours rid­ing shot­gun in a box truck gave peo­ple time to get to know each other bet­ter.  Sure some of the con­ver­sa­tion was about work or clients, but often more of it was about fam­ily, inter­ests, and being real peo­ple.  This built trust and friend­ship, both of which helped things to run more smoothly.  The job of route dri­ver was some­times lonely, and hav­ing a con­ver­staion with a real side­kick was a great change from silently talk­ing back to sports radio talk shows.

Get­ting every­one from top to bot­tom out in front, even just once a year, helped to strengthen the com­pany cul­ture, gen­er­ate new ideas, and build rela­tion­ships that tran­scended the org chart.  I don’t know whether the TV show Under­cover Boss will go on to be a suc­cess, but I do know that hav­ing first hand knowl­edge of the busi­ness played a huge part in the suc­cess of Cintas.

Amaz­ingly, social tech­nol­ogy offers us many of these same ben­e­fits.  Cer­tainly these mate­ri­al­ize in dif­fer­ent ways, but the sim­i­lar­i­ties are obvi­ous.  Whether it is rid­ing shot­gun in a box truck, clean­ing portable toi­lets, writ­ing a blog, or con­vers­ing on Face­book — the closer you can get to the front lines, the bet­ter.  I con­tinue to believe that today dis­tance mat­ters more than ever.  What are you doing to get closer to those you serve?