The Fearless Frontline by Ray Attiyah

As a leaders and manager, do you feel that much of your time is consumed by urgent, but unimportant tasks?

Why is it that as managers and leaders we are expected to spend so much of our time working in the business, rather than on the business?

In his book, Ray Attiyah says that leaders must learn to spend more time ON the business and less time IN the business.

Book structure:

Contents

• meet the marathon manager
• developer fearless culture
• empower the front line to lead
• transfer the winning momentum
• upgrade management systems: a liberated manager emerges
• fuel proactive improvements: a play to win culture emerges
• make them keep the promises
• place and win bold bets: how fast then go big
• Scout then placed talent: building your growth team

The fearless frontline is in the approach to looking at the empowerment your frontline staff. Recognising that for many organisations complexity is business as usual rather than something that happened in these parts of an organisation. Business is complex. Having said this we often make running a business more complex and it needs to be, with too many people involved in too many processes. It only takes one or two moving parts falling out synchronisation to core systems and processes to become unreliable. The author suggests that our goal is to return business to it’s simply states removing negative complexity.

Run-Improve – Grow

This book is based upon the model run, improve, grow. Represented as a triangle with “run” at the base and grow at the pinnacle, the author suggests that the run face all the day-to-day activity necessary to produce your products or services is the foundation. When the “run”, function reliably and independently of management involvement, it’s strange resources by pulling managers away from their most value added functions. This is where most organisations fail.

Without the appropriate people resources often businesses try to simultaneously balancing increased complexity of new initiatives products and high customer expectations with the general “run” of the business. For those organisations operating with the minimum amount of people than their ability to maintain “business as usual” and develop new products and services is greatly limited. While this might be stating the obvious is of course a common mistake across many sectors and organisations. Having a robust and consistent “run” is key to organisational sustainability. When most middle and senior managers or leaders spend the majority of their time on the “run” operations of their business clearly there is little time or space for improvement in future products or services.

Take aways

At the end of each chapter the author provides us with a range of “takeaway” statements in bullet point form. These statements neatly summarise the chapter and provide a great checklist for the reader.

The fearless theme

When the leaders and managers in a business have clearly identified what “business as usual” means to frontline staff enables managers and leaders to take their hands off the reins and let frontline staff deliver what they and our customers want them to deliver. We need to trust, be fearless.

Work on the business not in the business

For decades many business coaches and business advisers have seen managers and owners of businesses focus on working in the business, that is working in the “run” stages of the organisation. This book clearly demonstrates to managers and business owners the need to work on the business, to “grow” the business through brave and courageous “improvement”.

Focusing time effort and energy on the “grow” part or what some of us may know as innovation is the key message that the author is sharing with us.

The simple practical and yet robust process proposed can be easily understood by the reader along with simple practical ideas for leaders and managers to run – improve and grow their business