Front Line to Front Office: How Leadership Experience Impacts Team Performance

What is yoru 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 crucial 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. Rather, 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 (wich sets of doctors and administrators are on call when a crisis strikes).