Leadership and the Frontline Workforce

This book explains practical culture change based on engaging frontline workers and citizens in real engagements including at aluminum fabrication and bauxite refineries, social service agencies, and citizen engagement projects. Just as history has traditionally been written from the view of the victors, so leadership and management theory has been written from the point of those on top. A noted exception was Kurt Lewin, who deeply identified with people in all walks of life, and demonstrated through research that the most reliable approach to increase productivity and morale is to engage everyone in any system in generating solutions and implementing them. Lewin’s method includes training in basic skills, such as conflict management, and alignment of the authority structure to support action at all levels, especially those on the front lines of work or of social change. He called this training-action-research.The authors of this book have practiced a Lewinian approach for the past 70 years and over two generations. Three generations, really, as the family was deeply influenced by the blue-collar wisdom of William Crosby (1896-1975) who was an hourly worker in the rail yards of Pittsburgh.This book teaches by blending in the voices of men and women like William, telling stories from frontline workers who have experienced the good, bad, and the ugly of being targets of change at the bottom of systems.The idea for this book came initially from another blue-collar man named Cotton Mears (1956 – 2019). Cotton was a pot room tender in Alcoa’s Warrick, Indiana, an aluminum smelter, one of the toughest jobs in the plant, when Robert P. Crosby first arrived to help change the culture. Cotton was a union steward and described himself as an attack dog, willing to fight for anything that his union colleagues wanted him to fight for. It was a revelation for him to realize there was another way. He took it to heart, and spent two years in Alcoa’s Corporate Leadership Program, unique in many ways but perhaps especially in that it included hourly workers mixed right in with management personnel. By the end of the program, he was on a journey to create true collaboration at Warrick and in other organizations, applying Lewinian methods from the unique perspective of his blue-collar roots, a perspective he never lost. Cotton intended to write this book, and when Robert Crosby said he was thinking of writing a book from the worker’s perspective, I was inspired to bring this to life. It was Cotton who already had the title, and had lived it, View from a target.

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