To unlock employee effort, don’t overlook the person holding the wrench 

In an uneven economic climate where myriad factors have made change the only constant, one message to employees seems universal across business leaders: Do better. 

Leaders expect employees to produce more, increase efficiency and maximize impact — particularly on the front lines. Many leaders, though, forget or fail to build the necessary cultural engagement to motivate employees and unlock that discretionary effort.

But performance missives without culture, collective purpose and the tools to get the job done fall flat with the workers that former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz says are critical to operational excellence: the front line. 

“Essential workers are the first to detect bullshit a mile away. Excellence is the outcome of the belief they have in you as a leader, and you earn their belief with action,” Munoz said in a recent interview. 

The Frontline Is Where Performance Lives or Dies

I had the opportunity to work alongside Munoz as he transformed United Airlines from the inside out, aligning a largely disgruntled 85,000-person workforce whose discontent was hemorrhaging into the customer experience. 

In doing so, Munoz had a composite audience in mind – the guy with the wrench. 

“When mechanical issues delay a flight, it’s not the middle managers with the desk jobs who fix it. It’s the guy with the wrench,” Munoz told me as we traveled from O’Hare to Newark in October 2015, part of a multi-hub charm offensive tour. 

How fast he moves, how motivated he is to apply his very best work at that exact moment with purposeful precision can be the difference as to whether the flight gets out on time, Munoz said. 

The domino effect of the mechanic’s discretionary effort can determine whether the plane connects to the next one to take off, whether the crew reaches its next assignment, whether the airline reaches its on-time departure goals, whether the customers........

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