When it comes to translating a company’s strategy into results, there’s no denying the importance of first-level leaders—those who manage others who do not manage others. At BP Group, these leaders oversee operations at retail outlets, manage work crews at chemical plants or refineries, and handle operations at drilling platforms. Some supervise more than ten people; others work with few subordinates in R&D, marketing, or human resources. First-level leaders are the ones who are most responsible for a firm’s day-to-day relationships with customers and the bulk of employees. As Harvard professor Linda Hill wrote in Becoming a Manager, “…managers on the front line are critical to sustaining quality, service, innovation, and financial performance.”
Developing First-Level Leaders
Reprint: R0506G
Oil and energy corporation BP was well aware of the importance of its work group managers on the front lines. Their decisions, in aggregate, make an enormous difference in BP’s turnover, costs, quality control, safety, innovation, and environmental performance. There were about 10,000 such supervisors, working in every part of the company—from solar plants in Spain, to drilling platforms in the North Sea, to marketing teams in Chicago. Some 70% to 80% of BP employees reported directly to these lower-level managers. Yet, until recently, the corporation didn’t have a comprehensive training program—let alone an official name—for them. For their part, the frontline managers felt disconnected; it was often hard for them to understand how their individual decisions contributed to the growth and reputation of BP as a whole.
In this article, BP executive Andreas Priestland and Dialogos VP Robert Hanig describe how BP in the past five years has learned to connect with this population of managers. After one and a half years of design and development, there is now a companywide name—“first-level leaders”—and a comprehensive training program for this cohort. The authors describe the collaborative effort they led to create the program’s four components: Supervisory Essentials, Context and Connections, the Leadership Event, and Peer Partnerships. The design team surveyed those it had deemed first-level leaders and others throughout BP; extensively benchmarked other companies’ training efforts for lower-level managers; and conducted a series of pilot programs that involved dozens of advisers.
The training sessions were first offered early in 2002, and since then, more than 8,000 of BP’s first-level leaders have attended. The managers who’ve been through training are consistently ranked higher in performance than those who haven’t, both by their bosses and by the employees who report to them, the authors say.
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