Frontline Leadership: Where Strategy Lives or Dies
Overview
A quiet crisis is hiding in plain sight within many organizations. It is not primarily a technology, compensation, or even a talent problem, although each may appear as a symptom. It is this: the leaders closest to the work, frontline supervisors and team leads, are often set up to fail because managers don’t clarify what operational excellence means. That is, managers aren't always clear on what “excellence” looks like. Further, the frontline leader’s role has always been difficult. They are caught between the results demanded by management and the reality of getting people to consistently perform work that meets the quality customers require. Yet organizations frequently compound this difficulty by overcomplicating the leadership models they provide to supervisors or by providing no coherent operational model at all.
Join this conversation with Brad Winn, Pat Geary and Oscar Roche to learn more and consider what may be worth investigating further for your organization.
Host Company
Presenter
Brad Winn is a leadership and strategy practice professor and Executive MBA director at Utah State University’s Huntsman School of Business. He brings over 25 years of executive experience leading organizational change and continuous improvement. His research and consulting focus on organizational excellence and culture. An engineer by training, Brad earned his engineering degree at Purdue University and worked on NASA’s space shuttle solid rocket booster program at ATK Thiokol. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Pat Geary joined Story Construction as a project engineer in 1992 after graduating from Iowa State University’s construction engineering program. His first 13 years were spent leading projects as Project Engineer, Project Manager and Operations Manager ultimately becoming Chief Operating Officer in 2005 and then president in 2025. Over the past decade, Pat has overseen the creation and deployment of Story’s lean project production system, Construction Production 2.0, as well as the Story Way, the company’s scientific thinking leadership, and behavioural model. Pat is married with two grown sons, one of whom works at Story as a Crew Leader.
Agenda
Tuesday, February 2, 2027
Central Time
2 p.m. Introduction
2:02 p.m. Conversation (with audience questions)
2:25 p.m. Further audience questions?
2:28 p.m. Wrap up
PARTICIPANT BENEFITS
- Why starting by ensuring there’s no ambiguity as to what ‘good’ looks like is imperative.
- The straightforward link to Story Constructions ‘good day every day’ vision.
- The relevance of Kato’s statement “work standards create a basis of efficient production that delivers the quality our customers require”.
- Clear standards don’t supress innovation at the frontline.
- Two performance challenges a frontline leader will inevitably need to deal with.
- A simplistic but realistic view of what it means to be a ‘leader’.
- Problems are not evidence of failure, they are information; don’t over complicate problem solving
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
- CI people whose senior leaders are asking "what do you need me to do?"
- Senior executives
- Senior management
- Operations managers
- HR executives and senior leaders
Safety Requirements
OTHER REGISTRATION INFORMATION
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