Leadership and the Frontline Workforce

This book is for anyone who wants to lead change in organizations. It is very different in that it explains change methods through the real-life experiences of frontline workers. Just as history has been written from the view of the victors, so leadership and management theory has been written from the perspective of those on top. A noted exception is Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), the proper mentor of the authors, who deeply identified with people from all walks of life. Lewin's research demonstrated that the most reliable approach to increase productivity and morale is to engage the people who do the work and face the challenges every day. The authors of this book have practiced a Lewinian approach for the past 70 years and over two generations. One could say three, as the family was deeply influenced by the blue-collar wisdom of William Crosby (1896-1975), 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 before and after the author's methods were applied. 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, aluminum smelter, one of the toughest jobs in the plant, when William's son 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 about anything. It was a revelation for him to realize there was another way. He took it to heart and spent two years in a leadership program designed by Crosby, which was unique in many ways but perhaps especially in that it included hourly workers mixed right in with management personnel. That launched Cotton on a mission to create true collaboration at Warrick and in other organizations, applying Lewinian methods from the unique perspective of his blue-collar roots. His intention of writing this book was cut short by his death in 2019. When Robert Crosby said he was thinking of writing a book from the worker’s perspective, his son, Gilmore Crosby, who had spent many years working alongside Cotton, was inspired to bring this to life.