Engaging and Empowering Your Hidden Frontline Leaders

What businesses can learn from organizers about the uniquely powerful role of organic leaders.

A new Gallup survey showed ongoing and alarming gaps in employee engagement — and a hunger for communication, clarity, and two-way trust. “My employer stopped being receptive to ground-up communication. That was a giant blow to morale,” said one focus group participant.

In large and layered organizations, it’s challenging for executive-level leaders to maintain direct relationships and two-way communications with the entirety of the workforce. But knowing and engaging the handful of frontline employees who are highly trusted among their peers — “organic leaders,” as they’re known in labor research — can help to close this distance and ensure that cascaded communications deliver action, not just email opens.

And the good news is that you don’t need to go through a labor dispute to leverage workplace organizing methodologies to enhance employee engagement and internal communications.

See if you can relate:

You launch a new initiative and check all the right boxes on crafting and cascading compelling messages. You enlist frontline managers, deploy communications from the C-Suite, reinforce with repetition and rewards, and host town halls to build buy-in through direct engagement. And yet the initiative fails to gain traction, or seems to fizzle after an initial burst of excitement.

If this sounds familiar, organic leaders may be your missing links.

In every organization, there are employees who quietly lead their peers from entirely outside of formal management structures. You won’t see their names on an org chart, and they are rarely the loudest voices or the “most popular” in a strictly social sense. (In union organizing, activists and social butterflies fall into different categories.)

It’s hard to overstate the importance of organic leaders. They set the behavioral example; they care about their colleagues and give informal mentorship; and they’re often very effective problem-solvers at the department or shift level. Union organizers obsess over them because they have so much power to move their peers.

The first step in engaging these organic leaders — and, by extension, the larger group that follows them — is knowing who they are. Leader ID requires ongoing assessment given that trust and influence are dynamic and contingent rather than permanent states. Organic leaders won’t necessarily raise their hands to self-identify, but they often give clues:

• Problem-solvers: If a department is facing a localized challenge — say, something like weekend scheduling — is there an employee who seems to be designated by coworkers to approach management? And does she come with a complaint, or with a proposed fix?
• Network nodes: Organic leaders aren’t gossips, and they may or may not socialize with their peers… but they somehow seem to know people; and not just many people, but the right people: “If you need something from Maintenance, call Jim, not John.”
• Tone-setters: During a crisis or big change — like a merger or major policy rollout — look for the person whose opinion seems to “settle” the room. It doesn’t require much leadership to rile people up, but it takes trust and respect to calm an uneasy crowd.

By building meaningful relationships with these frontline leaders — with mutual respect and direct lines of communication, when appropriate — organizations gain notable advantages:

• Focused feedback: Organic leaders may be best positioned to tell you whether — and perhaps even why — a plan will succeed or fail on the ground, allowing for crucial adjustments ahead of wide rollout. Savings in time and effort can be invaluable.
• High-credibility ambassadors: When one of these rank-and-file leaders buys into an initiative, they become your most effective internal advocates. Their endorsement carries authenticity, and hard-earned trust, that is hard to replicate with a corporate memo.
• Strategic bridges: Organic leaders can help connect enterprise-level strategy to real, on-the-ground execution. Especially when aligned with frontline management, they can turn top-down mandates (compliance) into bottom-up buy-in (commitment).

Every day, organic leaders are already shaping how work gets done, regardless of whether they are intentionally cultivated. If your best-laid initiatives sometimes stall on the frontlines, the issue may not be the message — but rather who’s carrying it. By identifying and engaging organic leaders, organizations can help move large swaths of employees along the spectrum from mere compliance to true commitment.