Leadership and the Frontline Workforce

Lessons from the Targets of Change

Gilmore Crosby

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040378281
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

This book is for anyone who wants to lead change. It explains change methods through real-life experiences of frontline workers. Just as history has primarily been written by the victors, leadership and management theory have been written from the top. An exception is Kurt Lewin, whose action-research established that people on the frontlines are best positioned to create and sustain change. This book's authors have practiced that approach over two generations for the past 70 years. They were deeply influenced by the blue-collar wisdom of the author's grandfather, an hourly worker in the railyards of Pittsburgh.

Leadership and the Frontline Workforce teaches via interviews of those who were present both before and after Lewin?style change, telling the stories of the workers who have experienced the good, bad, and the ugly of being targets of change at the bottom of systems.

A colleague of the author, Cotton Mears (1956–2019), intended to write this book but only got as far as a title, "View from a target." He was a pot room tender in Alcoa's Warrick aluminum smelter—one of the toughest jobs in the plant—when Robert P. Crosby arrived on the scene. Their relationship launched Cotton's own organization development career. Following Cotton's untimely death in 2019, Robert's son, Gilmore Crosby, felt inspired to bring this book to life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 View from the Targets
• Chapter 2 Lewinian Organization Development (OD)
• Chapter 3 Alignment and the Front Lines (SATA)
• Chapter 4 Before and after—A Union VP meets Lewinian OD
• Chapter 5 A Blue-Collar OD Guy—An Electrician Meets Lewinian OD
• Chapter 6 A Blue-Collar Jamaican
• Chapter 7 The Blue-Collar Wisdom of William Crosby
• Chapter 8 A Blue-Collar OD Guy—Cotton Mears
• Chapter 9 Examples from My Father’s Lifetime of OD Work
• Chapter 10 From Conflict to Collaboration—A True T-Group Story
• Chapter 11 Involving the Front Lines in a Social Service Agency
• Chapter 12 Behavioralizing Culture: Goal Clarity, Role Clarity, Decision Clarity, and Feedback
• Chapter 13 Conflict Utilization
• Chapter 14 Implications for Leadership
• Appendix A The Interpersonal Gap Meets Toltec Wisdom
• Appendix B Behavior Description Quiz (DEI Version)
• Appendix C The PINCH Model (Article by Mark Horswood)
• Appendix D Managing Conflict in Community Development
• Appendix E Sponsor, Agent, Target, Advocate (SATA)
• Appendix F KRID (Adapt/Adopt)
• Appendix G Cotton Mears Flipchart Visual Aids
• Bibliography
• Index