While meeting with a retail executive several years ago, Jim Womack made a comment that has stayed with me ever since. He said:
“You lead one of the largest educators in the country in terms of how people work.”
Hospitality and retail companies employ 63 percent of working 16- to 19-year-olds in the U.S.1 These are the coffee shops, grocery stores, restaurants, amusement parks, and boutiques where many of us get our first paycheck and our first taste of the working world. These are training grounds — not just for skillsets, but for mindsets.
In the lean community, we’ve spent decades working to improve systems and grow capability across industries. We often talk about getting lean thinking into schools. But what if there’s another opportunity hiding in plain sight: What if we made frontline jobs the classroom?
What Frontline Workers Learn Today
If you’ve ever held a frontline retail job, I can imagine that your first day went something like this:
- After filling out new-hire paperwork, you received a lot of information about the company, and little to no information about the work you will be doing.
- You shadowed someone who showed you how they do things — no written standards, and a sense that everyone does it a little differently.
- You spotted messes: cluttered stockrooms, outdated metrics on the walls, dirty floors. No one mentioned them, so you inferred that it was normal.
- You were set loose to perform a mix of tasks. When problems came up, you had no one to ask. You learned to make it up on the spot and keep moving.
You ended the day unsure if you were helpful — and certain you were lost.
Now if you made it to your hundredth day, recall how things progressed:
- Someone is shadowing you, learning how you do things — revised versions of what you were taught, informed by months of hard lessons learned.
- In the best-case scenario, the environment is unchanged. More likely, conditions are worse.
- You keep glancing at the clock, counting down the minutes until you can do something else — anything else.
By now, you’ve internalized deep, invisible lessons like: no one has time to help me. Don’t ask questions. When there’s a problem, I’m on my own. Making things better is not my job. My workplace does not respect my time or my abilities.
Instead of teamwork and leadership, we teach people that work is mindless and endless. These beliefs aren’t often challenged later in life. They harden into workplace habits — and sometimes, into leadership behaviors. Then the cycle repeats.
What Frontline Education Could Look Like
Think of these jobs, not as just entry-level work, but entry points into better habits of working, thinking, and leading.
Here’s what it might look like if those jobs were created with conditions for success:
- You’re taught clear standards for what good looks like and how those standards relate to customer needs and desires.
- You’re equipped with proven methods to uphold the standards and meet if not exceed customer expectations.
- Your leader is present with the time and expertise to teach you these standards and methods.
- Problems are detectable — because work is standardized, any simple disruption is an indicator for something going wrong.
- When you experience a problem, not only do you know how to ask for help, you also know — and learn to trust — the leader-led process for problem solving that your call for help triggers.
Let’s replay that retail job experience at a grocery store. But this time, we do it differently.
Your shift starts with a team huddle. Today’s focus: produce freshness. Your team lead walks through the standard — no items with brown edges or excess moisture in the bins — and reminds everyone what good looks like and why it’s important to customers.
Starting with the salad mixes, you simply work in the routine that your team established. You notice a few sealed bags are fogging up with moisture. Unsure what to do about this particular problem, but clear on what to do when you encounter any problem, you immediately notify your team leader.
Unable to resolve it immediately, your leader tags the product and logs the issue, jotting down whatever the two of you understand about the problem. Ultimately, your small action triggers an investigation, uncovering a malfunctioning fridge sensor. The combination of the operating system and your attention to detail just saved the store thousands in potential spoilage.
And the best part? You’re not doing this alone.
Your team leader is deeply invested in your success — it’s their core responsibility. They understand how your success translates directly to customer satisfaction and the company’s bottom line. They’re readily available, consistently coaching you to identify issues, and helping you whenever you need it.
Instead of plotting your path to another job, you start imagining yourself moving up in the ranks here. For starters, the team leader role looks interesting. Instead of coming home at the end of the day to vent about frustrations and obstructions, you can come home each day with stories about the problems you solved.
Pursuing Better Systems
Now, let’s be honest: frontline jobs don’t usually look like this. The biggest barrier I see? Many executives still treat frontline work as trivial — “unskilled,” high-turnover, not worth investing in, not the value-creating work that serves the needs of their customers.
Operations leaders often internalize the idea that chaos is normal, and just figure things out. Even when they believe in better, they may not believe they have the power — or the business case — to change things. Or they simply don’t know how.
But these mindsets come at a steep cost.
Zeynep Ton and the Good Jobs Institute (GJI) have helped change this narrative. They show leaders the real costs of underinvesting in frontline work: in terms of lost sales, misplaced inventory, low productivity, turnover costs, difficulty adapting, and others — helping companies shift their mindset from “we can’t afford to invest in our people” to “we can’t afford not to.”
To start creating the conditions for success on the frontline, they help leaders make different operational choices to free up time for employees to focus on value creating tasks, and investment in people to create stability and increase tenure.2
Consider Sam’s Club. In partnership with GJI, they undertook a major overhaul of store operations. This meant simplifying product offerings, eliminating low-value tasks, improving technology to create capacity for frontline employees to focus on what matters. It also meant making strategic pay and staffing investments to increase team stability. The result was teams who stayed longer, delivered higher sales, and higher productivity.3
On a recent visit to O.C. Tanner at the Future of People at Work Symposium, I saw something similar. The housekeeping team shared how they practice kaizen each day — tracking the problems they experience, running experiments, working with other teams to introduce countermeasures, all generating millions in cost savings.
Leaders like Gary Peterson at O.C. Tanner have developed operating systems with integrated management systems that deliver the capacity and capability for problem solving. As a result, teams like the one I visited in housekeeping have pride and ownership in their work. Every day, they make things better, and that energy ripples across the organization.
So Where Do We Start?
Some of the best lean thinkers I’ve met didn’t start with lean in boardrooms or strategy roles. They learned lean thinking and practice while in value-creating jobs in warehouses, in kitchens, in call centers.
What set them apart wasn’t their background — it was the fact that someone took the time to teach them how to see problems clearly, respond thoughtfully, and keep improving and learning in their own work. In other words, they worked in a system built for lean thinking and practice.
If we were ambitious enough, we’d set out to ensure that this type of learning and thoughtful education was the default, not the exception.
If you’re a leader at an organization, how would you grade the education that your entry-level frontline workers receive? What invisible lessons are they learning? How are you preparing them to be your leaders of tomorrow?
When we teach people how to see and solve problems in their work, we don’t just improve performance. We unlock potential for people and for businesses. We create the conditions for pride, progress, and ownership to take root — at every level of the organization.
Want to take these ideas further?
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