Scaling Leadership to the Frontlines 

6/9/2026

I have a strong opinion about where culture change lives or dies in an organization. It doesn't happen in the boardroom. It happens in the aisle between workstations, in the five-minute huddle before a shift, in the conversation a frontline supervisor chooses to have or avoids having with someone on their team. 

That's what made my conversation with Jason Lippert so compelling. 

Jason is the President and CEO of LCI Industries, a Fortune 1000, publicly traded manufacturer with over 15,000 team members across the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and beyond. They supply specialized components for the RV, marine, manufactured housing, and transportation industries. By Jason's own account, 95% of those people are on the front lines. That's not a footnote. It's the whole story. If leadership isn't strong where the work actually happens, it isn't strong anywhere. 

Leadership Doesn't Stop at the Director Level 

Many organizations invest heavily in developing their senior leaders and then wonder why nothing changes. Here's the math that doesn't work: you can have the most aligned executive team in the world, but if the person overseeing 15 people on a production line hasn't been given the tools, the language, or the belief that they're a leader too, that investment stops at the top. 

Jason deliberately decided to change that math. His reasoning is straightforward and worth sitting with: 

"If we don't get leadership right at the front lines of our business, then leadership just isn't going to be right. How that leader leads those 10 or 20 people really determines the quality, the safety, the efficiency, whether these people are coming to work with passion and energy." 

I've seen this firsthand. Some of the most rewarding leadership programs I've been part of were with forklift operators, maintenance workers, and technicians. At the start, there's often resistance. By the end, it's: "I've never been able to do something like this before." That shift never gets old. 

Defining What Leadership Actually Is 

One of the things Jason said that every leader needs to hear: leadership has to be defined before it can be developed. Not assumed. Not inherited. Defined. 

At LCI Industries, they built five leadership qualities and five core values, and then they did something most organizations skip entirely. They talked about them constantly. In daily huddles. In boardwalks. In one-on-one conversations. Not as a one-time rollout. 

Jason put it plainly: "We define leadership so people know what it is first, and then we just talk about it every day. It's not just a card they get or something posted on the wall." 

When I asked him to sum up what leadership means at LCI, he didn't hesitate: "Show up and serve your team. Show up and serve the people who are coming to work in your area every day. That's the most important part of leadership." 

That's servant leadership stripped of all the jargon. Accessible. Repeatable. Teachable. 

The Long Game 

Building culture at scale is never a quick initiative. Jason was direct about this: it's a journey, and arguably a forever one. It starts with drawing a line in the sand, establishing core values as a north star, and then cascading leadership development out from there, not just to the top few hundred people, but to the thousand frontline leaders who are responsible for the other 12,000. 

That's where the real leverage is. And that's where most organizations have historically left a vacuum. 

When leaders resist alignment, coaching is offered. If that doesn't move things, sometimes change is necessary. That takes courage. Most organizations avoid that decision until it costs them far more than it needed to. 

Action Plans That Actually Change Lives 

One of the boldest moves LCI made was committing to leadership action plans for every team member, personal and professional goals paired with accountability partners who check in on progress. 

The impact goes beyond performance. People who had spent years clocking in and out without much thought start writing down their goals. Some of those goals have nothing to do with work. And that's the point. When an organization demonstrates that it cares about a person's whole life, not just their output, something shifts. People show up differently. 

Consider that nearly nine out of ten American workers believe their company doesn't actually care about them. That's not a retention problem. That's a leadership problem. And it has a solution. 

The Consequences of Not Having the Conversation 

There's a cost to silence. When leaders avoid meaningful conversations about performance, about growth, about what someone wants from their work and their life, that silence sends its own message. It says, "You don't matter enough here to be challenged." 

The organizations that get this right don't just retain more people. They build something competitors can't easily replicate: a culture where people feel genuinely seen and genuinely invested in. 

That's what Jason Lippert has spent years building. And it's one of the clearest examples I've come across of what it looks like to accelerate the changes you seek. 

Listen to the full conversation in Episode 2 of the Unleashing Leaders Podcast.

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