Take an industrial maintenance company running several hundred traveling technicians across sites in France, demanding on safety and quality, growing fast. On paper, everything is mapped: a site supervisor here, a field manager there, a functional line above. In practice, ask two people how evaluation, recognition, or managerial authority actually work on site, and you’ll get two different answers.
This is not a people problem. It’s a structural one.
The double line, or why “we all sort of know” stops working
Any organisation running in field or site mode (a location, a rotating crew, a frontline supervisor) almost always carries two parallel lines: a functional hierarchy that manages careers, skills, and formal evaluation; and an operational field line that manages the day-to-day, safety, and the on-site relationship with the client. As long as the company stays small, this ambiguity costs nothing. Everyone knows everyone, and arbitration happens in a hallway or on the job site.
The problem shows up with growth. The more technicians, sites, and supervisors there are, the more that once-free ambiguity starts costing real money: managerial practices that vary from one site to the next, a level of demand that depends on each supervisor’s personal disposition rather than a shared standard, recognition of frontline workers left to individual judgment. It is rarely that site supervisors or field managers lack managerial skill. It is that no one ever told them, in plain terms, what was expected of them as managers, as distinct from what’s expected of them as technical experts or safety leads.
What the diagnosis almost always reveals
We are often facing missions of this kind: organisations running in field or site mode, industrial or technical-services environments, operational teams spread across multiple locations. Everytime, the same pattern keeps showing up: the org chart says one thing, the way work actually happens says another. Interviews with frontline supervisors and technicians almost always surface a gap between what’s written in the job descriptions and what actually plays out in day-to-day team leadership.
So the diagnosis that’s actually useful never starts with the org chart. It starts with the simplest question, and the one most rarely asked: concretely, on this site, who decides what, who evaluates what, who recognises what, and which of the two lines is actually doing it today, regardless of what’s written down?
A managerial framework, not a new org chart
Faced with this, the instinct is to redesign the organisation: add a box, clarify a reporting line, rewrite the job descriptions. That’s rarely what changes anything on the ground. What works is a simple managerial framework: a handful of clear principles on what’s expected of a site supervisor or field manager in leading their team, what falls under their own authority to demand, evaluate, and recognise, and what needs to be escalated to the functional line. Simple enough to explain in one team meeting, simple enough to apply without heavy tooling, and, critically, built with frontline supervisors, not for them.
That’s the difference between an organization that gains managerial clarity and one that gains one more document in a binder.
The Change Society helps organszations running in field or site mode, and industrial environments more broadly, clarify their managerial line and strengthen how they demand, evaluate, and recognise performance on the ground.
If you wish to be supported during your transformation projects, we invite you to schedule a meeting with The Change Society Office.
