The State of Operations
We recently completed a very successful webinar reporting on the results of our first survey amongst senior operational leaders to hear their voice on the state of challenges, opportunities, growth/decline, focus, and goals in the productive sector (find our report here).
We did the survey because while you’ll find whole magazines devoted to CFOs, CIOs, CEOs, there’s nothing for COOs. Personally, it’s an acronym close to my heart because I was Chief Operations Officer at Southern Cross Healthcare for a couple of years, which represented the pinnacle of my corporate career.
I doubt I would have gone on to other COO roles because I wasn’t really much of a COO. That was okay because the circumstances meant the role was not strictly a COO role – it was a solution to an organisational problem that had three quite different businesses under one structure. In reality, this role saw much more dramatic change than the usual COO roles.
I say dramatic because we can make the mistake of thinking that Operations is about getting things done, and change is driven by other areas of the business – marketing, finance, IT. But no one has had to deal with more change and on a bigger scale in the last 12 months than operational managers.
Twelve months ago they were wrestling with how they could keep the business going safely in a lockdown. Then they were grappling with how to respond to the economic and possibly the societal collapse we all thought was going to happen – how many jobs would they cut and when. Then they were dealing with the unexpectedly strong resurgence in demand, and they’ve been scrambling to keep up ever since.
We’re now in a stage of COVID where the risk of lockdown has not gone away, but we’re dealing with the downstream rather than the direct effects. Availability of skilled staff, supply chain constraints, and the economic environment are the main threats now.
The report is full of insights about the various challenges and opportunities, and I want to reflect on one specific issue. The clear view was that their people had stood up incredibly well to the challenges of a chaotic environment, but the biggest opportunities to improve lay in the management skills of their people, not their technical skills or personal characteristics.
In this continuing fast-changing environment, the truth is that your best managers are not those who have been consistently good at their job. Your best people are those who can adapt in order to improve operational performance and take their people with them.
That’s why management skill is so important – and why developing those skills generates outsized returns in productivity gains. They enable the ground-level ops teams to improve their performance, which is the only way to lift the organization. We call it people-powered productivity.
But the reality is more challenging than that – only half the respondents trained their teams in management skills over the last twelve months, reflecting time and cost constraints. In the short run, that’s a pragmatic response, but the long term is made up of a series of short runs.
If you’re not already thinking about how to invest precious time and dollars in your operational managers, you’re compromising your organization’s future. And if you are thinking about investing in your people, remember to factor in the most important resource: your own time and attention. Spend the time to get it right, and take advantage of the opportunities for scaling leadership development that has been created by COVID.