Operations is Leadership
I know that Operations (with a capital O) is often a department or a role that is separate from Leadership (capital L). But I think too much separation is a mistake. I believe the operations of your team or business IS a leadership responsibility.
Let me say this clearly: This does NOT mean that as the leader, you shouldn't delegate or assign operations to someone on your team. You absolutely should, as soon as you can. But as a leader, you should never abdicate your responsibility to understand what your team is doing, how they're doing it, and why they're doing it… which is what operations (lowercase o) really is.
Many (most?) leadership decisions have something to do with operations, so leaders of small and medium-sized businesses set themselves and their teams up for success when they have a working knowledge of process design, take care to avoid unnecessary steps, and set and manage meaningful metrics.
Be a part of process design
Even if you're the only employee of your business, taking a moment to intentionally design your operations processes sets you up for success. Intentionality causes you to think about why you're doing something, how you're doing it, and whether the process is serving you well.
It's not uncommon for me to learn during initial client meetings that they don't really know why they're doing things a certain way. They tell me that’s just how they started so they kept doing it that way. This makes it much harder to evaluate whether you're meeting your own expectations, and it makes it harder to delegate, train new staff, and grow your business.
Intentional operational design completes this sentence: we do this process like this so that this happens to produce this outcome for our customers.
As your business grows, sharing that intentionality helps you delegate more effectively and helps your staff perform processes in a way that meets both the intent and the values you want for your business.
If you have a larger team (two or more), understanding how each person does their specific tasks, how they work together, and the dependencies they have on each other gives you a much clearer picture of how smoothly (or not) the business is running day to day, and can point you to areas that need adjustment or improvement.
If you take over a team, in my experience, the best thing to do first is spend time learning how the processes are designed, how staff are doing things, where the processes and people intersect, and why they're doing things that way. This is also the quickest way to find the squeaky parts of the process — which might be the reason you're taking over the team in the first place.
If you're lucky enough to have a good operations person working with you, work closely with them to make sure operational processes match your expectations for quality and reflect the values that you want. Check in with your operations person often to make sure that the process design continues to serve the staff and the business.
Process for process's sake…just don't
When the gap between Leadership and Operations gets too big, Leadership can start to feel out of touch with what's going on within the company. I've known far too many leaders who have imposed process steps with no real value, except to give themselves some assurance that they're leading. Status meetings, written status reports, and performance scorecards are all examples of this. I can assure you: if you need a status meeting for your team to tell you what they're working on, you're not really managing them.
Likewise, any process step or operational procedure without a clear reason or benefit is suspect. And this is where strong leadership can really make a difference. Confident leaders ask why something is done a certain way and examine those answers with curiosity.
Healthy operational processes evolve — new people, new data, new technology, new products all act on operations, and operational processes often change as a result. Adding steps with no value is never good, but neither is clinging to steps that were once needed but no longer are.
Process steps with no value are also a sure sign of a lack of trust within the team. When leaders understand the operational processes, it's easier to trust the team to do them well, because you know what the outcome is supposed to look like. And when trusted team members bring up steps that seem obsolete or unnecessary, it's easier to review those steps to make sure they still have value.
It's also common for team members not to know or understand how an "unnecessary" step early in the process gets used later, so this becomes an opportunity for training and discussion.
Meaningful metrics matter
An element of operations (especially capital O "Operations") is defining metrics - key performance indicators, objectives and key results - meant to help you determine how well you're doing overall. Recently, I heard someone say, "you can't manage what you can't measure." I agree in part, but you also can't manage effectively using measurements alone.
I believe you must understand the processes being measured before you can make good decisions based on the metrics. Leadership that is too separated from Operations is likely to miss the mark when it decides, from metrics alone, that a process is taking too long or that a change in priorities won't affect operations.
As a leader, when you understand how things work, you can interpret metrics in a more nuanced way, can ask more meaningful questions, and can take a wider view. With an underlying understanding of operations, you can craft performance incentives more meaningfully, deliver training or retraining more wisely, and introduce new initiatives more thoughtfully.
One yardstick you should use to evaluate whether your metrics are really serving you is to ask your staff if they’ve got a minute to share how they think things are going. You must really listen without judgement if you want to get honest answers.
Listen for the areas they find difficult or tedious. Listen for the things they love doing. Check your data and see if it matches the information you got from your staff. If things don’t line up, investigate.
Importantly, fast isn't always best. Quality and company values must always take precedence over speed.
Get support
If all this seems like more than you can do by yourself, you're right. Getting help with your process design, documenting your processes, and creating your metrics is worth it. It's also worth investing time upfront working on your operations processes before you get really busy; it's hard to build the ship while you're sailing it.
You don't need everything worked out, especially when you're just starting out. But once you've defined and documented your foundational processes, run through them yourself to confirm every step is necessary and valuable. Consider this an initial “field test” to shake things out and set initial success metrics.
Then, as you grow your business and add staff, use their input to refine your operations, and as soon as you can, delegate the detailed management of the nuts and bolts of operations to someone else. The upfront, intentional work sets everyone up for success.
Operations is Leadership. Leading well means having solid operations that serve you, your staff, and your customers.