4 practices I learned leading Operations Teams the last decade

In this week’s issue, I’ll break down four practices I’ve learned managing operations teams in the last decade that helped progress my career.

In a world of many priorities and never-ending emails and reports, I’ll share a framework for cutting through the noise by keeping these 4 lessons in mind.

By focusing on building a framework for these 4 practices, you’ll increase your chances of developing yourself, your teams(especially remote teams), and your business over the long term.

The problem is some leaders fail because they over-index on one of the 4 key points instead of handling it as a 4-legged stool that must be balanced

Fun, Maturity Models, Forecasting, and Cross Training were the major unlock. Let's Dive in!

Lesson 1: Daily management can be fun and meaningful

Let's face it. Daily management(or huddles) can be a grind and in some cases really boring but it doesn't have to be this way

One opportunity to make this fun was finding an objective way to recognize teams for actually improving their daily performance which led me to this tip from video gamers

• The first big idea was “gamifying” the rate of improvements in our team(s) and creating leaderboards recognizing teams who drove the most improvement or improved the most from a prior month.

  • Gamifying is easily done by assigning points for changes on a normalized basis for the key performance indicators

• The second big idea was making recognition a part of our huddles with 3rd party praise. We’d make an agenda item to discuss people living out our values and have a 3rd party call the person(s) to tell them how much our team appreciated them. The goodwill this generated was incredible and it cost nothing but a few minutes

Putting these two practices in place drove more conversation and engagement than I’d seen prior to it. The challenge though is keeping this simple enough for teammates to grasp.

Lesson 2: Maturity Models are a great way to engage teams and drive legacy-defining change

Many managers have an “it's always been done this way attitude” but making a difference requires you to find a way to drive changes that build on the success of the team you inherited.

In my experience, maturity models do a fantastic job of helping a team objectively look at its processes compared to industry-leading standards and give you a roadmap to improvement.

• Simply find one relevant to your process or organization

• Bring the team(s) together early in your role to assess the current state

• Work with them on future state improvement actions

I’ve used them in different companies to help set the stage for multi-year journey teams can get rallied around.

Lesson 3: Your financial forecasts are only as good as your team’s assumptions.

It’s one thing to meet your committed goals but the best leaders I’ve followed do a good job forecasting as well.

They not only forecast their likely outcomes but establish processes for their teams to communicate explicitly

• Business changes that may affect the forecast

• Drivers of their forecast

• Risks associated with the forecast

• Opportunities to improve the forecast

Putting this process in place with your teams not only helps you but helps them as well better understand their impact on the financials and learn from variances.

Lesson 4: Cross-training is the cheat code for organizational resilience if you measure it and actively drive it.

Many teams I’ve seen talk about cross-training but a much lower number can actually quantify their cross-training performance, especially for knowledge-based activities.

What the great resignation taught me is that effective development monitoring entails:

1. Identifying task-level skills

2. Identify the frequency of those tasks being completed

3. Identifying the criticality of those skills(regulatory agency, financial like closing the books)

4. Quantify capability levels of team members against a-c

   • Quantify your single points of failure

     • Address them before you get a resignation or lottery win that causes havoc on your team

This is a lot of work but once you build this foundation, you’ll be amazed at what you learn about your team. If you don't, you’ll also be amazed at what you find if people leave and you don’t have a robust plan.

Thanks for reading. In summary, the 4 lessons were:

1. Run the business: Make it fun

2. Improve the business: Use maturity models

3. Hit your financials: Build robust assumptions

4. Develop your people: Quantifying makes it more intentional

That’s it for now. Have a great week!