Identifying the right place to focus your energies as an operations manager can be challenging. This is especially true if the team reporting up into your organization is highly distributed across many locations, global in nature or includes a cross-functional set of departments.

For an operations manager, one of the more daunting challenges is getting a project funded. Senior leadership, especially those that grew up on the revenue side of the business in sales or product management, have the tendency to favor revenue-generating projects. Usually this entails an investment in product functionality, no matter how small. While this can be frustrating for back-office staff, it also makes great sense.

Tribal knowledge is generally passed down from generation to generation and is a critical part of oral tradition in some societies. As with those societies, many businesses also have tribal knowledge that gets passed down from manager to worker and worker to worker. You know you are dealing with tribal knowledge when the training timeline for a straight-forward role, such as a client services rep, seems to take an inordinate amount of time. In businesses like that tribal knowledge is most often referred to as “domain expertise”.

Running a successful operation is a team sport. The best operations manager will not be successful without his or her team being onboard. What it boils down to is this: a good leader is successful not only because he or she has the ability to lead, but because those being led want to be led by that person. That means that your authority as an operations lead, or frankly executive of any type, is only as strong as your team’s collective vision. So how do you get your team behind your vision? How do you get them to not only accept your vision, but make that vision their own? The answer is evangelism and open-mindedness.

If I said the word “factory” out loud and asked a group of people what the first image that came into their mind was, most people would think about a stodgy grey building in an industrial part of town with complex and noisy machinery that churns out goods like cars, toys and candy bars. There are purpose built factories that might only perform assembly tasks and there are other factories that create something new and original from initial design to finished product. Regardless of the factory’s purpose, all factories have a number of things in common that make them factories. At a very basic level they take in raw materials and assemble those raw materials into finished goods. They deliver the finished goods in some way to customers whether those customers are internal or external.  It is in the “assemble those raw materials” part where the magic happens. With that said, poor management of inputs and outputs can affect the overall performance of the factory.

An ecosystem at its core is nothing more than a community where the members are interacting with each other in a pre-defined and purposeful manner. Each member of the community plays a specific role, which if executed successfully, will benefit the community as a whole. The community is often governed by specific rules of engagement or defined parameters. If you drastically upset one of the members of the community or change the rules, then some sort of evolution will take place. Sometimes this evolution is for the better and improves the community’s overall function and effectiveness. Sometimes this evolution renders the community ineffective, or worse, entirely extinct. 

If there is one thing that business people are good at is reacting to things. They react to market conditions as if they were not in any way predictable. They react to employee sentiment even when that sentiment is driven by rumor. They react to client demands even when clients are demanding things that they are not willing to pay for. They react to new management as if they are certain that new managers will ruin everything they have worked for. They react to uncertainty as if they are certain that the sky is falling. Business people of all flavors today tend to be reactionary.

So, what is “operations” and what does it mean to be an “operator”? Operations can be defined in many ways, but the definition that I am most fond of is the simplest. Operations is simply the act of running a company well. Though that definition is exceedingly broad, it gets to the heart of the matter. Basically, it means that every function within an organization is touched by operations. Operations is the process of making things happen in a controlled manner to achieve a desirable outcome. Put another way, things will happen to you that you did not plan for or expect to happen unless you work intentionally and with purpose to make something more desirable happen first.