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.
Operational evangelism is interesting in that it does not mean that you alone are evangelizing. What it means is that once you have a vision and a roadmap forward that you can get others to evangelize on your behalf. The team will do this not because they are following you necessarily, but because they believe in the vision you are putting forth. They believe that the vision and direction that you are offering them not only will be good for the company, but for them as well.
This is key for two reasons. First, there are only 2080 hours in the average working year. That means that the vision cannot be executed by you and you alone. There are simply not enough hours for you to execute well without support. This is true even if you are responsible for a small team in a small company or a large team in a large corporation. Only someone with an enormous ego can accept as reality the possibility that he or she can drive change alone. So, you will need to assemble a team, and you will need to delegate effectively. Most importantly, you will need to focus your energies on helping them succeed in their roles.
Building a team is mostly about being open minded. In the end, no operational leader is worth his or her weight in salt if there is not a strong team behind them. The leadership team, who will become your evangelists, will ultimately be the lever that will help you achieve the vision. Even if you are accountable for getting to the end state, it will be your team that will get you there. Not you.
That is where being open minded comes in. Good managers will provide only two things to you and you should only provide two things to your superiors. A good operations manager will provide insight and ideas. Nothing else really matters. That insight and those ideas are the raw materials for positive change. Especially if you are new to a company or an operation, it will become very clear very fast that you do not know enough about the details and you never will. The insight and ideas brought forward by your team will help you mitigate risk, navigate past errors and can serve as an accelerator.
It does not matter how smart you are or what your track record is previously. If your team is not behind your vision they will execute poorly and it will be difficult to hit your objectives. Even managers that have been successful elsewhere fail when they apply past learnings and practices without making appropriate adjustments for the new operating environment. While the past is prologue at meta level, at the detail level that is almost never true.
It is also important to be smart about when you choose to evangelize. The new manager that jumps in and has not yet gone through a discovery process or taken feedback from their team cannot possibly have a fully baked vision. As such, they are likely to not be not believable and will lose credibility before they even get started. This will make it difficult to get support from inside your team as well as from management and stakeholders.
It makes sense then to only be evangelizing your vision after you have one that you have vetted, lived with for a while and even pre-sold to certain key members of the team and external stakeholders. In short, don’t rush your vision out the door. I am always fond of telling my teams to be right, not fast. Everyone will remember if you were wrong, but nobody will remember if you were fast as long as you achieve your objectives. This is especially true if the outcome you produce is an abject failure.
In order to be an operational evangelist, you must have a vision that you can evangelize. Evangelizing is really just a form of selling or socialization. Any good sales person will tell you that you can only sell something to someone who wants to buy in the first place. The best sales are those where you are not selling per se but rather helping the purchaser make a purchase decision that they already want to make.
That means that if you are trying to sell your vision for the future, you need to understand what management wants and align your vision with the corporate vision. It means that you need to understand the concerns of your team and the things that keep them up at night. That is true for any operational improvement or reengineering initiative as well. You need not only your team but management behind your vision for the future. In the end, getting management’s buy in is usually the easy part. At the root level, they put you in the position you are in in order to effect change anyway. In other words, they are already open to the idea that you will have a vision that is different from the current operating environment. They expect to be “sold to”, really. They are buyers. It is the team that will be a challenge.
You need your team to understand the vision and accept that to achieve it their workload will likely increase, at least in the near term. In the end, to effect change you rarely will have the opportunity outside of a start-up to build a process in a vacuum with no customer demands, cranky sales people or competing corporate priorities. That means that the change that you are proposing, no matter how obvious, will require at least some of your team to put in longer hours, work harder or take more personal responsibility. That will take them away from their families, increase their required workload and add stress to their lives. That is a harder sell than the sales pitch that gets made to senior management. That is why it requires “evangelism” and not simply a sales job.
Moreover, a quality staff can become invigorated by the increased workload specifically because somewhere deep down they also recognized a need for change. Good employees are rarely naturally complacent. In many cases they are simply trapped because they have been poorly led or worked for a manager who was trying to maintain the status quo as a priority. In many cases, the change you are trying to implement will create opportunities and new challenges for your team. This will be viewed positively.
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