4 roles operations needs to play in your company…
//The Guide - Alignment
Operations is about ensuring that a high degree of alignment is achieved by all teams towards common business goals. This looks like finding gaps in systems, processes, communication and resource flow that could impede or slow down the businesses core delivery to the market. This is found in the recognition that people need information, communication, clarity and alignment of expectation to feel empowered to run as fast as they can. When there is a lack of information, clarity and alignment, it can create a lack of trust and instability that causes people to withdraw. Tools like process and business intelligence serve to bring information and alignment possible to each person.
High level business thinking. Seeing ahead and planning the growth of the company.
//The Immune System - Health
It’s about identifying and overcoming business threats. While this can be applied to threats outside the business, most business threats are actually internal. When you look at the core reasons why businesses fail, most of the time its related to a leadership, production, adaptability or resourcing problem within the team. This means that a large amount of operations time is spent identifying and solving problems within the company more than outside of the company. The ops team serves in a similar capacity to an immune system. They find threats and eliminate them even if it means reducing productive capacity for a short period. This immune system gives the team confidence that if issues arise in the company, there is accountability and capability to solve the problem. While some people may view this as control, most staff will view this as the company creating safety and stability for the work they do to be successful.
Watching for signs of internal threats and deploying tools to fix alignment, resource or communication issues.
//The Customer Service Agent - Support
Resourcing each person with the environment they need to do great work is important. This looks like ensuring that facilities, technologies, workstations, etc are to a standard that allows teams to focus primarily on the work. This extends from environment to culture. The Ops team helps create solutions for effectively maintaining and promoting a healthy team culture. This is to help company culture permeate through all departments & positions. Alignment to culture is a key to creating a sense of belonging and communal alignment. People that don’t follow similar values on a fundamental level can quickly become threats and cause people to act out of self protection more than alignment.
Be available to give the team the best possible advantage in each of their roles.
//The Benevolent Ruler - Vision
The operations team has the authority to require compliance with company policies & leadership decisions. They are given the ability to require action or set goals for teams that can change how that team functions. However, just because operations has the authority, does not mean that is the primary method of influence that is used. An ops team should build trust on being supportive and uplifting to other teams. They should always be looking for ways to improve systems and find alignment with buy-in rather than requirement. Operations should maintain a position of strength in the mind of staff because, although, this might cause some possible fear of operations, more often, it will create a larger sense of stability and covering. This is why it's critical for Ops to have the authority but not use that as their primary method of communication.
Helps teams solve problems on their own.