Since the start of my work in the area of operations and management for small business, I focused on the title of General Manager, Integrator, Director of Operations, or Chief Operating Officer as the 2nd in Command...the number two. We recently fine-tuned our ideal client down to business owners with 1-10 employees. During our assessment of businesses in that size, We determined that the 2nd in command in these small businesses is referred to most of the time as the "Office Manager".

As we thought more about it, we determined that the Office Manager role is way under appreciated. They are often required to do frontline work as well as managerial work and then on certain days, strategic work. They need to understand all aspects of the businesses operations. One day completing payroll the next day dealing wit a client issue. They are typically the ones that would be executing our 6-practices of Structured Operations: Process Development, SOP Documentation, Role Descriptions, Analytics, Training Plans, and Continuous Improvement.

I promise going forward that we'll give proper care and recognition to the brave, hard working Office Managers.

In just about any stage of life, “what do you do?” is a persistent and relevant question.

Since I sold my IT firm and started my new business nine years ago, I’ve sometimes lacked the clarity to succinctly answer this question. However, this changed for me a couple of months ago. Now I answer confidently “I develop Structured Operations solutions that align leaders, managers and their teams.”

So, what are Structured Operations and why should anyone care about them? Every great visionary has clarity in the way that they see the future. They have an imagination that excites them and those who share their vision, purpose and beliefs. There is a definite psychology for visionaries which allows them to create these inspiring pictures of the future.

The Visionary excels at providing clarity in the realm of “why” and “what.” Vision in an organization is the picture of how the organization will execute its purpose in the future. Purpose can be thought of as the sum impact of the organization’s efforts to act on its guiding beliefs. A guiding belief is the “cause” or an expansion of the current state of a product, service or organization. The visionary believes that the future world will be better, grander and will operate more effectively. Visionaries are idealists who help to propel organizations toward an ultimate, unifying goal.

At Aligned Operations, we believe that every person deserves the opportunity to do fulfilling work in an organization the provides clarity confidence and trust (our guiding belief). We do this by creating Structured Operations solutions and training (our mission) that aligns leaders, managers and their teams (the impact).

The area where the Visionary often gets tripped up is formulating the “how.” The creative mentality of the Visionary isn’t tuned to focusing on the nuts and bolts of getting from now to the future state of their vision. In an organization, the path to the future is the daily execution of effort or work. At Aligned Operations, we define “operations” as the coordination and execution of work. “Structured Operations” is defined as the requisite coordination and execution of work to realize the vision of the organization.

The next several articles will show you how to implement Structured Operations to go from a vision based on a purpose, to the manifestation of that vision. For this article, we’ll start with culture.

Structured Operations and Culture

The term “culture” comes up often in the discussion of operations and management. I think most small business owners don’t really understand what it means to their organizations. I didn’t really put too much thought into it myself until I read this statement from Elliot Jacques:

The most far reaching, dramatic and rapid changes in behavior of individuals in an organization can be achieved by changes in the organization – both in structure and in managerial leadership practices.

I then realized that my control over the environment my employees work in was a priority in building a successful organization. I also realized that what was at stake was not just the success of my organization but the well-being of the people we invited to work in our organization. As business owners, we have a direct impact on the well-being of the people we employ.

I came across an article from Tom Foster that breaks down culture this way:

Company culture is that unwritten set of rules that governs our behavior in the work that we do together. It is unwritten in contrast to our written set of rules, policies, procedures. Culture is often more powerful than any policy we may write or attempt to officially enforce. Often, culture works against our stated policy in operations management.

What is the source of culture, how is it created? These are the four steps in the Culture Cycle:

1.  Develop our beliefs, bias, our experiences…our story. Culture is the story we carry into our experience that provides the lens, the frame, the tint, the brightness or darkness of that story.

2.  The culture drives team behavior. We can’t see each other’s stories, but we can see their behavior.

3.  Behavior, driven by culture, is constantly tested against the reality of consequences. For better or worse, behaviors driven by culture are proven valid, or not.

4.  Behaviors that survive, for better or worse, are institutionalized in our rituals and customs. This starts with the way a team member sees the organization.

I sum culture up this way:

“The people in our organizations will behave based on the tested beliefs formed through the rituals and customs that the leaders dictate or allow.”

So, it’s up to the leaders to dictate the rituals and customs or allow them to be created on their own through laissez-faire attention. Most often the rituals and customs which are “allowed” to be created don’t serve the organization’s Vision and Purpose.

Clarity Confidence and Trust

Clarity in an organization means that everyone is free of confusion. There are clear expectations of how work needs to be completed, to what quantity in a time period, and to what quality. Clarity assures those completing the work have reduced stress.

Confidence in an organization means that everyone is free of doubt. Doubt results in poor decision making because no decision is made. Organizational leaders in a requisite organization empower their teams to make confident decisions.

Trust is the magical ingredient in an organization. It is the two-way street where leaders trust the execution of their teams and teams trust their leaders to support them along the way in operations management.

For more information on Elliot Jacques click here.

For more information on Tom Foster click here.

 

I typically don’t get this granular in recommending tactical applications, but I feel this one is a game changer: record your meetings.

I recently started using the Meetings app in the ZoHo One suite of applications. It’s not the most feature-rich tool for managing and executing web meetings or seminars, but it has suited me well. I had been using the Meetings app for training clients in on a software system we use to align leaders, managers and their teams (Trellis Tools). One of the attendees couldn’t make it, so I offered to try the recording feature.

First of all, it is super easy to initiate a recording. Once you get going with the meeting you don’t even realize it’s recording (Which might be a good and bad thing, for those who are a bit too free with their words). I do get permission from anyone on the call to record our sessions--I also offer a link to the recording if they would like to review it afterward as well.

After recording our meetings a couple of times, I ran into a situation where one of the attendees had recommended a book and I forgot to make a note. I remembered that I had the recording, so I simply reviewed our conversation and was able to get the information I needed.

I then mentioned this to my college-aged son, and he responded with a story about a professor who recommends that students don’t take notes in his class. Instead, he implores them, just pay attention. Then he recommends that after class students should write down everything they remember. The professor also offers an outline of his lecture on the class portal to confirm the contents of their notes. The point being that we don’t pay close attention to the substance of the material while we’re taking notes. So now I record meetings and only take notes for action items or very important points. For in-person meetings, I start the app on my laptop and use the built-in mic to record--the audio quality has proven to be surprisingly good.

Most of the other remote session solutions (Zoom, Teams, WebEx) include a recording feature and I highly recommend you start the practice of recording your meetings and remote sessions. I recently discovered that Teams will even transcribe the audio into a searchable text.

This strategy did produce one unforeseen challenge; some of the requested attendees have been opting to skip meetings entirely, in favor of just listening to the recording later. I feel the lower level of “live” participation reduces the overall value of the session, so it is important to emphasize that while recordings are a good reference, they should not be a wholesale replacement for attending meetings.

For more information regarding ZoHo Meetings click here.

To learn more about Trellis Tools click here.

Every organization has limited resources (some more so than others). These include: cash, staff, knowledge/skill, time, space, technology, etc. So, what is the best use of those limited resource to move your organization forward.

I believe the three primary elements of an operations are structure, iteration, and oversight. My simple explanation of iteration is “to do the best with what you have to expand what you… then repeat”.

So, what is “what you have”. I regularly suggest to business owners to “take an inventory” of your organization, so you know “what you have”…what are your assets.

Once you know “what you have “, you can then decide how to “do the best with them”…this is strategic planning. The process of deciding includes evaluating the inventory you just took and determine what’s the most limiting factor to expand the organization. This limiting factor is often referred to as a bottleneck or constraint.

This bottleneck or constraint could be a bad process, an untrained person, a poor policy, etc. We often use data analytics to assist us in determining the most limiting factors. When in doubt, I ask “what is the task that everyone hates to do”. Often, that’s the bottleneck.

At the end of the day decision making in an organization needs to maximize the impact of the limited resources at each stage (iteration) of growth. I’ve heard the analogy of knowing which levers to pull and when.

If you’d like to learn more about bottlenecks and The Theory of Constraints, I’d recommend you read The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. I also found a few good YouTube videos on the topic: https://youtu.be/5HStf-XbsSo