This is the fifth article of six, starting with Leaders Everywhere: How Can You Lead Changes In Your Team? (Article # 1 of 6) , moving to the second article where we cover change management as an investment then onto the magic of rough and ready templates and the virtues of airline captain leadership.
Here is a unique perspective on operational leadership.
Ray Dalio, author of Principles and founder of Bridgewater Associates likens an organisation to a machine 1. This machine comprises your team and the resources at their disposal. It should be reliable and produce outcomes. Operational leaders determine the results and have the authority to reorganise parts of this machine. Leaders are accountable for ensuring this machine consistently provides needed results. Ray hires leaders who embrace this accountability. Leaders also need the higher-order thinking necessary to visualise their part of the machine.
Difficult decisions are necessary to change the components of your machine:
“Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes. I call the way you operate to achieve your goals your machine. Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine. Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change.” — Ray Dalio, Principles 1 (p157–159).
Will this higher-order system thinking help you detach your emotions from necessary engineering? Can you find the resolve or temerity needed to remove or reallocate an underperforming or ill-fitting team member? If you are clear on the outcomes your “machine” has to produce, are you also passionate about seeing these outcomes?
Let us adopt Nietzsche’s words for operational leaders: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins and his research team studied three groups of public US companies in a five-year project. Collins’ research identified companies realising superior operating performance 2. Data revealed these superior companies are clear on two questions. Where do our strengths and passions intersect? How do we measure success?
When good-to-great companies acknowledged hiring failures, they acted immediately. Decisive yet compassionate leaders would remove the hire from the role. Ray Dalio takes a similar approach, advocating setting clear goals and putting the right people in the right role.
Leadership is a balance of empathy and commercial pragmatism. It is difficult yet necessary to “look at things as they are, not as your emotions colour them” 3(pxix). Both Collins and Dalio advocate confronting reality as it is and taking swift action 1,2. They also use managers who can maintain consistency in their organisation’s machine. Their presence reinforces a culture of discipline which operates without a leader’s intervention 1,2.
With life experience, you aren’t as swayed by emotion or the twists and turns of operational leadership. Similarly, “elevate yourself above the battlefield” 3 (pxix). Are you thinking of the challenges right in front of you? This is tactical thinking. What about at least one year from now?
This article may lead you to reflect on your role in your operation. How much of your time is on working on your team’s operation rather than in it? Michael Gerber, the author of The E-Myth Revisited, examines small businesses growing into large ones 4. What is one thing which helps small businesses avoid failure and end up thriving?
Those who make it past adolescence and into maturity are run by leaders who take a broader (“machine-like”) foresight — and design their machine to scale. Successful businesses consider the future to be self-sufficient without their leader’s presence (nor being “on the tools”!).
Gerber believes great operations work in the simplest and most efficient way. So simple that anyone could run it! Great operational leaders aim to make themselves redundant. If your operation’s machine is scalable, this foresight helps your team grow in maturity — even if you lose valued team members on the way.
Three steps help you achieve this:
Your operational “machine” has to be systems-dependent, not expert-dependent.
Do you have current standard operating procedures across your entire operation? Both Collins and Gerber believe in leveraging technology for this aim. Yet technology can also take the form of reproducible templates.
Your team are a valuable marketing tool.
To portray your operation in the best light, your team have to be “fed and well-watered” — and Dalio and Gerber emphasise a sense of meaning in their job 1,4. When making changes to the operational machine, how involved are your team? Have you considered others outside of your team who may be impacted? These upstream and downstream stakeholders are as valuable as your team in serving as a marketing tool if changes to the machine are carefully planned and implemented.
Your role in tweaking the operational machine is ongoing.
Innovation has to be treated as a change process — not just a quick announcement of a new way of doing things. Implementation is part of the change process. It is often hard work to get your team onside and ensure your innovation (or change) sticks. How will you measure the effectiveness of your innovation? How will you maintain a spirit of experimentation, especially if your team feel a bit over the latest innovation?
Well-executed change comes from great design. Tweaking your operation, and increasing the ratio of you working on the business, rather than in it, helps get you into a mindset for thoughtfully designing change.
The next article in this series builds on this leader mindset. This sixth and final article covers psychological perspectives and techniques for leading change.
Our book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out our online course on Change Management.
References
1. Dalio R. Principles. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 2017.
2. Collins J. Good to Great. London, England: Random House Business Books; 2001.
3. Greene R. The 33 Strategies of War. Sydney, Australia: Hodder Australia; 2005.
4. Gerber ME. The E Myth Revisited. New York, NY: HarperAudio; 1995.