Your Choice: A Journey of Fighting Fires or Lighting Up the Score Board? (Part I)

Connecting the dots will help you determine your next steps to leverage your strengths: steps towards moving a reactionary business to a proactive operation

I never realized it until the last couple years, but I was learning leadership and operations management from the very early stages of my life. It’s similar to if you had parents that loved music…I knew songs even as a young kid that I have heard, but recognize details, bands, song snippets, that were far before my time. I unconsciously learned so much from my father through his professional experience in leadership about a few core principles:

• Treatment of people

• Character

• Simplicity over flash

• People over profit, drives profit

• Serve customers and associates, not the structure itself

• Entrepreneurial spirit

As I launched my career, I just wanted to work and I quickly found an opportunity to be groomed and professionalize my inherent knowledge and “feel” for business, and was able to see others in action from the early stages of my career. Early on, my job was recruiting, hands-on smile and dial, recruiting engineers, technicians, supervisors, designers, and quality inspectors, etc.

During that time, I saw directors, vice presidents, account managers, and other leaders lead groups, offices, regions, accounts, which showed me the opportunity to run operations, build partnerships, and grow and retain clients. I didn’t know what it was and why I would be good at it, but I was already an operator in 2006. (I also worked in light manufacturing operations and led a delivery operation prior to that, so again, my specialty was being built into me without even knowing it).

Making the shift to an ops role officially was not easy in a sales and talent driven company. Ops was not seen as a “producer” role, which makes me laugh to think back. One thing I learned, is that you often have either the wrong lens or wrong people, if you see Ops as an overhead expense versus a value driving organization. Operations should be built to run and deliver on business, but also grow the business through customer obsession, continuous improvement, and scale. Operations retains customers and people.

In so many firms, operations directly impacts revenue and or income. Profit is in the people, not taken from the people. For me, it was a natural shift from talent recruitment to more of a broader strategic service delivery and operations approach. I started the shift naturally on my own without even thinking about it. This was one way I found my superpower, my zone of genius, my area of expertise, and again, I had no idea what it was for a long time.

At this point in this week’s OpCo, you may be wondering where I am going with this - hang in there, as this story will take us back to the main point here and give some context and hopefully provides some spark into your own professional career journey and life.

How it started professionally

Early on it was about protecting business, “Protect the flag”, with client retention and saturation for growth. Process improvements to streamline business, while most saw it as staffing, “get a req fill a req”. I saw a managed program or service, delivering an outcome, and if there wasn’t one, find a way to grow it into one. I never enjoyed transactional one-off engagements nearly as much, but those become second nature once you run large programs and services.

Acceleration of interest and skills

Still quite early on, taking on leadership of a quality, supply chain and logistics program, I shifted to operations with a process improvement focus head-on. I was officially leading in my second job out of school, after my second promotion, a small delivery team. But in this new role, responsibility went from 80 up to 250 headcount at times, fluctuating based on volume daily and weekly. It was a real business, with a lot of people, and physical work, not only knowledge/service work. Talent was just the mechanism to deliver and bill the customer for our service. Talent wasn’t the business. The business was delivering world class services with the highest level of partnership, delivery and relationship. Quality work, quality service, and I learned a lot. I was leading this operation while also running an additional program and growing my responsibility in a third major program.

This experience allowed me to make it as customer centric and ops-driven as I could. I delivered on people development leadership reporting, continuous improvement, staffing, and strategy development, most of which I did at my own instinct, and naturally gravitated toward this method and mindset. Account management, client management, and operations management. I was running a small business from 2007, bigger than many small businesses, and then in 2008, the stakes raised significantly with this program, allowing me to run a fully outsourced operation on site at an auto OEM. I had an on-site project manager reporting to me, ad we were able to retain and scale a program, which no one thought could be retained.

Then seven years into my career at this organization, I was fortunate to be promoted into a delivery operations role officially. I spent seven years finding my niche, a large complex business that either no one wanted or could run. Turning around, stabilizing, scaling and making profitable programs, far larger than most businesses in the US, became my thing. Then I was in it as my job, which was amazing.

I wasn’t planning to go this in depth on my early career, but I share this because it took this learning experience discovery and mindset to develop my specialization which has allowed to understand the value in proactive management, and leadership, versus riding the reactive ups and downs. Even at that point from 2007-2013, I wasn’t sure what it was, what I was doing, or what was next, but you definitely connect the dots looking back. It recently took me the last two year, 2022-2024, to really define what I do and why. My specialization: Empowering Organizations to Unlock Greatness through Scaling People, Process, and Technology.

It didn’t take over night or even in 2 years, it’s been a true journey. As I have developed my technical aptitude for the work, I learned to navigate all the deterrence along the way. Politics, financials, resources, corporate bureaucracy, all the stuff that often doesn’t serve your team or your clients, that became more of the job the more I rose in executive leadership roles. I realized sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re the best, the worst, or in the middle. It also takes relationships at all levels and that sixth sense to understand when to dig, jump, or duck, but you can’t let the game distract you, as you have an operation to run, people to lead, and clients to deliver for - that is why you are there. This experience thought me the basic fundamentals of operations unintentionally, and how to lead proactively, otherwise someone is there to take your lunch. And to get great at taking on all the other stuff too, because it is necessary to embrace within your organization to have sustainable success and fulfillment.

I started writing about proactive leadership and this turned into a little tale about a journey of discovery for those graduating this May June and beyond. Hopefully this offers a little perspective on finding your thing. Sometimes it takes twenty years of work to find it, but if you start looking back, connecting the dots, and considering your strengths, interests, and unique character, coupled with the experience from school and working, you will find your thing, once you’re ready to find it.

This journey is what it took for me to understand the value of proactive leadership, the how, and the impact. Once you can find ways to make the shift from fighting today’s fire as your priority and business, you can actually work on the business instead of in the business.

I’ll get back to more about proactive leadership next week as a continuation on how I learned the practice, and next will be how to do it yourself, or help your team drive it.

Hopefully, this added a little value to your business or your career. Thank you for reading. Please repost or share with someone who may benefit from this edition.

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