Building resilience through Operational Rigor: A leadership playbook
I started a new role and asked my manager about the leadership team’s perception of the team
“Missing deadlines, communication breakdowns, disarray, and a lack of coherent vision.”
Wow, my first day just got very interesting!
Instead of focusing on business outcomes first, I decided to tackle our main problem head-on: operational rigor. By addressing this, I wanted to create a strong base to build on.
The transformation wasn't easy or fast, but the shift was palpable. We stopped missing deadlines, communication was consistent and crisp, and a long-term narrative emerged. As we started getting into a rhythm, our leadership team noticed. Doubt turned into belief, and we gained confidence in achieving bigger results.
Establishing operational excellence is critical for leaders, as it forms the foundation for unlocking team performance. A well-structured and effective operational framework clarifies, simplifies processes, and eliminates busy work, allowing team members to focus. Leaders develop a sense of accountability and predictability among team members by instilling a culture of operational excellence, promoting a shared commitment to accomplishing company goals. This dedication, together with more efficient processes, greatly increases total productivity, creating an atmosphere that rewards creativity and flexibility.
Efficiency + Consistency = Resilience
Operational rigor is an ongoing evaluation of how teams are executing in pursuit of the company's mission and goals. Efficient processes of today become the overhead of tomorrow if they are not evaluated frequently based on the needs of the organizations. Processes are meant to serve people, not the other way around.
My playbook to unlock resilience is a combination of efficiency and consistency.
This plan consists of an optional “cold start” plan for leaders to evaluate when they start leading a new organization.
Cold start
Observe
Plan
Communicate
Warm start
Run the business (RTB)
Grow the business (GTB)
Communicate
Cold start guide
Every leader’s journey in a new organization should start with a broadly communicated 90-day plan that focuses on three areas: observe, plan, and communicate.
Observe
Focus on the first 30 days to observe how the following:
Mission: How does the team ladder up to serve the company's mission? How successful has the team been in delivering on that?
People: Embark on a listening tour to hear from a minimum of four layers - your leads, your peers across functions, your reports, and your skips. I would highly recommend a plan to reach every single person on your team over the first six months.
North Star: What is the North Star the team is aiming for? Is this vision aggressive but achievable?
Plan
Based on the foundation of "observe," partner with your peers and direct reports to build, revise, or acknowledge the following:
Goals / OKRs: How will the team measure success? How does each goal ladder up to ensure alignment with company goals?
Processes: How does the team execute? How does the team communicate? Are these processes helping teams be efficient, or are they slowing teams down?
Communicate
At the end of 90 days, broadly communicate the good, the bad, and the ugly. Teams expect transparency from their leaders to build trust. In addition, leverage your working team to gut-check the learnings with their teams to provide additional feedback.
Warm start guide
The playbook to ensure operational rigor on an ongoing basis consists of three parts: how to run the business well (RTB), how to grow the business (GTB), and how to communicate.
Run the Business (RTB)
RTB consists of conversations and modes that recur frequently and help you keep a pulse on “how” and "what.”
Goal / OKR tracking: Weekly conversation with cross-functional partners to determine progress, roadblocks, and escalations required to make progress towards delivering on goals.
Product Prioritization: Bi-weekly conversation with team + cross-functional partners to determine what new ideas are prioritized for the teams to focus on
People conversations: These are recurring 1:1 or team conversations to assist, coach, unblock, and align. These include one-on-one conversations with your direct reports, a subset of your cross-functional partners, your team meeting with all of your directs, and a team meeting with all cross-functional partners.
Product Reviews: These are user problem and/or solution discussions on problems your teams are solving. I recommend having a sign-up sheet for teams to sign up in advance and have them send out a pre-read 24 hours in advance to ensure a meaningful discussion.
Grow the business (GTB)
GTB consists of conversations that go beyond your immediate teams and help you understand the connective tissue with partner teams, to make angle changes possible over the short and long term.
Extended cross-functional syncs: These include conversations with finance, business development, marketing, PR, HR, and more. Each of these could be on a separate cadence but are critical conversations for leaders to understand and inform these partners about upcoming milestones, risks, and dependencies.
Strategy reviews: These are strategic discussions on new and/or revised strategies aimed at finding angle-changing opportunities to serve the company mission and exceed expectations on goals. I recommend having a sign-up sheet for this too, such that teams can work backward from a date they have signed up for.
Monthly / Quarterly Business Review: These reviews are deep dives into all aspects of the business with your senior leadership team—strategy, goals, progress, risks, new ideas, and a list of burning questions to get their input on.
Communicate
The most critical aspect of a leader’s role is to communicate frequently, concisely, and consistently.
Organization communications: These are frequent (weekly or biweekly) and aimed at communicating the highlights, progress, and risks the organization has seen since the last update. Each of these topics should include a maximum of 3 bullets to ensure that the overall update is at most half a page long. This is a carefully crafted note that the leader sends to senior leadership as well as the entire organization.
Project / team-driven communications: For projects with high visibility, the team should send updates to the senior leadership team and the v-team. These updates are sent weekly by the team driving the project.
Leadership communications: This is a monthly consolidated update sent by the leader to the senior leadership team and the organization. This includes progress on goals, notable user outcomes, upcoming milestones, and celebrating people on the team for their achievements.
Targeted communications: As a leader, you are responsible for all aspects of the team: well-being, feedback from customers and employees, employee resources, and more. By partnering with the internal communications team, you can build a cadence of communications targeted to inform, educate, and share with the organization.
As leaders, embracing operational rigor becomes our playbook for building resilience—transforming challenges into opportunities and fortifying our teams for ongoing success. In the symphony of leadership, operational excellence plays a harmonious tune of adaptability, innovation, and enduring strength.