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In: Decision Making, Operations Leadership

In my opinion, being accountable is one of the most positive personality and leadership traits. When important things need to get done, you and/or your team state with confidence, “I own that. We will review what needs to get done and provide an update next week. We will achieve the end of month target.” When things don’t go as planned, you and/or your team state, “My bad. This should have been done by X date, but I missed that mark. I apologize and would like to discuss an alternative date. I assure you that we’ll meet the adjusted time line.” When a direct report missesRead More →

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In: Decision Making, Improving Results

Lately, I have found myself uttering the phrases “we need to pick our battles ” often followed by “there are bigger fish to fry” at least once per week- enough to notice it and write a blog post about it. When running a complex business operation, there will always be problems to solve and coworkers that you disagree with, but if you take action on every problem and confront every disagreement, you will actually lessen not increase progress. Strategically, picking your battles will increase your leadership effectiveness. How do you know which battles to fight? Ask yourself this set of questions… Does the issue inRead More →

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In: Decision Making

Does the output need to be error free or is “80% good”, good enough? To be effective as an operations leader, and to successfully drive business results, we must understand when and how to apply these two different business concepts. We must execute with both quality and speed. Error Free: Error free outputs (e.g. documents, reports, online content) are just what they sound like – error free. The recipients or users of the output can assume that every data element has been checked and re-checked; that the information comes from a trusted “gold source” and that the data was pulled and massaged correctly. Business outputsRead More →