The Upscale Operations Lead session is an opportunity for attendees to explore common scaling challenges, the frameworks and processes for dealing with complexity and to meet like-minded Operations Leads and build a community of operators.
Led by a scale coach, this meetup session will tackle the most common functional challenges faced by Operations Leads, followed up by an in-depth discussion about scaling your team.
Scale Coaches:
Session Takeaways:
OPS SCALING KEY CONCEPTS with Divinia Knowles
Adjust to business phase
Blitzscaling chart that takes into account:
When companies are rapidly scaling, it’s easy to lose track of things going on in different functions which adds to the complexity of scaling. It’s extremely important to take a step back and take time to reflect, by doing regular retrospectives to assess what stage of growth the company is currently at. This can be done by taking the 3 points from the Blitzscaling chart above into account.
Culture and the systemic organisation
Org as a wave (Gestalt) - Chidiac
There are 3 distinct parts to an organisational culture:
As you scale, you may find the depth getting increasingly bigger and it’s easy to get lost in it if you don’t provide clarity from the beginning. The depth is not fixed and will fluctuate depending on the clarity that you provide from the beginning.Think about it from the perspective of a new employee coming in and what they see initially, people who have been there for a long time will see everything but newcomers will find it difficult.
Business as operating system (location agnostic)
Scaling organisations often start with a functional looking organisation and then as they reach scale, it diversifies. This is because as a company matures and reaches product market fit, it’ll need to restructure around what it’s currently doing and focusing on. It’s never fixed; there is a constant restructuring, ask yourself ‘do we have things in the right places?’ ‘Do we have the right information flows and feedback loops?’ ‘Is it working?’
These questions will help figure out your businesses model and market dynamics.
Structures:
Clarity, comms and decision making
Greatness - David Marquet
The key concept is giving away control which has 2 underlying pillars;
If you don’t give up decision making power, it’s really hard to scale
Competency - behaviours to get to where they need to be
Use this framework if you’re ‘struggling to give away your legos’. It shows the severity of certain classes of decisions, e.g. only board members should be making ‘Root’ decisions. It gives you a span to think about who can make what decisions.
Clarity - vision, mission, strategy, goals
Management & leadership excellence
Focus on how you make managers and leaders excellent
Define what manager excellence is and how can you ensure they are equipped with frameworks, tools, and training. Remember that being highly technically skilled does not automatically mean that person would make a great manager.
OPS SCALING KEY LEARNINGS
OPS LEARNINGS
Dee Coakley, Boundless
Ops teams
Access to talent
International ops
Fundraising
FRAMEWORKS/PROCESSES
> Goal setting
It’s important to be crystal clear in setting goals and that should be obvious.
Take that time away as a SLT and be deliberate about what you want to achieve and how you want to get there. Build a process and communicate it to more junior members of the team, don’t just assume everyone is clear on it.
> People planning
When to bring people onboard?
Implement a structured process. Instead of fortnightly or monthly meetings, try 3-weekly meetings where all SLT meet to talk through all roles currently being hired for, any issues in current teams and set actions for the next meeting in 3 weeks. It makes you focused on helping people to deliver.
Talk about any gaps - where do we have capacity issues or where are we not performing as we should? Is there a role we can make from that? What does a hire look like? Decisions should all be made in that meeting. Regarding people on probation - talk about them all and when they get to the point of being through, get line manager, CEO and COO to physically sign a document to show they have passed probation.
> Culture articulation
Goes with the goal setting.
It’s important to talk about culture which should be defined from beginning. As people join the SLT, it’s important to have conversations about what the organization’s culture is. Culture should be something that people understand from how they see others behave. Articulating it in writing on a regular basis can raise interesting conversations, questions and debates.
> Documentation
Process and culture documentation is important for distributed teams - make sure you do this. For core location teams, it is easier to pick up, but think about people who don’t come into the office everyday and how hard it can be for them.
SCALING WORKSHOP AND DISCUSSION
Simple coaching model
Start with a topic - where would you like to end up with it?
What is the state of it?
What can you do to remove barriers and limitations?
How do you move forward? Could be a step or an idea
Biggest current ops scaling challenges
Goal: Getting people to adopt process or being too process driven but adapting to change
How to embed transformational change
Reality: Identifying it is frustrating, some people oppose moving towards one direction, how do you measure success?
Options: Why? Sell the benefits to people, either adapting or adopting
Allowing people to be part of the change and identity blockers to remove as regularly as you can with retrospective processes
Helping people identity the metrics of failures and benefits
What didn’t allow you to learn or adopt?
Way forward: Establish that psychological safely
Nurturing a culture of mistakes
Change management
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Goal: Sustaining consistency at scale
Reality: Geographical differences and nuances between those, team you join into, differences in individuals and teams
Documentation which is lacking or not followed leads to inconsistent customer experience
Options: Consolidate knowledge and being diverse and inclusive
Acknowledging that they are non negotiable
Holding the line - being clear if someone is not complying that this may not be the right place for them
Way forward: Having systems for when teams aren’t working well
Buddy system for new starters, deliberate onboarding and having ownership
Getting people to engage with company before officially joining
Employee journey
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Goal: Processes and adoption of them
Shadow processes - when someone decides they’re gonna do something their own way
Reality: Inconsistent work that is not replicated in all teams
Options: Demonstrate failure and its cost in a controlled way
Splitting teams up so you have cross functional team collaboration to find the best way to do something
Way forward: to demonstrate, get a customer (not biggest customer, get them to consent) to go along with these ‘shadow processes’
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Goal: Move from generalists to specialists
Reality: Team have resistance to change, like the variety of work
Options: Messaging - hard to envisage what that change will be but be transparent
Trialling things - the primary role you want someone to do but add secondary role
Focus on recruitment and see who else you need to bring in
Way Forward: Having discussions with people trialling the roles - is it the right place for the person?
‘Giving away your legos’ shared language that everyone knows what it means
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Goal: Alignment across different teams and locations, frictions, overcommitting or overpromising
Reality: Unrealistic expectations cross teams
What is involved when delivering something?
Areas not understanding each other
Capacity changes over time as you scale
Options: Having structure in place so you have accountability
Make sure product offering is clearly defined, know when to say no
Way forward: Defining the customer journey is the first step - do it regularly as things change
Be clear on what we can deliver comfortably
Have a structure in place to know when you should take a project on or not
Giving people the opportunity to be listened to
READING LIST: