COO : WAYS OF RUNNING OPERATIONS PROFESSOR You view every person and every goal

COO : WAYS OF RUNNING OPERATIONS

PROFESSOR

You view every person and every goal as an opportunity to educate the staff so that the continually improve and as a consequence the organization, it’s goods, services, and reputation improve. You manage, advise, counsel, and direct where necessary. You stay actively involved with each person and their duties. You contribute ‘suggestions’ and keep honing the organization by pushing decisions downward, while maintaining a safety net in case there are points of failure.

When? When you are building a growth company.

(I run operations like an MBA program. And it works. And people love it. )

MANAGER

You have a competent and stable team, and your primary function is to handle exceptions, and those exceptions are generally limited to the choice of how to allocate scarce resources.

When? When you have built a stable company, but not a growth company.

DELEGATOR

You have people competent at performing tasks, but not yet at achieving goals. You control the planning and decision making then delegate the activities to team members, and in general, control the flow of work through the organization.

When? When you don’t have the scale (or money) to build a team of people who can manage production without your help.

OBSERVER

You have competent people and you really don’t have to do anything because there is very little change in the organization over time, and little prospect of change.

When? When there is little adaptation or innovation or change occurring in the organization and the individuals in the company merely need someone to come to in those few cases of where conflict resolution is needed.

HARASSER

You do not have competent talent at planning and decision making, and you are not competent at planning and decision-making, and do not know what to do, so you harass people as a means of getting information out of them the only way that you know how – precisely because you cannot get it out of them through creating value.

When? When your company is a poor performer with a poor executive team and they cannot attract better talent for budgetary, cultural, or market segment reasons.

ABSENTEE

Enough said.

When? Um. Seriously? When everyone knows the end is near but no one has the courage to shut down operations and write down the debt because it is still possible to collect a paycheck for another year.