COO and Advisor
Advisor at Nirvana / freelance COO
Joined an 'end to end' operations project team at one of the big US banks, automating/scaling existing operational processes within sales and trading. Since then, taken on bigger projects (dual with a focus on risk management) and ended up as Chief Operating Officer for a few ventures.
Agree a clear plan for the week. Tackle a few key issues to fix/automate/scale/deliver them. Work with teams as much as possible and work with management to plan/think about the strategy (they have to all line up!). Take a step back to see if we're missing anything.. Then later in the week be honest about what worked/ what didn't (and why/whare are the metrics telling us). Meet in person to have a nice end of week celebration with team / end the week on a positive.
Moving from a corporate 'stable' job in Banking in New York, to a growing scale up FinTech in Berlin. Some people thought I was mad.
I listen to and observe what the teams are doing as if my life depended on it. leadership is 90% listening. 10% speaking.
It sounds strange, but whatsapp. it's an immensely simple, reliable and convenient (free!) tool that works for sharing ideas / updates / having calls / keeping in contact / doing quick polls / being super agile when travelling. I would be lost without it.
Take a step back. People act the way you act, so as a leader you need to be calm, measured and objective. Deal with the situation (client,tech issue, whatever it is) to the best of the ability, then later you can step back and think about what went wrong. Weekly incident review meetings (honest, open and constructive) should be essential in ANY organisation.
Not just knowing the company strategy but understanding how to empower/support the team to deliver what is needed from an operational perspective, to execute that strategy.
That 'operational excellence' is seen as binary, 'achievable' thing. That's nonsense. operations is all about continuous improvement / optimization and scaling processes ... day in, day out, in the best possible way. In a tough environment when everyone is working hard and there are countless problems, then a single 'win' for the day (technical, product, client, revenue etc) can be a big step forward and that is 'excellence' in itself. Most people who ask what operational excellence is, rarely have been deep in the weeds in operations/ventures/tough delivery projects in my experience.
Automation, scaling, new tools, new ideas and the curious thinking of Ops people. That will solve many many more problems.
know the details within operations. inside out. If you have the details (of processes, data, touch points, workflows, client needs etc etc) it becomes an absolute super power. I didn't always realise that (coming from consulting) .. but if you're an expert on the details and can articulate that within the teams, you'll end up running the show.