After years in retail, sales, logistics and hospitality, I have understood that industries change much faster than the principles of management.
The product can be goods in a warehouse, an order that has to leave on time, or a hotel room. Systems change. KPIs change. Even job titles change.
But in the end, an Operations Manager almost always faces the same questions:
Do people know what is expected of them?
Does the process work?
Does the data show what is really happening?
Who owns the problem?
And what are we changing so that the same problem does not come back?
Today I would sum up my working philosophy in five principles.
1. People
Operations do not work without the people who keep them running every day.
I have worked in environments with pressure, targets, delays, mistakes and moments when you had to react quickly. I have learned that a standard can be high and a demand can be firm without lowering the dignity of the person in front of you.
Pressure can be fair.
Humiliation is not.
For me a manager has to be able to ask for accountability without using fear as a way of managing.
Because a team that is afraid to show its mistakes does not have fewer mistakes.
It only has fewer visible mistakes.
2. Standards
I have learned not to put much trust in processes that only work because an experienced person "knows how it's done".
If the result depends on the right person being on shift, then the organisation has knowledge, but it does not yet have a standard.
That is why I believe in SOPs, checklists and clear ways of working.
But an SOP is not good because it looks professional in a document. It is good when someone else gets the same result, even under pressure and without the SOP's author nearby to ask.
For me, standardisation is not meant to take thinking away from people. It is meant to stop them having to reinvent things the organisation should already know.
3. Data
A KPI is a signal, not a conclusion.
I have learned not to be satisfied just with the fact that a percentage is red or green.
If delays go up, the question is not only how many there are. The question is why.
If we have damage, mistakes, loading times outside the standard or another operational problem, I want to know where the problem is concentrated and what is causing it.
This is where ways of thinking like Pareto and 5 Why help me. Not because every problem needs a big methodology, but because it is very easy to fight the symptom and call it improvement.
The data has to take me to the floor. And the floor has to help me understand the data.
If these two worlds do not meet, the report can look good and the operation can keep having the same problem.
4. Ownership
For me, ownership does not mean taking every problem onto your own shoulders. It means that no problem is left without an owner.
I understood this very clearly in the handover. A shift can work very well, but if the information does not pass to the next shift, the organisation loses part of that work.
The same goes for leadership without a title. You can take initiative. You can identify the problem. You can help. You can propose. But you also have to know where your authority ends.
For me, ownership is:
I will not ignore it because "it's not mine".
But also:
I will not make a decision that is not mine to make just because I am the person who saw the problem.
That balance is one of the things I want to keep as a manager, always.
5. Continuous improvement
My question used to be, often:
How do we solve this problem?
Today it is:
How do we solve it, why did it happen, and what do we change so it does not come back?
This change in the way I think is perhaps one of the most important professional developments for me.
Operations do not improve through one big project once a year. They improve through many small corrections, made continuously and grounded in the reality of the work.
What I never want to do as a manager
I do not want to use fear as a tool for leading.
I do not want to ask people for a standard that I myself am not willing to understand or respect.
I do not want to hide a problem just because the KPI looks better without it.
I do not want to become the manager who knows everything because nobody else has been trained.
And I do not want the team to need my presence for every small decision.
If a team only works when the manager is in the room, for me that manager has not yet built a system.
What my ideal week as an Operations Manager would look like
Every day I would start with a short overview of the operation. Not with an hour-long report. I want to know: what has deviated, what is still open, where we have risk and where my presence is needed.
I would check the main KPIs, but I would not spend the day just looking at dashboards.
An important part of my week has to be on the floor. To see the process. To talk to people. To understand the problems that do not always make it into the report.
Once a week I would want a deeper review of performance:
What is improving?
What is getting worse?
Which problems keep repeating?
Which actions are still open?
Who owns them?
And which problems are no longer incidents, but patterns?
I would also want dedicated time for people: feedback, coaching, and conversations where the question is not only "what went wrong", but also "what is stopping you from doing the job well?".
Reports tell me where to look. The floor tells me what is happening. A manager has to do both.
The first 90 days in a new role
Days 1–30: Understand before you change
In the first month I would not come in with the idea that I am there to "fix" the organisation. I would learn.
I would get to know the team, the processes, the KPIs, the customer, the dependencies between departments and the way decisions are made. I would spend a lot of time on the floor. I would talk to the people who do the work every day. I would look at the SOPs and compare them with reality.
I would also try to understand what does not show up straight away on the dashboard:
Where is time being lost?
Which problems are already considered "normal"?
What has to be done by hand because the process does not work well?
Where do we have one critical person without whom the work gets stuck?
At the end of the 30 days I want a clear map of the operation. Not a long list of things I want to change.
Days 31–60: Set the priorities
In the second phase I would start separating the symptoms from the real problems. I would look at the data. I would look for the patterns that repeat. And I would choose a few priorities, not twenty projects at once.
For each priority I want it to be clear:
- What is the problem?
- How do we know it is a problem?
- What is the likely cause?
- Who owns it?
- What are we going to change?
- How will we know whether the change worked?
In this phase I would also start the small corrections that can be made without destabilising the operation.
Days 61–90: Turn improvements into a way of working
By day 90 I would not claim to have transformed the operation. Three months are not magic.
But I would want some things to have become clearer:
- The main KPIs and what they mean.
- The ownership of problems.
- The way the handover is done.
- The process for following up actions.
- The standards that are actually used.
- A regular rhythm in which the team checks not only performance, but also improvement.
My goal for the 90 days would not be to show how much I changed. It would be for the organisation to have a clearer picture of itself and some better mechanisms for improving.
Where I am still learning
There is a lot I want to develop further.
I want to deepen my knowledge of data analysis and of how operations connect to the P&L, forecasting and financial decisions at a broader level.
I want to gain more experience leading operations with a larger organisational scope, where decisions go beyond one shift or one function and affect several teams at once.
And I want to keep improving at something I do not think is ever finished: knowing when to step in and when to let people solve things themselves.
Because my goal is not to become the person who has the answer to everything. I want to become the manager who builds a team where the answers do not always have to come from him.
How I would like to be described
If one day I asked the people who have worked with me how they would describe me, I would not ask them to say I was the smartest manager in the room.
This would be enough for me:
"He asked a lot of us, but he was there with us, he listened to us, and he tried to leave the process better than he found it."
That is the Operations Manager I want to be.
Not the one who looks most important when the operation is in trouble.
The one who builds an operation that needs rescuing less and less.