Chick Operating Officer

It is interesting to note that the symptoms of operational crisis are often remarkably similar, regardless of the underlying cause or the type of company.  The often-used hamster wheel analogy of running around in circles and getting nowhere really does fit very well. 

Here are some of the things you are likely to observe when an organization has lost its grip operationally:

• Everyone is crazy-busy.    Activity level is at fever pitch.  Email flow is sky-high, back-to-back meetings are continuously booked, and extremely long hours are the norm.  Senior managers are inaccessible, even to each other.  But why is it that nothing ever seems to get crossed off the list and few projects of substance are completed? 
• I’ve been in this meeting before.   The same people, sitting in the same room, discussing the same issue … over and over again.  Critical issues may well need to be re-visited, but a consistent pattern can indicate an organizational inability to bring anything to closure. 
• Making a list and checking it twice.  Lists of action items, projects, and ‘priorities’ multiply within the organization, and the lists get longer and longer.  “Put it on the list” becomes the standard answer to every issue, whether critical or trivial.  Well-managed lists are, of course, an important management tool.  The distinction here is that the list-making process gets out of control and becomes an end unto itself – an easy form of fake action-taking and deferred decision-making.      
• Oh what a beautiful … irrelevant document.   In a corollary to list-making, administrative tasks related to operational matters – rather than the underlying operational issues themselves – seem to consume the business.  There might be a project underway to neatly re-draw all organizational charts, those ubiquitous lists will be well structured and regularly re-typed, and more and more metrics will be presented in increasingly elaborate formats.  Powerpoint decks get bigger and more ornate, and the specificity of the template increases.  Don’t even think about omitting Slide #87, ‘Year-on-Year Comparison of Top Five Market Trends in Decreasing Order of Impact’.   
• Hamsters behaving badly.   Everyone in the organization is cranky and tired, and they sense that something is wrong.  Bad behavior escalates, with an emphasis on political maneuvering. 

This situation can occur in mature businesses, generally because of new management with insufficient operating experience, or because of an overall leadership vacuum.  More often, however, it happens as a result of growth or M&A activity, and it’s part of a natural evolution.  In a small business, an organic, somewhat chaotic approach to management works just fine.  Critical information can be retained in the heads of one or two people, and systems and processes are simply unnecessary.   But growth (in size and/or complexity) eventually pushes the business across a critical threshold where the original mechanisms start to fall apart.  Management panic can then exacerbate the situation, particularly when the founders are entrepreneurs with little interest or experience in running a scaled-up enterprise. 

While an operational meltdown is clearly a call to action, there are some good-news aspects to being in this situation.  First of all, it’s fixable.  Not instantaneously and not easily, but operational issues are nominally within our control as managers.  External drivers such as macroeconomic crisis, major market shifts, or technological obsolescence are much, much scarier.

Secondly, in growth scenarios it is likely that a business will hit the wall operationally before a real business/financial crisis occurs.  If you see all of the indicators noted above and the business is cooking along financially, you’re in luck!  Business performance will eventually suffer if things aren’t brought under control operationally, but you have been blessed with a leading indicator.  There is an opportunity to take action before serious damage can occur.