The Key Relationship All Owners Should Manage

If you are running a growing financial planning business with annual revenues above £1M (and on its way to £2M, £3M or £5M) one of your key leadership challenges is how effectively you work with your Operations Manager.

All business owners and Ops Managers should have read Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business, by Gino Wickman and Mark Winters. Not only that, you should have met with each other to discuss its contents.

Why?

Because this relationship is the key to your success.

What Do I See?

As your business grows it becomes self-evident that you can’t do it all. The key to business growth that’s fun, fulfilling and sustainable is assembling a great team, which allows you, the business owner, to stick to what you love and are good at. Your Operations Manager is the person who can drive the hiring, firing, training and management of your team, protecting you from the emotional drain and time involved in doing so.

However, far too often I see mildly dysfunctional relationships between owners and their Operations Managers and it’s almost always the business owner’s issue.

I’ve known this as a challenge for many clients I work with, and let me be clear, these are all good people; they’re doing their best.

I wanted to find some real world, specific behaviours I could pinpoint for this blog, that readers might recognise and so be able to do something about them. So I asked my Operations Manager, Michelle, for some examples from her many years’ experience in the role.

She started by pointing me to a few quotes from Rocket Fuel. The authors say that the relationship between the Visionary (owner) and Integrator (Ops Manager) is like Yin and Yang.

Michelle is an experienced Operations Manager who has worked in far larger organisations than FP Advance. We feel lucky to have her working with us. Here are the signals from her lifetime of work experience that she says make her feel undervalued:

• “Not being included in strategy setting and planning. Instead being told what the strategy is – not expecting any input or opinion – and being told that it now needs me to implement the strategic plan.”
  
  
• “Not truly listening to my opinions and thoughts. I say my piece but am regularly “over-ruled” by the leader(s) with or without justification.”
  
  
• “The leader not giving up control. Giving me a to-do list like I’m just an implementor (often with no understanding of the why). It should be that I’m creating my own to-do list based on the Level 10 meetings, Rocks, etc and almost self-managing like a true partnership.”
  
  
• “Setting a strategic plan as a team, but then the leader goes off and does what they want anyway. This often causes organisational whiplash whereby not only myself but the wider business doesn’t know what they should be doing as they receive contradictory messages.”
  
  I’d add to Michelle’s last point above that the Operations person then gets blamed for lack of progress when the real cause is the owner’s behaviour, which undermines everything the Ops person is trying to do. But typically owners struggle to see this.

Michelle went on to say that we don’t do these things to her at FP Advance. She’s a valued and equal member of the senior leadership team consisting of me, my wife Debbie, and Michelle.

Again, as examples, I asked Michelle for some of the actions we take that she believes make our relationship work really well:

• “We have our quarterly Strategy Days which I feel like I lead based on knowing [all]¹ the numbers and what your personal and business Vision is (and I’m bought into it 100%).
  
  During these meetings we may not always agree on everything but any opposing views are discussed rationally so that even if my opinion is not the “winning” one, I feel listened to and I understand why.”
  
  
• “We have our weekly Level 10 meetings to go through the Issues List and we all bring up issues which are, again, discussed openly. It’s never about finger-pointing but more about ‘what is the real issue?’ and solving it without blame or making anyone feel bad.”
  
  
• “You may be hesitant about an idea or something that comes up, but I can tell that you always give it due consideration, even if that is not immediate and takes some time.”
  
  
• “You do sometimes go off and not follow the plan or process, but when I raise it with you enough times (because you may do it a few times), you eventually go “I see now the chaos that causes” and stop doing it.” (Just to prove we can all wander off track from our own advice from time to time!)

¹Author’s Note: Michelle see’s everything – including how much we earn.

Another Great Tool

Something else from Rocket Fuel that I’ve recommended to business owners trying to get this key relationship with their Ops Manager back on track is the Same Page Meeting.

This meeting is held monthly between the owner/s and the Operations Manager and lasts as long as it takes. It is held offsite and away from prying eyes so that if difficult conversations need to be had, they can be had, fully and frankly.

The goal of the meeting is for both parties to speak openly and honestly with each other about what’s working and what’s not from their respective viewpoints.

By the end of the meeting, the owner/s and Operations Manager need to be on the same page. They can then present a united front to the rest of the team back in the real world, which gets rid of the conflicting messages.

Check In With Yourself

If I asked you, “Do you value your Ops Manager?” you might be slightly offended. “Of course I do”, you’d tell me.

However, are you unwittingly exhibiting any of the behaviours that Michelle listed above that might be making your Operations Manager feel undervalued?

Self-awareness is critical in any good leader and sadly, just thinking about yourself more doesn’t get the job done. We need to be brave and open to feedback from people that we work with or trust. Could you sit down with your Operations Manager after showing them this blog and have a conversation requesting their feedback on how you are doing?

Yeah, scary.

But hugely valuable if you can take on the feedback and make some behavioural changes.

And remember, try not to respond immediately when you get each piece of feedback. Take a note and reflect on it for a week or so. Speak to other people about the feedback – maybe a spouse or trusted friend and see if they can add anything. Responding in the moment is likely to be defensiveness and won’t enhance that relationship. Pausing and reflecting will.

My guess is about 5% of leaders reading this blog will do that exercise. Will you be that 1 in 20 leader who is prepared to ‘go there’?

Let me know how you go

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