It’s Time to Reframe the Strategic Role and Contribution of Operations Leaders

By Magnus Finnström, Julian McCarthy, Steve Sichak, and Ian Simington, Executive Fellows, The Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance

In the face of supply chain instability, uncertainty, and other challenges stemming from the COVID-19 crisis, Operations Leaders have been front and center. Unprecedented disruptions in demand and supply, combined with prolonged uncertainty and fragility of the workforce, necessitated rapid and sometimes dramatic shifts in operational practice to stabilize operations. 

The range of necessary responses by Operations Leaders has been wide and continues to evolve. In many sectors, significant parts of the supply chain experienced shutdowns, sometimes halting companies’ entire operations. Other organizations needed to rapidly refocus their operations in response to new demand patterns. Those organizations in critical sectors such as healthcare moved to the opposite extreme, aggressively ramping up operations to meet urgent needs for personal protection equipment, medication, and devices needed for testing and direct patient care. 

As a result, companies in almost every industry went through and are still undergoing a rapid, massive operational reset. The nature of the reset varies across sectors and operations, and while transformation efforts are underway, in many cases the final outcome remains inherently unclear.  

Our in-depth, continuing working sessions with a select group of Operations Leaders over the past year provide profoundly important lessons on the contribution these leaders can make to corporate strategy and resilience.  Significantly, these lessons suggest a reframing of the strategic role Operations Leaders can and must play to enable their companies to survive and thrive in a turbulent future.

Operations Leaders at the Eye of the Storm

The Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance hosted a group of Operations Leaders and executives over a 13-month period from May 2020 to June 2021 in a series of interviews, discussions, and problem-solving sessions to discuss what did and did not work in their response to COVID-19 and what they see as further challenges.  

These working sessions occurred just as the Operations Leaders were grappling in real-time with crisis conditions and the need for urgent transformation.   Our ongoing conversations revealed multiple stories of inspired, selfless, and frequently courageous leadership.  Often behind the scenes and out of public view, these Operations Leaders and their teams worked tirelessly and creatively, addressing sometimes overwhelming challenges to mitigate the effects of bottlenecks and disruptions in complex, multi-tiered, global supply chains.  Without their efforts, the negative impact of the pandemic on their global businesses, including thousands of suppliers, customers, and employees, could have been far worse than actually occurred.

In almost every case, these Operations Leaders were called upon to take a more prominent role in decisions and actions affecting the direction and future of their companies.  The concurrent challenges to stabilizing and re-synchronize supply chain operations, while also maintaining safety, productivity, and quality performance, unavoidably required extraordinary leadership.  

Implications Extending Well Beyond the Current Crisis

While valuable leadership lessons abound in these Operations Leaders’ recent experiences on how to lead complex operations through a crisis, even more, important implications emerged that transcend the current crisis.  The realization quickly emerged that in many respects the operational crisis associated with COVID-19 has been a ‘dress rehearsal’ for a turbulent future.

In a future encompassing climate change, technological disruption, global trade restructuring and reshoring, future pandemics, and other sources of dynamic change and uncertainty, the extraordinary leadership demands facing Operations Leaders will continue not to subside.  In this context, a reframing of the strategic role of Operations Leaders is necessary to enable these leaders to make the lasting contributions to corporate strategy and resilience that are necessary for this demanding future.

Our Operations Leaders demonstrated during this past year that an integral part of their role must be to reassure, realign and gain collaboration among a diverse set of stakeholders inside and outside each leader’s own company. Frequently, the complex task of stabilizing operations under uncertainty required these leaders to expand their scope of influence to encompass not only operations employees but also C-suite peers, customers, and multi-tiered supply chain partners.

We also heard stories of bold and courageous decision-making in the face of deep uncertainty, under time pressure and without reliable data, resulting in pivotal outcomes: protecting the lives and safety of employees, addressing urgent needs of customers, managing complex supply issues across a supply chain ecosystem, and ultimately protecting the well-being and survival of their companies.

In our next blog, “Five Higher Ambition Principles that Help Stabilize Operations in a Crisis,” we will explore specific principles and actions that enabled these leaders to amplify their impact.