People power

Technical knowledge isn’t enough to be a successful operations manager,

you need great interpersonal skills too. Michelle Knott reports

Operations is a job of two halves, according to Graham Clark, senior lecturer in operations management at Cranfield University’s business school. On the one hand, for middle managers at least, there’s an expectation that they should demonstrate a high level of technical  competence in the process they’re managing. On the other, they should combine this with the leadership and management skills to oversee a substantial team of people. “If you’re too hands-off and managerial it can be difficult,” says Clark. “In most organisations, if you haven’t got that technical understanding, you don’t get the job. The expectation is that you know how your company does what it does and can do the day-to-day tasks that you’re asking others to do. You at least need to know the right questions to ask to give the impression that you understand everything that’s happening. To be honest, it can sometimes be a bit macho.” Nevertheless, many of the lessons learned in managing one process can be applied in another, so there is still scope to skip between different types of production. “In a way, production is production is production,”

“Suddenly you’re at the

top table with the big

boys and you have to

fight your corner”

says Paul Haigney, operations director at Pasta King. “You might be putting multiple components together to make anything from cars to pizzas. But in our industry we have extra layers of complexity to consider, such as food safety and health and safety on top of the technology and finance functions.” “There is a lot of commonality with other manufacturing, but one fundamental difference is that the products we make are consumed,” agrees David Seeckts, factory manager for Premier Foods. “You are always aware of the importance of food safety and the implications of getting it wrong.” “The other big difference is the timescale for decision making. There is pressure to move faster with less information available, so there’s often more judgement involved than in other manufacturing industries,” he comments. Although a certain level of technical competence is needed to work in operations, Clark says that companies could be missing a trick if they insist on always recruiting people from a similar background. “Traditionally, operations managers will have come up through the ranks, although that’s changing to some extent. In food, many of them will have been man and boy in the same industry and will have risen gradually through the system. That’s a strength because they know how things work, but it’s also a weakness because they can get too ingrained in how things are already done.” Before Haigney joined Pasta King, he spent five years working freelance, applying his already considerable experience across a wide range of food processes. He too believes that bringing in someone with a fresh perspective can be an advantage. “I found I could take my knowledge from site to site. It can help to bring in someone with a fresh pair of eyes because people often can’t see the wood for the trees,” he says. Even so, if someone from outside the food industry wants a job in operations, they may have to take a step sideways in their career, rather than aiming for immediate promotion. This is essentially what happened with Seeckts: “I initially did engineering and started my career in manufacturing working in the cable industry as a graduate trainee. I then made the call that I wanted to move into operations, so I moved sideways rather than up and started as a shift manager at Pedigree Petfoods.”

Be a people person

Technical competence alone is not enough to be successful in the operations function, however. Operations managers also need to know a lot about people because they typically have to manage an awful lot of them. Production functions often account for between 60% and 80% of the people in an organisation, so a good manager must be able to rally the troops. “It’s often something learned from bitter experience, rather than something they’ve trained for,” says Clark. “A lot of the food industry is heavily manned and that means there are a lot of people to align in the same direction,” says Seeckts. “So people management needs to be a core competence and if you’re bad at that you’re going to be in trouble.” He also emphasises that a successful factory manager will need to build up a strong support system around him (or her): “Having a strong team is important and you’ve got to be comfortable with their ability to deliver. We’ve got 600 people on site and you can’t manage them all individually.” So the ability to delegate to team leaders and shift managers is an important aspect of effective people management in a big plant. But that level of trust is not always easy to achieve. “We need to ensure that team leaders are up to the task,” says Clark. “They need authority and training and to work in an environment in which they’re not going to be in trouble the first time they make a mistake. You can call it empowerment but I prefer to call it giving them discretion.” “Training and development is so important,” agrees Haigney. “I also like to delegate as much as I can. It’s important for more junior members of staff to put their training into practice. Having a well trained team of people around me is very, very rewarding.” With so much emphasis on being hands on at the  middle management level, moving up to the board can be a major challenge for operations managers, according to Clark. “Moving up the career chain to director level is a big jump in any function, but especially in operations because of the emphasis on detail,” he says. “Suddenly you’re at the top table with the big boys and you have to fight your corner and be far more strategic in your approach. “The top team usually contains chiefs from all the main functions, including operations, finance, sales, marketing and so on. But there is always a first among equals. Very rarely is it the operations director who has the ear of the boss. It’s more often finance or sales. Operations  directors need to delegate and trust more, not spend 90% of their time buried in detail.” One reason why it’s difficult for operations directors to disentangle themselves from day-to-day problems is because it’s immediately apparent when operational systems go awry, such as when machines malfunction or orders fall through. These everyday problems can take up a lot of time, but Clark argues that focusing on immediate concerns and neglecting the strategic view is sacrificing the future. He believes that operations is too often viewed as the “tail on the dog”, with its direction determined by the demands of all the other functions. Perhaps a bit of rebranding might help: “I think we should re-badge operations as strategy implementation. You can have the fanciest business plan in the world, but if you can’t deliver it you haven’t got a strategy. We need operations directors who are willing to put their heads above the parapet and say ‘we’re doing great things here’, but we too often don’t see ourselves that way.”The important thing is to recognise how the role changes as the operations manager progresses through the organizational hierarchy. You start by managing yourself, then by managing others. This is followed by managing managers and so on. “The trick is that you have to be ready to gain something and to let something go at every transition,” says Clark. ■