Owners Filling In For Staff Signals A Deeper Operational Problem

It’s a common story for owners or management to fill in on operations.

Especially in companies with limited funds and staff — small and medium-sized businesses, startups — it’s an extremely common story.

It’s even more common when it happens in the middle of some innovative effort.

Operations and innovation aren’t opposing concepts. Small innovations happen even within operational work, and operational tasks are scattered everywhere within innovation work too.

The scene described above — the owner filling in — proves that operations aren’t running properly, at least temporarily.

Here lies the “demon of temporary.”

What kind of situations does “temporary” cover?

A staff member out sick, an urgent delivery, trouble at a site outside the office pulling people away, work coming up that no one’s been assigned to. It’s a common story that these tend to happen “in multiples at once.”

If a company has the owner filling in every single time a staff member calls in sick, that’s a problem, and the staffing arrangement needs rethinking.

If it’s simply an urgent delivery that’s come up, the existing staff should be able to handle it by pushing lower-priority deliveries to the next day.

If it’s simply that people got pulled to an external site, staffing should be adjustable from other departments.

If it’s simply some nitpicky issue that’s come up, that kind of thing happens often enough that a mechanism should already be in place — a “general affairs” or “secretary” type position — with staff assigned to handle it.

But when these things happen simultaneously, they become unmanageable, and the owner ends up pulled into operational work as a result.

Even so, it’s a common story.

Caution is needed when the interpretation of “temporary” keeps expanding, half by default, with an attitude of “well, today just happened to be like that,” “these things happen,” “this time was kind of like that too…”

This means “the cost you’ve been assuming is wrong.” It means your company is actually running at a loss, or that the loss is bigger than you think, or that the profit is smaller than you think. More investment is genuinely needed — in personnel costs, in system infrastructure. Skimping on that only produces an apparent cost reduction. It’s a slow bleed.

What the owner should actually be thinking about is either reviewing the operational workload and reinforcing staff to match it, or reviewing the operational flow and departmental structure. The funding plan, bonuses, procurement budget, sales plan, and business strategy going forward all need adjusting accordingly. Nobody but the owner or management can do this. Putting their brains to that is their job.

Just when it’s finally their turn to step up isn’t the time to be doing operational work on the floor, working up a good sweat, and enjoying a refreshing beer afterward. That laziness will come back to strangle their employees down the line.

Where this gets tricky, though, is the pattern mentioned earlier — “operations within innovation work.”

Countless operational tasks naturally exist in the middle of an innovative process. And beyond that, encounters with seeds of innovation sometimes happen precisely while grinding through operational work.

I remember once, while I was in the US, drawing up my own business plan, doing the design, building prototypes, making everything from the hardware to the web application, then exhibiting it at a trade show and even serving as the booth explainer myself. A French-American friend was quite astonished and asked, “Are you really doing all of that by yourself?”

Taken as a whole it’s innovation, but it’s brimming with operations inside. In America, where division of labor is far more advanced, there isn’t much of a habit of one person doing everything end to end in a situation like that.

Something similar happened with an Indian colleague, who told me, “Kuz does the design and holds the soldering iron himself? That’s unusual.”

That said, this “operations within innovation” is, in most cases, nothing more than wordplay. Most of daily life is filled with non-innovative activity. This depends on the job, the position, and of course the individual. But taken as a whole, most of daily life is operative.

This isn’t meant pessimistically at all. The reason you can get a rice ball at the convenience store every day, the reason you can reliably buy a hot coffee from a vending machine, the reason trains run on schedule — all of it comes down to the high quality of operations.

Long live operations.

But a society can’t run on operations alone. Someone needs to think about making convenience store delivery systems more efficient, someone needs to come up with a system for predicting vending machine stockouts, someone needs to develop an IoT device for monitoring train drivers’ health. Someone is needed to build the financing plan for those projects, and someone is needed to dream up and hustle to launch the business in the first place.

Coming back to the case at the start: owners or management are precisely the ones who have to provide some kind of answer to “a society can’t run on operations alone.”

So in most cases, it’s simply not praiseworthy for an owner to be doing operative work.

I of course had my younger days, my days at the bottom of the ladder — not so terribly long ago — staring down an oscilloscope debugging things until deep in the night, doing revision after revision in CAD nearly in tears, trying everything and measuring endlessly when I had no good idea for noise countermeasures.

Honestly, it was fun.

I know the taste of the ramen you go eat in the middle of a late-night work session, and I remember the pleasant rush of dopamine facing down a mountain of tasks.

Sometimes I even think I’d like to go back to that.

But I mustn’t forget that, at this point, that impulse isn’t something to be praised.

There’s other work to do. After all, the reason I’m in my current position is because I wanted it.

Of course there are times to step into operations for emergency response. But that must never be done in a way that draws attention. It’s entirely normal not to be praised for it, completely fine not to be thanked for it. If anything, one should be careful never to act smug about it, or to be seen that way by others, and it has to be done with an awareness of getting back to one’s real job as quickly as possible.

In a culture like Japan’s that strongly demands homogeneity, this tends to get romanticized as “what a warm company, having the higher-ups out on the floor like that.”

This is a big mistake.

The retort that needs to be made is: “No, that’s just you skipping your real job.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/1486/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.