Operational Leadership through Trust and Planning

Starting my career in the maintenance field helped create a respect for a broad set of skills. Mechanical skills, IT skills, communication skills, etc., all take time to build and add value in different ways. President Woodrow Wilson once said, “There are no problems we cannot solve together and very few that we can solve by ourselves.” Diverse skills are a large part of why I believe this is true.

Balancing Urgent Needs through Trusted Partnerships

I’ve found that in the real world, this takes a combination of proactivity and reactivity. Essentially, I try to be proactive, but with a reactive gear. If I’m dealing with existing deferred maintenance, I put out today’s fires and then I ask, “How do we prevent this next time?” and work to make proactive repairs. Otherwise, I aim for a preventive/ predictive approach with inspections, standardized scopes, lifecycle replacements and triggers that create planned activity and reduce surprises.

What External Partners and Teams Need Most

In a word, trust. For external partners, be transparent; keep your promises and delivery. For technical teams, be vulnerable, empower your team, reward successes and support through failures to get results together. In “Speed of Trust,” Stephen M.R. Covey says that trust is the cornerstone of success in personal and professional life.

Planning for Quality while Growing Technical Leaders

I take a PMI-style approach: have a plan and then run the plan. The plan starts with stakeholder alignment— what success looks like, who approves what and how we communicate. Then do a “what-cango-wrong” exercise. Combine this with a pre-job scope review, midstream inspections and a clear punch/closeout process. Taking the time to front-load the work keeps risk and rework low.

Michael Dell once said, “Try not to be the smartest person in the room.” I’ve been fortunate to work with some very smart people throughout my career. Don’t try to impress smart people with your knowledge. If they know more than you, let them know early and often.

The value you can add is to challenge them with questions that make them think about problems differently and trust their expertise. Get them out of their comfort zone by broadening their horizons to help them come up with creative solutions.