I don’t know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:
It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn’t be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like “the impact of operations work has high variance,” or maybe “good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside.” Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don’t know how much money we have, we don’t keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren’t as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.
I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I’m always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.
I don’t know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:
It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn’t be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like “the impact of operations work has high variance,” or maybe “good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside.” Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don’t know how much money we have, we don’t keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren’t as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.
I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I’m always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.