I agree with several of your points here, especially the reinventing the wheel one, but I think the first and last miss something. But, I’ll caveat this by saying I work in operations for a large (by EA standards) organization that might have more “normal” operations due to its size.
The term “Operations” is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean “everything back office that the CEO doesn’t care about as long as it’s done. Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
I don’t think this is fully accurate — my impression is that “operations” is used widely outside of EA in the US nonprofit space to refer to 90%+ of what ops staff in EA do. E.g. looking through a random selection of jobs at US nonprofits the operations jobs seem similar to what I’d expect in EA, which is basically working on admin / finance / HR / legal compliance, etc and some intersections with fundraising/comms. At lots of small nonprofits (like EA ones), these jobs are staffed necessarily generalists — you have to do all those functions, but none might be a full-time job on their own, so you find one person to do it all. I’ve worked at a bunch of US nonprofits outside of EA and all of them had staff with titles like “Operations Director” or “Operations Coordinator” who basically did the same thing as I’d expect those roles to do at EA organizations. I think EA likely just took this titling from the US nonprofit space in general, though EA does have some unusual operations norms (e.g. being unusually high touch).
I think that there is definitely a different use of this term in a lot of for-profit contexts (e.g. business operations) but I’ve also seen it used the same way there sometimes. And, COO usually stands for Chief Operating Officer, not Chief Operations Officer, and those are definitely different things.
Managers within EA don’t seem to realise that some things they call operations are actually management responsibilities, and that to be a manager you need to be willing to less or maybe none of the day job, e.g. the CEO of a large research organisation should probably not do research anymore
I agree that operations at EA organizations do lots of things that might often in other contexts be done by managers, and your specific example might be correct, but I also think that sometimes, especially in a nonprofit context, a large amount of admin burden is placed on programmatic staff, and it can be good to design systems to change this. That being said, the examples from the original post (e.g. dealing with emails for someone) sound more like an Executive Assistant’s role, or just bad?
I think that lots of nonprofits outside of EA are under weird kinds of pressure (e.g. Charity Navigator rates charities on “administrative expense ratio”) to not have particularly high operations costs. And an easy way to do this is to shift those expenses to managers (e.g. managers doing more paperwork). I don’t think this is necessarily intentional, but a pretty undesirable effect of having fewer ops staff. I don’t think EA organizations are under the same pressure, and that seems generally good.
Thanks for this! You might be right about the non-profit vs. for-profit distinction in ‘operations’ and your point about the COO being ‘Operating’ rather than ‘Operations’ is a good one.
Re avoiding managers doing paperwork, I agree with that way of putting it. However, I think EA needs to recognise that management is an entirely different skill. The best researcher at a research organization should definitely not have to handle lots of paperwork, but I’d argue they probably shouldn’t be the manager in the first place! Management is a very different skillset that involves people management, financial planning, etc. that are often skills pushed on operations teams by people who shouldn’t be managers.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that—I think a pretty common issue is people entering into people management on the basis of their skills at research, and they don’t seem particularly likely to be correlated. I also think organizations sometimes struggle to provide pathways to more senior roles outside of management too, and that seems like an issue when you have ambitious people who want to grow professionally, but no options to except people management.
I agree with several of your points here, especially the reinventing the wheel one, but I think the first and last miss something. But, I’ll caveat this by saying I work in operations for a large (by EA standards) organization that might have more “normal” operations due to its size.
I don’t think this is fully accurate — my impression is that “operations” is used widely outside of EA in the US nonprofit space to refer to 90%+ of what ops staff in EA do. E.g. looking through a random selection of jobs at US nonprofits the operations jobs seem similar to what I’d expect in EA, which is basically working on admin / finance / HR / legal compliance, etc and some intersections with fundraising/comms. At lots of small nonprofits (like EA ones), these jobs are staffed necessarily generalists — you have to do all those functions, but none might be a full-time job on their own, so you find one person to do it all. I’ve worked at a bunch of US nonprofits outside of EA and all of them had staff with titles like “Operations Director” or “Operations Coordinator” who basically did the same thing as I’d expect those roles to do at EA organizations. I think EA likely just took this titling from the US nonprofit space in general, though EA does have some unusual operations norms (e.g. being unusually high touch).
I think that there is definitely a different use of this term in a lot of for-profit contexts (e.g. business operations) but I’ve also seen it used the same way there sometimes. And, COO usually stands for Chief Operating Officer, not Chief Operations Officer, and those are definitely different things.
I agree that operations at EA organizations do lots of things that might often in other contexts be done by managers, and your specific example might be correct, but I also think that sometimes, especially in a nonprofit context, a large amount of admin burden is placed on programmatic staff, and it can be good to design systems to change this. That being said, the examples from the original post (e.g. dealing with emails for someone) sound more like an Executive Assistant’s role, or just bad?
I think that lots of nonprofits outside of EA are under weird kinds of pressure (e.g. Charity Navigator rates charities on “administrative expense ratio”) to not have particularly high operations costs. And an easy way to do this is to shift those expenses to managers (e.g. managers doing more paperwork). I don’t think this is necessarily intentional, but a pretty undesirable effect of having fewer ops staff. I don’t think EA organizations are under the same pressure, and that seems generally good.
Thanks for this! You might be right about the non-profit vs. for-profit distinction in ‘operations’ and your point about the COO being ‘Operating’ rather than ‘Operations’ is a good one.
Re avoiding managers doing paperwork, I agree with that way of putting it. However, I think EA needs to recognise that management is an entirely different skill. The best researcher at a research organization should definitely not have to handle lots of paperwork, but I’d argue they probably shouldn’t be the manager in the first place! Management is a very different skillset that involves people management, financial planning, etc. that are often skills pushed on operations teams by people who shouldn’t be managers.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that—I think a pretty common issue is people entering into people management on the basis of their skills at research, and they don’t seem particularly likely to be correlated. I also think organizations sometimes struggle to provide pathways to more senior roles outside of management too, and that seems like an issue when you have ambitious people who want to grow professionally, but no options to except people management.