Stop Reading Reports. Start Watching the Work.
(A COO’s Most Underrated Habit)
If
you really want to know what’s breaking your operations, skip the meeting. Grab
a chair and sit beside the person/people actually doing the job.
There’s
a kind of leadership that stays locked inside dashboards, PowerPoints, and
endless boardroom talks. Executives debate strategies. They scrutinize reports.
Big decisions happen upstairs. Yet, way below all that, the real work is going
on – messy, unpredictable, and never quite matching the nice, neat stories the
reports tell.
I
made the classic mistake early on as COO: I put too much faith in summaries.
I’d pore over a report, spot what looked like the issue, and immediately start
fixing it – basing all my decisions on data that, honestly, was just a polished
version of what was really happening.
Then
I started doing ride-alongs, actually shadowing people on the floor. And
surprise!!! Almost everything I thought I knew turned out to be wrong.
Here’s
the core idea:
If
you want to find the truth about your operations, talk to the people doing the
actual work.
As
execs, we’re used to talking about problems from a thousand feet up. That’s
part of the job. But the real feel of an operational issue is the workarounds,
the things left unsaid, the stuff that never makes a report but lives with the
folks on the ground. It’s there with the support rep handling a tricky ticket.
The operator working through a clunky process. The manager quietly patching up
problems that should’ve been fixed last year.
The
most valuable habit I picked up was embarrassingly basic: just sit with the
people doing the work.
No
conference room, no detailed agenda, none of that performance review tension.
Just me, watching – asking questions only when invited. You’d be shocked at
what a single hour of real observation can show you that six months of reports
never do.
A
Story That Stuck With Me
One
company I worked with saw a spike in customer complaints. Leadership quickly
decided it must be an “expectations” issue-customers asking for things we just
couldn’t deliver. The plan was to redo onboarding, spell things out more
clearly, and hope for the best.
Before
we jumped in, I asked to sit with a support rep for an hour.
Ten
minutes in, the real problem jumped out. To answer a single customer question,
this rep had to juggle five different systems. One for the account. Another for
order history. A third for billing. A fourth to check shipping. And finally, a
fifth just to respond. Every customer chat took as much tech gymnastics as a
mini ‘IT project’.
The
truth? People weren’t upset because their expectations were off. They were mad
because it took forever to get a simple answer. And the rep, who was sharp and
quick, kept getting tripped up by a process clearly designed by folks who never
worked in support themselves.
We
overhauled the workflow. Fewer tools, less switching, one simple interface.
What changed?
– Response
times dropped fast
–
Customer satisfaction shot up
– Support
team burnout, even though no one had talked about it, started going down
We
didn’t add staff. No one needed retraining. The people were never the problem.
The system was.
How
to Go on Your Own Ride-Alongs:
This
is seriously one of the most valuable things you can do as a leader in just
three hours. Here’s how:
Set
up three ride-alongs, an hour each.
Cover three angles:
1. A
frontline worker-the person actually doing the core job
2.
A middle manager-the one turning strategy into
action
3. A
customer-facing role-the folks who hear it straight from the customer
Your
only job: observe. Don’t coach. Don’t fix. Don’t overexplain why you’re there.
Just watch. Pay attention to the slowdowns, the heavy sighs, or when someone
quietly opens a spreadsheet labeled “workarounds.”
At
the end of each session, ask one thing: “What’s the one thing making your job
harder than it needs to be?” Then just listen.
What
I’ve Learned
Reports
are helpful, but they’re only a filter. They leave out the messy edges. The
biggest disconnects between what’s supposed to be happening and what actually
is? That’s where most of your operational problems are hiding. And the only way
to truly see the gap is to look right at it.
I
wasted so much time trying to solve problems I’d never really seen. I let
myself get fooled by the summary, not the system.
Now,
before I build, change, or cut anything, I watch it happen first.
That’s
how you speed things up in the long run. The people closest to the work will
always show you what the data can’t.
So,
when was the last time you sat beside someone doing frontline work? If you
can’t remember, maybe that’s your first move this week.