What 22 Years in Operations Taught Me About Leadership
Nov 15, 2025Leadership in operations is learned at the frontline — it’s about clarity, empathy, and repeatable habits.
Operations leadership looks straightforward until you face the human realities behind the metrics. Over 22 years leading contact center operations across APAC, Europe, North America and LATAM, three lessons have been stubbornly consistent: lead with clarity, support your people, and make ritualized improvements.
1. Clarity beats inspiration when deadlines loom. When an escalation lands on Friday evening, a rousing speech won’t fix it. Clear, actionable instructions — who does what, by when, and what success looks like — reduce ambiguity and friction. I learned to convert strategic aims into specific weekly rituals: daily standups with three fields (blockers, wins, actions), SOP checklists, and a visual scoreboard that everyone could read.
2. Empathy is operational leverage. People perform best when they feel seen and supported. In my teams, small things mattered: a manager spending 10 minutes listening to a difficult customer call with an agent, or shifting schedules to help someone manage a personal emergency. Empathy reduces churn, improves morale, and creates discretionary effort that lifts the numbers.
3. Coaching + measurement = predictable growth. Coaching without follow-up becomes a nice conversation. Measurement without human development becomes compliance. Pair weekly micro-coaching (10–15 minutes) with a simple improvement plan and track one metric — and you’ll see compounding improvements.
4. Stability precedes scale. I’ve turned small pilots into 100+ FTE programs repeatedly. The pattern: stabilize the process, document SOPs, ensure governance rituals are running, then scale. Skipping stabilization increases risk and client anxiety.
5. Automation should free cognitive load, not hide it. Automation that reduces reporting time from hours to minutes is transformational. But automation must be paired with ownership; when dashboards are automated, make sure someone is accountable for interpreting them.
6. Transitions are human projects. Tool migrations and program transitions are often framed as technical projects. They’re not. They’re human projects. Knowledge transfer, simple docs, shadowing windows, and rapid feedback loops are the real differentiators.
If you’re early in your ops leadership journey, focus on building clarity, human rituals, and a simple set of tools to track progress. Over time, you’ll discover that steady habits and a people-first mindset are the true levers for operational excellence.