You know what’s not very sexy? Operations.

You know what will give you an advantage in any industry? Operations. If you don’t care about looking sexy but you want to outperform your competitors, here are some areas for focus.

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Is urgency and excellence expected? Most companies are good at this in the beginning but can easily become complacent over time. Don’t lose your edge. Expectation for deliverables should be the same for an entry level employee as it is for the highest executive. Do you hold your team accountable for completing tasks in a timely manner? Do you hold your team to a high standard of excellence when it comes to the finished product? Are you relentless as much about the small details as the big ones? As a leader, urgency starts with you. Do you respond quickly to messages? Are you ready to jump in where you can to help with a project? Do you check in with your team on a regular basis? Do you continually cast the vision and draw everyone back to the mission of the company?

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Does your organizational structure promote decision making? To put it bluntly, nothing will hold you back from getting things done than a bunch of people. Do you have a top heavy hierarchy? Are you able to make decisions and execute on them quickly? Do your managers have autonomy to make decisions and act on ideas? Are you able to make changes without having to get multiple levels of approval? If five people from five departments have to weigh in before a decision can be made, your competitors will win the market. Consider how you can streamline communication and decision making.

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Do you have productive meetings? We humans love meetings for some reason. Have you ever been in a meeting only to wonder afterwards what exactly the meeting was about? Most meetings are like run-on sentences. You could have said everything you needed in fewer words. Meetings can be the biggest time suck in a company. As author Dave Barry has quipped, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings.’ Start by assessing how many meetings you have in a week. Then evaluate each meeting to see if the meeting was necessary or if the topic could be handled through email or a project platform. Who knows how much more you could get accomplished just by having fewer meetings.

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These internal issues might not seem exciting or sexy, but they will impact your productivity and will give you a competitive advantage. 

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