03/03/2026
Promoted to Ops Manager.
But not prepared.
Last quarter, I met a young ops manager in an outsourcing team.
He’d been promoted from team leader after just 12 months.
Smart.
Driven.
Completely overwhelmed.
The CEO kept asking, “Why are we missing our SLAs?”
His answers?
“It’s complicated.”
“The client keeps changing the scope.”
“The agents just aren’t engaged.”
Spanish have a say for this: "As vague as the sleeves of a vest."
The truth was quite simple.
He’d gone through one of those generic BS leadership programs.
Personality tests.
Communication styles.
Nice theory.
But no one had ever taught him how to read the reports he was sending.
He could export dashboards.
But he couldn’t explain them.
He’d spend Sundays manually copying numbers into a slide deck.
He’d present charts he didn’t fully trust.
And every tough question felt like an attack,
so he hid behind jargon.
When I joined, we didn’t start with a new tool.
We started with a whiteboard.
We broke down AHT, occupancy, and service level in plain language.
We walked through interval data like a story, not a spreadsheet.
Then I had him run his first WBR.
No fluff.
Just:
“What happened?”
“Why did it happen?”
“What are we doing differently next week?”
The result?
He stopped feeling like an imposter.
And the team finally had a shared reality.
Here’s what I told him:
Your power doesn’t come from slides.
It comes from being able to ask questions until you are satisfied.
When you invest in skill,
you don’t need to hide behind “it’s complicated” anymore.
