Chosen theme: Navigating Business Processes: A Guide for New Managers. Step into your role with clarity and confidence as we explore practical ways to see, measure, and improve how work really gets done. Share your biggest process question and subscribe for weekly manager-ready insights.
Mapping and Documenting Workflows Without Drowning in Detail
Start with SIPOC and Swimlanes
Begin with a SIPOC to define Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers. Add swimlanes to clarify who does what, and when handoffs occur. Drop a comment if you want our one-page template—great for quick alignment in your first week.
Write Living SOPs
SOPs should evolve as the work evolves. Keep them short, stepwise, and linked to checklists that frontline teammates can edit. Invite feedback after every incident or change. Tell us your favorite SOP format, and we’ll share a battle-tested example.
Make It Visual and Social
Use visual boards for workflow and capacity: Kanban for flow, Gantt for projects, and dashboards for outcomes. Host an open mapping session and let practitioners narrate bottlenecks. Subscribe for facilitation prompts that keep sessions constructive, not political.
Stakeholders, Handshakes, and Healthy Tensions
Who Owns What
Clarify owners, approvers, contributors, and informed parties with a simple RACI. Ownership prevents drift and duplicated work. Ask stakeholders to sign off on roles publicly. Share a handoff that often fails in your world, and we’ll suggest a tighter RACI.
Friction as a Signal
When teams clash, don’t blame personalities—inspect the process. Conflicting objectives or unclear criteria often sit beneath the surface. Try a blameless postmortem focused on decision points. Comment if you need our agenda for turning friction into useful redesign.
Rhythms That Stick
Establish lightweight cadences: weekly metrics check, monthly improvement review, quarterly deep-dive. Consistency beats intensity. Invite cross-functional peers to rotate presenting “one change, one risk, one lesson.” Subscribe to get our cadence checklist for new managers.
Metrics That Matter: KPIs, SLAs, and Feedback Loops
Define Success in Plain Language
Write one sentence that a new hire can understand: when we do X for Y, success looks like Z. Align this with two or three KPIs. Share your sentence below and we’ll help translate it into measurable indicators that your team can rally around.
Measure Leading and Lagging
Balance lagging results—like revenue or defects—with leading signals like cycle time, queue length, or first-pass yield. Leading indicators let you intervene early. Comment with a metric you watch too late today, and we’ll propose a leading partner metric.
Close the Loop
Metrics matter only if they drive decisions. Bake them into team rituals: review, decide, experiment, follow up. Celebrate when you delete a metric no longer needed. Subscribe for our metric hygiene checklist that keeps dashboards crisp and honest.
Change Management That People Actually Embrace
Explain why the change matters using a simple storyline: problem, stakes, vision, first step. Include a real customer or teammate anecdote. Invite questions loudly. Share a change you’re planning, and we’ll help craft a narrative your team can believe in.
Change Management That People Actually Embrace
Run small pilots with clear success criteria, then scale with evidence. Early adopters become ambassadors, not skeptics. Post one process you’d pilot next month, and we’ll suggest a low-risk experiment that returns data in two weeks or less.
Risk, Compliance, and Doing the Right Thing
List your top risks—financial, operational, legal—then attach preventive and detective controls directly to steps. Keep controls visible in SOPs. Share a risk that keeps you up at night, and we’ll suggest a practical, low-friction control to test.