Map What Your Operations Director Carries Before You Need To

Your operations director has been in the role for years. They know every supplier, every quirk in the production schedule, and every customer who needs careful handling. The business runs well when they are there. When they are off, even briefly, things that usually happen without a conversation start landing on your desk.

Pain: Operations director doing too much work no one else can pick up.

This is what key person dependency looks like at the senior level. The role has grown organically around the individual rather than around a defined set of responsibilities. No one deliberately concentrated all of that knowledge in one person. It happened gradually, year by year, as the business came to trust them to handle it.

The risk is not that they perform badly. It is the opposite. They perform so well, for so long, that the business never builds a secondary path for any of it. Their absence, planned or sudden, reveals how much was being carried quietly, without anyone noticing how much of it was invisible to everyone else.

Fix: Map the work and identify what only they can do.

This is not a performance review. Sit down with your operations director and list every recurring task they own, every decision they make, and every relationship they manage on behalf of the business. Then mark each one: something only they can do right now, something that could be documented and transferred, or something that should never have been theirs in the first place. That list tells you where the exposure sits. It also gives your operations director a clearer picture of their own role. Most people in that position have accumulated responsibilities they would be glad to hand off. For a practical starting point on how to structure this, see the SYSTEMology approach to role clarity at Simpleris.

What would your operations director's absence for two weeks reveal about how the business is currently structured?

This post is part of the Friday Fix series — one operational fix, every week, for founders and MDs of growing manufacturing and engineering businesses.