All About Operations & Careers

By Deena Englander @ 2025-07-23T15:37 (+24)

In honor of career week, I’ve decided to write up about the operations profession - what it is, who is a good candidate, and some core philosophies about what makes operations important.

What Exactly Is “Operations”?

A strong operations team is the backbone of any organization. Operations specialists are enablers - they lay the foundation for the specialists in their organizations to do their work without being bogged down by logistics. When you have a strong operations team, the rest of your team is able to do better, more focused work, which means that your org has more impact and higher quality.

A good operations team lets you operate efficiently. They’re the hub of the organization. They should be aware of everything that’s going on and proactively supporting everyone and everything in it. Similar to an actual spinal cord, all activities within the organization should point back to the operations team. The operations team literally provides the support and infrastructure for the rest of the organization.

Operations supports the vision. It's a recommended practice to pair a strong visionary with a strong operator – the visionary will bring creative energy and ideation into the organization and the operator will bring it to life. Without the operator, the visionary’s ideation would never come into being.

Different types of operations jobs

Operations means MANY different things. Be clear about what type of “operations” you need when you’re hiring and if you can, label the job description appropriately. Similarly, if you’re looking for an operations job, know what kind of operations you’re good at and look for that. This is a list of the most common interpretations of “operations” that I’ve encountered.

Again, this is not a complete list of types of operations job requirements – just the most common ones I encounter.

Signs of a good operations team:

 

How do you know if you should go into operations?

The best operations professionals think in systems. They like organizing things, learning new things, and are adaptable. They tend to be more detail oriented than big picture thinkers. They like to play a supporting role backstage instead of being in the limelight. 

One tool I often use in hiring and mentoring is Gallup StrengthFinders; the premise is that there are 34 unique talents that each of us is born with. It’s the lens through which we view the world. A good operations professional will be high in the execution talents and strategy, with a bit of relationships mixed in. 

As a side note, I do recommend using this assessment for all your final candidates – it’s a great way to assess natural ability to perform well in the job before hiring them.

If you find your natural strengths lie in the other sectors – that’s great! Go pursue your strengths and be the best that you can be – but don’t try for a career in operations; you’ll be frustrated, and your organization won’t thrive as much as it could have. There’s no glory in operations – much of what you do will never be noticed by anyone, so only follow this career path if that thought makes you excited. Otherwise, you’re doing yourself and your prospective employer a disservice.

Hiring a strong operator

People often ask how mission aligned operations pros need to be; my answer is always that good operations professionals take pride in their work of enabling others to do a great job; their primary motivation and job satisfaction will primarily  be in their work, not in your organization’s impact. That’s not to say that mission alignment isn’t at all important – it just means that it shouldn’t be a factor in your hiring decision if the stronger candidate isn’t mission aligned. Trust me, they will very quickly become quite knowledgeable about your area of expertise and will be your biggest champions.

There are a few ways to assess operational competency. These are a few suggestions to include in your hiring process:

How many people do I need on my operations team?

There’s no right answer to this. At minimum, you need a virtual assistant as your admin support. At maximum, you need a whole team. The right answer is the number of people it takes to increase your capacity so that adding in the extra salary creates the equivalent (ideally more) opportunity for impact. The specific metrics you’ll want to track include:

Next Steps

If you’re interested in exploring a career in operations and want to chat, please use this link to book a time with me – I’m happy to share my insights!

If you’re looking for an operations job, please fill out this form. I do get a number of employers reaching out to me to see if I know anyone that’s a good fit, and I’d love to have you in my database to refer to them.

If you’re looking to expand your operations team, pick a time here to chat with me (it’s free) – we’ll discuss what to look for so that you can make the hire that’s best for your organization. I may even have some connections for you!

If you’re looking to join WorkStream’s executive assistant team, please fill out this form and I’ll follow up with you. Alternatively, if you’d like to benefit from our team of virtual executive assistants, schedule a call with me or submit this form, and I’ll send you information about the program and a link to schedule.

Summary

Operations professionals are the unsung heroes of any organization. We’re the pillars of success and enable a tremendous amount of impact. But it’s not for everyone – there’s a big enough pool of candidates that only those who excel naturally in this area should consider moving into this field. There’s a lot of room for specializing here also, so make sure that if you’re considering a career in operations, that you’re thinking about what type works best for you.

I wish you the best of luck in your career journey!


Snowman Socrates @ 2025-07-24T01:17 (+6)

Thank you for this excellent post, Deena! As an ops professional, I really resonated with everything you wrote and feel you represented ops accurately and accessibly. I anticipate I’ll be signing up to chat with you soon - always great to be connected to more impact-minded ops professionals!

Deena Englander @ 2025-07-24T17:54 (+1)

Thank you for the feedback! I look forward to chatting with you!

Andrew Mazzotta @ 2025-07-24T14:42 (+3)

Thank you for the experienced insights, Deena. 

I wanted to ask a couple questions here that might be relevant for others: When you think about the most senior operations folks, how would you describe their strategic strengths as they move up the hierarchy? I sort of imagine (an example of) growth from "keeping the website updated" to "partnering with CEO to match the future vision with the future of how the org can practically pull that off".

I've heard perspectives that Chiefs of Staff can also be framed not as people leaders, but as more strategic assistants to executives - their right hand so-to-speak. It sounds still like an ops-minded person has skills here, but perhaps different ones than managing employee performance and direct reports. Thoughts on that?

Deena Englander @ 2025-07-25T01:39 (+1)

The typical growth of an operations specialist from an associate to more senior usually involves more responsibility and oversight. The trajectory starts off very micro, and over time shifts slowly into more macro positions, overseeing others who are doing the micro work. But, if need be, they're capable of doing the micro work as well. The experience climbing the operations career ladder means that they've been in all the more junior roles, so they have the skills and know how to delegate and oversee those beneath them. The highest form of this is overseeing all the operations to actualize the mission of the organization. The chain usually goes from ops associate -> ops manager -> ops director -> COO, with each level becoming more macro and having more oversight.

Regarding the Chief of Staff position, that is one title that can mean almost anything... it's so ambiguous that I try to stay away from it myself. I think it was potentially intended to be instead of "HR director", and now that people are trying to avoid using the term HR, they use Chief of Staff instead. To me, a true Chief of Staff is responsible for overseeing all things people - HR, benefits, payroll, hiring, firing, performance management and mentoring. What it's actually become varies greatly from org to org; sometimes it's a glorified executive assistant, and sometimes it's an unacknowledged COO or operations manager. I'm not really sure why people like to stick the label of "Chief of Staff" on almost anything... maybe it sounds more exciting to potential candidates? In those scenarios, it might be an ops role in disguise.

Would you agree with that?

Andrew Mazzotta @ 2025-07-25T12:42 (+1)

Thanks for the response!

Re: Chief of Staff.. most of the roles I've seen posted in the impact space over the past year seem to be a less-tactical (than an exec assistant) more-strategic direct report to a c-suite. For a "traditional" CoS that heads up people-functions, I've also seen role names like Chief People Officer (at my current org), and I have no doubt there are many other versions.

Chief of Staff as a role name seems like it has an unusually broad set of use cases, and yes I'd agree - anything with "Chief" in it sounds more prestigious. I balance that with the fact that the "non-traditional" version doesn't seem to really be a managerial position in a lot of cases but a high-level individual contributor. I'm not entirely sure that's the path for me personally, but I do see the allure (not just for prestige, but to be in ongoing high-level work with senior leadership). I do think that the non-traditional role I'm referring to here deserves a different kind of role name then CoS - its literal interpretation throws me off. 

Deena Englander @ 2025-07-29T20:08 (+1)

I totally agree, based on the information you've provided. I'm happy to chat about the right career path for you if you'd like!