S&OP Manager – The Godfather of Supply chain
“Great men are not born great, they grow great…”
- Mario Puzo, Godfather
Most organizations choose an S&OP Manager to help facilitate the S&OP process cycle. He typically convenes and chairs S&OP meetings, provides frank feedback to the executive team. This article isn’t about his job description, you can refer to LinkedIn for that, but about the kind of leadership an S&OP Manager provides. The job of an S&OP Manager is a tricky one as he usually needs to go beyond his job description to achieve his objectives. His networking skills and people management skills will come in handy when he needs to break the ice between teams or resolve issues.
How can an S&OP manager become a great leader? Well, how does anyone become a great leader? If you have no clue, a good way to start would be by reading a ton of books and articles about leadership. But leadership books and articles are often self-contradictory in nature. Someone who praises Steve Jobs in one page for being a great salesman derides Trump for the very same reason. Influencers and icons who once praised Steve Jobs for his charisma and unpredictability are now trumpeting Sundar Pichai’s predictability and grounded nature. There have been so many contradictions that one particular Joseph Rost, who studied modern leadership literature 1991, found that it has been defined in two hundred different ways. Hero worship is institutionalized and incorporated in academia in the name of leadership research and education. And therein lies our clue. How are heroes born? Or Made? Heroes are born from crisis. They thrive in crisis situations and every successfully handled crisis improves their status.
It is impossible for people to make right decisions during a crisis situation. Even the darling of leadership literature, Steve Jobs, was forced out of his own company. But it is critical to understand that the very reason a company has moved towards having an S&OP process is to be prepared for such situations and do its best to avoid them. The more we think about it, the more we realize that most of these leadership theories won’t work out every time. When you brush away all these esoteric advice in the name of leadership research, we end up with the very basics. Allow me to introduce two concepts we all learned during our days in college - The Four Spans.
Span of Control
Span of control crudely translates to the number of people a manager has reporting to him. It also refers to the infrastructure that the manager has decision rights on, but is not considered relevant in many cases.
Span of Accountability
The textbook definition for Span of Accountability is the range of trade-offs affecting the measures used to evaluate a manager’s achievements. Simply put, it refers to the breadth of things that we are responsible for delivering.
Before we go to the other two spans, let’s see it from the perspective of an S&OP manager. An S&OP Manager typically has a narrow span of control but a broad span of accountability. He has a few direct reports but is responsible for metrics across demand, supply, inventory, and sales. This brings us to a very pertinent question “How does one be accountable for something one has no control on?” If you are new to S&OP, this query might baffle you. Seasoned S&OP managers know that this gap between accountability and control exist by design, and they embrace it. “Designing High-performance Jobs” by Harvard Business review accurately captures this gap as the entrepreneurial gap. By holding managers accountable for more than they can control, a company can encourage entrepreneurial behavior. The very definition of entrepreneurship is the process by which individuals pursue opportunities without regard to resources they currently control.
This brings us to the third Span – Span of Influence. The span of Influence is the width of the net that an individual needs to cast in collecting data, probing for new information, and attempting to influence the work of others. The influence an S&OP Manager holds is pretty vast. Such a wide span stimulates thinking outside the box, increase internal efficiencies or adapt to changes in the external markets. And this leads to the fourth Span – Span of support. The span of support refers to the amount of help an individual can expect from people in other organizational units. For an S&OP Manager, it helps if there is a broad span of support by design. Many a time, he may have to use the carrot and stick approach to get the help he needs. At other times, he needs to be the proverbial godfather of the supply chain and make offers his span of support cannot refuse.
Once an S&OP Manager is cognizant of these fundamentals, he will be better able to achieve his objectives at his work. By having an entrepreneurial mindset, he doesn’t care about corporate bureaucracy and gets the data he wants. The motive of S&OP is to avoid crisis and if not possible, be better prepared to handle them. But that doesn’t mean the job of an S&OP Manager is an easy one. There will be many occasions where mini-crises break out and firefighting is necessary. The S&OP Manager may need to take instant decisions or measured decisions based on the situations, but irrespective of the situation, the S&OP Manager needs to be decisive. Success or failure is usually a consequence of these decisions and one cannot be right all the time.
Failures need to be embraced and this decisive nature will help the manager to put behind these learning experiences and move ahead. And when he moves ahead, he needs to take his team with him. His interpersonal skills require him to bury the hatchet and not be biased towards a particular section, but he must be seen as the one who bats for the company as a whole. The company requires the S&OP manager to have his feet on the ground, ear on the market environment and eye on the future. If your S&OP manager ticks these three boxes, your company is in good hands.