A landmark study of 1,200 operations managers across 18 industries identifies the five habits that predict team performance. The findings challenge some deeply held assumptions about what great leadership actually looks like.
Key Takeaways
Ask most executives what makes a great operations manager and they reach for familiar answers: technical mastery, process discipline, and the ability to drive efficiency under pressure. A new study from the Operations Leadership Institute, covering 1,200 managers across 18 industries and four years of performance data, finds those answers are largely wrong. The habits that most reliably predict team productivity, retention, and quality outcomes are predominantly behavioural, not technical, and several of them run counter to the instincts that most organisations reward when promoting into management roles.
The study tracked manager behaviour and team outcomes quarterly from 2022 through 2025, combining 360-degree reviews, structured observational assessments, and hard performance metrics including output per employee, defect rates, absenteeism, and voluntary turnover. The result is one of the largest longitudinal datasets on frontline operations management published to date, and its findings carry direct implications for how organisations hire, develop, and evaluate the people responsible for their day-to-day performance.
The study used regression analysis to identify which manager behaviours most strongly predicted team-level performance across the full dataset. Five habits emerged as statistically significant predictors across all 18 industries studied. They are ranked here in order of predictive strength, a sequence that itself tells an important story.
Decision speed, specifically the manager's ability to make and communicate clear decisions within the same operational cycle in which a problem arose, ranked first. Teams whose managers consistently resolved ambiguity within 24 hours showed 31% lower error rates and significantly higher reported engagement than teams where decisions routinely lagged by days. The study's authors note that this habit is not about impulsiveness. It is about discipline: having a clear decision framework and the authority to use it, rather than escalating every edge case upward.
"We spent years promoting people who had the deepest process knowledge. The data shows that was the wrong primary criterion. The managers whose teams consistently outperformed were the ones who could make a call, communicate it clearly, and move on. Process knowledge matters, but it is fifth on the list." Dr. Priya Anand, Research Director, Operations Leadership Institute
The full ranking of habits, presented in order of their predictive weight in the OLI model, offers a framework that organisations can use immediately to assess and develop their management populations:
The practical implication of the OLI findings is direct and somewhat uncomfortable for organisations that have built their management hiring around technical credentials and tenure. The most predictive habits are all assessable before hire, through structured behavioural interviews, situational judgment tests, and reference checks focused on past decision-making patterns. Yet fewer than one in four of the organisations surveyed by OLI use any formal assessment of these specific behaviours in their operations management interview process. The result is a systematic mis-selection that compounds over time: organisations promote or hire for the fifth-ranked habit while paying insufficient attention to the first four.
Companies that have already integrated OLI's five-habit framework into their hiring criteria report a 38% reduction in management mis-hires, defined as a manager who exits within 18 months or whose team underperforms sector benchmarks for two consecutive quarters. The framework also has direct applications in learning and development, performance management, and succession planning, providing a common language for what good management actually means that transcends industry-specific jargon. For operations leaders and CHROs willing to act on the evidence rather than instinct, the path to measurable performance improvement starts not with a new technology platform or process redesign, but with a clear-eyed look at who is running the teams.
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