Carrollton, Virginia  /  Leadership & Operations

Robert
F. Yost

IT Support Supervisor, InMotion Hosting  ·  US Navy Veteran, FC3

I lead by building two things at once: a process that holds up under pressure, and people who outgrow the job they were hired into. The process work is measurable — you can see it in the numbers below. The people work is slower and matters more. Most of what I do is help someone push beyond their limitations, then clear the obstacles between them and it.

Robert F. Yost.
Track plot / average first reply 2024 → 2025
68.9 h 2024 5.5 h 2025

Average customer wait for a first reply, before and after the operating framework I built and ran. Same team, same headcount — structure and coaching were the difference.

+44ppSLA attainment gain in a single year
91%Fewer tickets waiting over 24 hours
10+Years leading support operations
1Unified leadership portal, built in-house

Selected work

What I’ve built

Programs that changed how the work actually gets done — and how people are treated while doing it.

Tooling  /  built in-house

The leadership portal

Leading a team had turned into a scavenger hunt across a dozen scattered spreadsheets, documents, and half-remembered links. So I leveraged AI and built the thing that should have existed: a single web-based portal pulling every leadership tool into one place, so a supervisor finds what they need in seconds instead of asking someone who might not be on shift.

  • Consolidated coaching, review, reporting, and reference tools into one interface
  • Removed the tribal-knowledge tax on anyone stepping into a leadership role
  • Designed, built, and maintained without a development team

People development

Coaching people past the role

Weekly one-on-ones with every direct report, and they are not status meetings. They are where someone tells me what they actually want, where they are stuck, and what they are afraid they cannot do — and where we build the plan to get past it.

  • Development plans built around the person’s goals, not just the org chart
  • Peer-led gap training: team members identify their own skill gaps and teach the sessions
  • Feedback framed as a challenge to grow into, not a deficiency to defend against

Process improvement

Turning a failing operation around

Inherited a queue operation in its worst year on record — 32% SLA attainment and customers waiting days for a first reply. Rather than pushing harder on people already working hard, I built the framework that had been missing: clear ownership, visible priorities, real handoffs, and coaching tied to what the data showed.

  • SLA attainment from 32.3% to 76.3% in one operating year
  • Average first reply from 68.9 hours to 5.5 hours
  • Closed a five-year performance gap between two teams to under one point

Standards & fairness

Making expectations visible

People cannot grow toward a standard they cannot see. I built a shared feedback and review framework so everyone in a role is measured against the same written expectations — which makes praise credible, criticism fair, and advancement something you can work toward.

  • 35-point standardized feedback library covering the full scope of the role
  • Agent performance tracker scoring and ranking productivity for data-driven coaching
  • Narrative reviews written to be useful to the person, not merely defensible

See the work samples →

Approach

How I lead

Start with the person

Performance problems are almost never character problems. Before I coach the metric, I find out what is actually going on — workload, confidence, something at home, a skill nobody taught them. You cannot fix what you have not bothered to understand.

Clarity is a kindness

Vague feedback protects the manager, not the employee. I would rather have one honest, specific conversation now than let someone find out months later that they had been falling short. People can handle the truth. What they cannot handle is not being told.

Build people bigger

My goal is not to keep good people in their current seat. It is to help them expand — better at the work, more confident outside it, ready for whatever comes next. If someone leaves my team for a role they could not have gotten a year ago, the job is working correctly.

1989 – 1994

Sea Sparrow
Technician, US Navy

Five years as a Fire Controlman, honorably discharged as FC3. I maintained, repaired, and operated the NATO Sea Sparrow Surface Missile System, and completed ‘C’ School on the MK 92 Gun Fire Control System — work where the standard for “good enough” is set by consequences rather than preference.

View service record →

A RIM-7 Sea Sparrow missile launching from a NATO Sea Sparrow Surface Missile System during a live-fire exercise at sea.
RIM-7 Sea Sparrow launching from a NATO Sea Sparrow Surface Missile System. US Navy photo, public domain.