---
title: "Troops and Suits, Part II: Why Operators Need the Suits More Than They Think"
description: Explore why bus operators need administrators more than they realize, highlighting the importance of context, communication, and collaboration for better transit systems.
---
[Media and Content| Patrick E Parents](https://www.patrickeparents.com/media)
# [Troops and Suits, Part II: Why Operators Need the Suits More Than They Think](https://www.patrickeparents.com/media/troops-and-suits-part-ii-why-operators-need-the-suits-more-than-they-think)
Written by [Patrick E Parents](https://www.patrickeparents.com/media/author/patrick-e-parents) | Sep 23, 2026, 5:13:53 PM
**“They don’t know what they’re doing.” “They need to stop using Google Maps for everything.”**
If you’ve spent any meaningful time inside a bus operator depot in the United States, you’ve almost certainly heard some version of these lines.
For as long as I can remember, there has been a visible gap between *the suits* and *the troops*. Executives wish operators would show up more consistently. Operators wish executives would make decisions that simply “make sense.” What follows is an endless game of cat and mouse, fueled less by bad intent and more by missing context.
I’ve written often about why boards, departments, and agencies benefit from having operator voices on payroll. There is a kind of intelligence that only comes from living the work at ground level. That truth stands.
But here’s the part that often gets overlooked in my work sometimes: this doesn’t mean executives, administrators, and managers are unnecessary. In fact, operators themselves benefit from understanding *why* the suits matter.
Below are four reasons why.
### 1. Laws, Regulations, and the Invisible Constraints
This one matters more than most operators realize.
I had two productive stints in MTA’s service development department. In fact I'm still (slight flex) the only operator in history to be an operator and scheduler for the former system, and its current Baltimore Link version.
I built runs. I helped design schedules. I knew the system intimately. As an extra list operator at the time, my front-end knowledge of how service *should* look on paper was strong. I knew routes end to end—their behaviors, patterns, alignments, and most importantly quirks.
**What I didn’t understand was the legal, regulatory, and political infrastructure shaping those decisions.**
I learned quickly that transit doesn’t operate in a vacuum. A single complaint from a resident to a member of Congress can trigger scrutiny. ADA requirements, Title III considerations, and Federal Transit Administration rules quietly dictate what is possible **long** before a schedule ever reaches an operator’s hands.
From the outside, operators see the finished dish. What’s missing is the recipe—and the constraints (ingredients) that come with it.
When operators don’t understand the “why,” decisions feel arbitrary. When that gap persists, frustration can harden into resistance. What begins as confusion often gets mislabeled as insubordination, when in reality it’s a breakdown in translation.
This is where administrators matter most.
**The suits are the bridge between intent and execution**.
They sit closest to the constraints—legal, political, financial, and operational—that rarely make it to the floor. When that context is shared clearly and consistently, something shifts. Decisions stop feeling random. Trust has room to grow.
Context doesn’t just reduce conflict; it improves performance and morale. People execute better when they understand what they’re being asked to protect, comply with, or sacrifice for.
The why matters. And when used correctly, it is one of the most powerful tools leadership has—not as a shield, but as a connector.
### 2. Career Polish: Learning the Language of the Room
True story.
In 2023, I was given a unique opportunity to serve as a Customer Onboarding Specialist at [Ecolane](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ecolane/) a transit scheduling software company based in Wayne, Pennsylvania. It’s a fantastic organization—one that changed my life in ways I’m not sure they even fully realize.
Up to that point, I had already been an entrepreneur. But my entrepreneurship was entirely operational. I was an on-demand bus driver running an on-demand bus driver company. Same fruit, just a different flavor.
Gala apple, Fuji apple= still an apple.
When I arrived at Ecolane, I quickly learned something humbling: I didn’t know how to email.
I didn’t know what was acceptable. I didn’t know what crossed a line. I didn’t know that emojis and “lol” didn’t belong in most professional correspondence.
Here’s how wide the gap was. When someone started an email with my name followed by a comma
*“Patrick,”*
I took it as frustration on their part.
In my mind, that formatting carried emotional weight. I associated it with moments from childhood or the depot floor—when someone sits you down, makes eye contact, says your name slowly, and explains what you’re not getting right.
So much so that I once called my director at the time, [John Walters](https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-walters-66680b8/) , concerned that a colleague didn’t like me. Her emails felt formal. For someone who is naturally relationship-driven like me, formality felt distant and cold.
My brain didn't know how to process this. I had no exposure prior to this and immediately was behind the curve.
John was my trainer, and he was exceptional. I still carry much of what he taught me. What made him stand out wasn’t just his command of the software—it was his awareness of the gap I was navigating.
My gift was the ability to simplify communication for people in frontline operations, along side my relatability. That mattered, because the role required me to train operators, dispatchers, and supervisors on how to use the platform effectively.
But at that time, there were **many** other skills I hadn’t yet developed.
John recognized that my challenge wasn’t technical; it was translational.
Completely unrelated to his actual job, he began teaching me the unwritten rules—how corporate correspondence works, how tone is interpreted when it’s written instead of spoken, and how professionalism lives on the page instead of in body language.
He helped me understand this new environment, which again was not his job.
What he gave me wasn’t just training. It was career polish—the kind that allows your value to travel farther than the room you’re standing in.
The reality is that, as an operator—especially at that point in my career, more than a decade in—I had no real reason to pursue these skills. My job didn’t require them. My performance wasn’t measured by them. And success, as I understood it then, had nothing to do with how I communicated in writing or navigated professional norms.
If we’re being honest, there is no formal class that teaches the suit-and-tie intangibles. No certification for tone. No training module on how to translate experience into corporate language. Most operators never even realize those skills exist until they suddenly find themselves in rooms where they matter.
That’s why "the suits" are so important—not as gatekeepers, but as guides.
When the suits take the time to explain the unwritten rules, they shorten the learning curve for people who already know how to execute. They help operators step into new environments without second-guessing, and without losing confidence in what they already bring to the table.
Career polish isn’t about changing who you are. It’s about removing friction so your value can be recognized beyond the role you started in.
### 3. The Power of Relationships
As an operator, I always prided myself on customer service. But much of the job is built around systems, processes, and procedures—inputs that often require exactly one person.
**Me**.
Show up on time. Run the route. Execute the assignment.
Even when routes have challenges, collaboration is usually incidental, not structural. If I’m on time and the bus ahead of me is on time, leapfrogging doesn’t happen. Coordination doesn’t happen. Collaboration doesn’t happen.
That reality quietly shapes how operators think about work. Success is measured by execution, not persuasion. Reliability, not relationships. You do your part, the system moves, and the day ends.
That logic works until you move beyond the drivers seat.
The moment you move beyond the operator seat, execution alone stops being enough. As I began making my professional shift—and honestly, even now—concepts like buy-in, alignment, and relationship capital became increasingly important. At the administrative level, progress doesn’t happen because one person executes well. It happens because the right people are aligned around a shared outcome.
Having the best idea is rarely sufficient. You need trust. Context. An understanding of who influences decisions, who needs reassurance, and who needs to feel included before momentum can exist at all.
This is the world administrators operate in **every day.**
They understand that collaboration isn’t accidental—it’s intentional. It’s designed, maintained, and revisited. And when administrators take the time to teach operators how that influence works—not politically, but practically—they unlock a different kind of power.
This is why the suit matters to operators. Not because execution is lacking**, but because execution alone doesn’t scale.** Administrators help operators translate their reliability, insight, and experience into outcomes that extend beyond a single route, shift, or title
### 4. The Big Picture
**What often separates operators and administrators is not skill, but scope.**
Operators are measured by what happens in front of them: the trip, the stop, the passenger, the minute hand on the clock. Precision matters. Consistency matters. Execution *is* the job.
Administrators are measured differently. Their responsibility extends beyond any single run or shift. They are accountable for patterns, tradeoffs, and outcomes that unfold across routes, days, budgets, and people.
Both perspectives are necessary. But they are not interchangeable.
From the operator seat, a smooth day feels like success. From the administrative seat, success is whether the system held together under pressure—whether resources were allocated correctly, risks were mitigated, and service remained reliable at scale.
Here’s what that difference in scope looks like in practice.
Patrick drives the 36. Patrick can keep the 36 on time. Patrick can keep the 36 on time morning, noon, or night.
The 36 doesn’t have on-time performance issues.
All of that can be true.
**From my point of view.**
But at the end of the day, it only represents **the bus I am driving at that moment.**
Administrators are accountable for everything beyond that moment. They see how one delay compounds into another. How reliability on one route affects reliefs, fleet availability, overtime, customer complaints, and budgets. They understand how inputs—traffic patterns, dwell times, staffing levels, funding requirements—stack long before those impacts ever reach me in the operator seat.
They see how the 36 struggles.
It doesn't mean either of us are incorrect, it just means that the story is incomplete.
To an operator, success is holding the route. To an administrator, success is whether the system holds.
This is why the big picture matters. Not to diminish operator experience, but to contextualize it. When scope is shared, decisions stop feeling random. And when operators understand how their performance fits into the larger machine, the work carries a different kind of meaning.
### Closing Insight
The divide between suits and troops has never been about **competence**. It’s been about **context.**
Operators hold the truth of execution. Administrators hold the truth of scale, structure, and sustainability.
When either side is missing, the system suffers.
The strongest transit systems aren’t built when one side dominates the other. They’re built **when experience and perspective travel together—when execution informs decisions, and decisions are explained with respect.**
Operators don’t need to become suits. Suits don’t need to become operators. But both benefit when they understand how the other sees the world.
That understanding doesn’t just improve service. It builds better leaders, stronger teams, and careers that can move beyond a single seat, route, or title.
Transit works best when context moves as freely as people do.
[View full post](https://www.patrickeparents.com/media/troops-and-suits-part-ii-why-operators-need-the-suits-more-than-they-think)
```json
{
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "BlogPosting",
"author" : {
"@type" : "Person",
"name" : "Patrick E Parents"
},
"dateModified" : "2026-09-23T17:36:05.684Z",
"datePublished" : "2026-09-23T17:13:53Z",
"headline" : "Troops and Suits, Part II: Why Operators Need the Suits More Than They Think",
"image" : {
"@type" : "ImageObject",
"height" : 941,
"url" : "https://51671931.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/51671931/ChatGPT%20Image%20Sep%2023%2c%202026%2c%2001_13_17%20PM.png",
"width" : 1672
},
"mainEntityOfPage" : "https://www.patrickeparents.com/media/troops-and-suits-part-ii-why-operators-need-the-suits-more-than-they-think",
"publisher" : {
"@type" : "Organization",
"logo" : {
"@type" : "ImageObject",
"height" : 60,
"url" : "/hs/hsstatic/content_shared_assets/static-1.4092/img/default-amp-logo.png",
"width" : 60
},
"name" : "Media and Content| Patrick E Parents"
}
}
```