Defining Responsibilities: How New COOs Should Define Their Roles in Relation to the CEO
The Mutable Role of the Chief Operating Officer
This second article in my ongoing series for new COOs is a practical guide to defining some of the most important boundaries of your position. Advice for new executives is often vague, aspirational, or overly conceptual, and those transitioning into a C-Suite position for the first time—or growing into the role from an adjacent one like Chief of Staff—have a great deal to gain from actionable guidance that can help them find their feet. That’s what I aim to do here.
The primary responsibilities of COOs are impossible to completely map out in advance, and the skills required are “neither generic nor very portable,” according to Nate Bennet and Stephen Miles, two of the most prominent voices on the role and training of COOs.
An effective COO is responsive to the unique needs of both the company and its CEO, so the role always varies between occupants and firms—sometimes to such an extent that two COOs might have almost completely dissimilar duties. Because the scope of a company’s operations is so broad, there is an extent to which the COO is a gap-filler position, an organization-focused executive brought in to compensate for vulnerabilities or to create strategically vital bandwidth for the leadership team.
By far the most important gap-filling you’ll do as a COO is supporting your Chief Executive Officer. COO and CEO are closely related roles, and succeeding in your new position is going to depend on how well you and the CEO work both in parallel and in partnership.
On a curling team, the captain is called the Skip. They’re the CEO. They pick the strategy and call the individual shots—how fast, how far, what angle. The Lead, meanwhile, plays the part of the COO, staying a few steps ahead of each stone and sweeping the ice smooth, ensuring that each shot follows its intended trajectory and lands on target. The CEO defines the path, and we make sure the company follows it.
That makes our relationships with CEOs the most significant influence on what we actually do all day. Setting clear boundaries between these two roles should be one of your first priorities. (Right after restructuring your schedule.)
Growing into the Job: What to Read
You will be the primary voice determining the scope of your duties as COO. The skills that got you the job—organization, coordination, and expertise in the company’s day-to-day—are the same skills that make you best qualified to define it. You should take the lead in setting expectations and differentiating responsibilities in your partnership with the CEO, and to do that well you’ll need to be prepared.
Start by reading everything you can get your hands on about the rest of the executive team and the Board of Directors. Most of them will have worked alongside one or more COOs in the past, and, because the role is so variable, they may expect very different things from you. To help you navigate those (potentially conflicting) expectations, it helps to be fluent in the major archetypes of COO.
Read this article first. Bennet and Miles’ research is the origin of the “archetypes” view of COOs. They list seven major reasons someone might be hired for the role:
To implement the CEO’s strategy (“the executor”)
To lead a particular initiative, such as a turnaround (“the change agent”)
To mentor a young, inexperienced CEO (“the mentor”)
To complement the strengths or make up for the weaknesses of the CEO (“the other half”)
To provide a partner to the CEO (“the partner”—not all the names are catchy)
To test out a possible successor (“the heir apparent”)
To stave off the defection of a highly valuable executive, particularly to a rival (“the MVP”)
They develop those descriptions in their book, Riding Shotgun, which I believe is required reading for COOs, and doubly so for those who are first-in-the-role at their companies. Although the book draws mostly on public-company examples, its insights and advice are still relevant to startups and those of you helping to lead SMBs.
With those archetypes in mind, I then recommend four other books as part of your new-job preparation:
For a focus on COOs in smaller companies, try The Second in Command by Cameron Herold. It’s valuable despite some heavy-handed self-promotion for the author’s professional community.
Despite its typographical errors, How to Be A Chief Operating Officer by Jennifer Gear is a standout for its organized lists of topics, responsibilities, and metrics, illustrated with helpful examples. Especially useful in the context of the other books.
Part of every COOs time is spent coaching colleagues toward success. The playbook laid out in Trillion Dollar Coach (Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle) is the toolkit used by some of the most successful executive coaches of our generation.
Finally, because the COO role is relentlessly generalist, I strongly suggest reading David Epstein’s Range on the specialist/generalist approaches to leadership.
Practical Steps: Defining the Relationship
Actually defining your role is all about the details. You’ll need to create a comprehensive assessment of existing operations that require meaningful involvement from either the CEO or COO. If you’re promoted into the COO role without an incumbent in place, you’ll need to start by mapping out a transition plan to ensure the business isn’t disrupted by your move. This will create bandwidth for you to take on new COO-specific responsibilities.
If you don’t have to manage a transition, start here. For each operational area, try to define:
What’s getting done today
Teams or individuals getting it done
Assessment and recommendation: fix it, maintain it, delegate it, or abandon it
Who should oversee the recommended action: CEO, COO, other
The resulting grid should let you divide operational areas by oversight and responsibility. There will be a handful of areas with clear lines of responsibility, either based on your CEO’s preference or based on your expertise. For anything that is unclear and needs to be assigned, pay particular attention to:
Pre-COO responsibilities that need a new owner or that need to be incorporated into your new role.
Anything the CEO is doing today that you recommend the COO absorb.
Areas where the business can benefit from more CEO time, like strategy, capital allocation, investor management, and so on.
Opportunities to define Objective and Key Results (OKRs, goals that are measurable and concrete) for your role.
Some OKRs are self-evident: was the special initiative completed on-schedule and on-budget? Others can be subtler. For instance, does the executive team report that they have the information they need, at the right depth and delivery frequency, to be completely confident in assessing the performance trajectory every week? Are weekly indicator reports from each business unit accurate, and can that be validated using actual quarter-end performance metrics? Etc.
This process of defining roles and monitoring performance is central to what a COO does every day. In some ways, you will understand the entire business, and how each component impacts others, better than anyone else at the company, and maintaining that perspective is a meaningful part of your value.
Put that knowledge to work through regular, proactive discussions with the CEO about responsibilities and priorities. Companies are always evolving, as successes and failures each bring their own kind of change to the business. Both the CEO and COO have a birds-eye view of these changes, and the company will run best when the two of you are working in clean coordination.
Here’s an example of what it looks like when you’re keeping one eye on future needs. We recently had a fantastic board meeting—the “best ever,” according to several members—but the demands of managing it fully depleted me. I had been unable to delegate preparation for the meeting or pause other projects, as everything on my plate was mission-critical. Now, I know that every quarter I’ll need to arrange the help I need well in advance, and budget extra time for Board prep.
Your first year will confront you with dozens of challenges like that one. Each is a chance not just for your personal learning, but for implementing institutional/operational changes that will produce better outcomes in the future.
How those changes get implemented—and when, and by whom—is the basis of your COO Roadmap. My next article will detail the process of building your own, based on feedback, long-term goals, and other key sources of input.