10 Commonly Asked Questions About COOs

New COOs really struggle with something and the thing that they struggle with most is trying to actually execute on the company systems before they've learned how to build the relationships with the people. And it's starting to cause huge problems for them and your company. So what starts happening inside of your company is the COO is so keen to put the systems in place, to put the playbooks in place, to put the actual process processes in place. They're so keen to start executing against strategy that they start frustrating. In fact, they start pissing off some of their direct reports and other leadership team members. And the problem continues to get worse as they'll end up breaking trust, they'll end up starting creating back channeling, fighting and arguing, and they'll end up hurting themselves without realizing that they even are. As they continue to push hard on the process and they hurt the underlying people inside of the business. That underlying people hurt starts causing your company time, costing your company money, and really you're going to end up even losing some of those good people because the COO is not connected with the proper things. So let me walk you through why it's important and how to actually fix it. This situation happened to me back at the very beginning of me joining 1-800-got junk. I walked into the organization and really no one there understood what needed to happen to scale the company. I was the one coming in with all of the franchising expertise. So I had a playbook very quickly of what I wanted to execute on the problem that I didn't realize was the team didn't know me. They really didn't know my experience. I hadn't gained that level of trust there. So as I started pushing in place, the system is pushing change, really moving the company forward in a very fast way. The entire team started getting frustrated with Uncle Cameron and Brian. The CEO had to bring in a marriage counselor to work behind the scenes to help us build a better relationship and help me learn how to connect with the actual employees. So here's the big takeaway that I learned from this and how I executed on it. I started to spend more time with the people, getting to know them, getting to like them, getting to appreciate their jobs, and also honoring all of the work that they've done up until this point. And by me going for breakfast, having lunches, going for walks, spending time after dinner or after work, and just getting to know them and connect with them even more and really connecting with the work that they'd already done and the work they'd done to grow the company to where we were. They started to feel much more comfortable with me bringing my ideas into the company. So the big net net here for every CEO is spend more time connecting with the people instead of trying to get the people connecting with your systems. If you connect with them, then they'll be able to execute on your plans. At some point in your career, you're going to want to jump from the industry that you're in to a completely different industry. And you're going to be worried that you can't make the jump. In fact, you're going to be so worried that you need to stay in the same industry that you're always in. I had this problem back in October or September of 2000. I was leaving a business that I built for two and a half years. It was an Internet company. It was a private currency business. And I really didn't know where I was going to go. Not only was I going to be changing industries, I was going to be leaving the tech sector because it was imploding. And I was moving from Seattle in the United States back up to Vancouver, Canada. So I was leaving the country, moving to an entirely different city, and going to have to change to an entirely different industry. And I was completely frozen. I was so frozen, in fact, that I really didn't know what was going to happen with my career. So I'll walk you through what I did and how I got through that. And it was from me sitting and listening to those closest to me. I pulled a group of my really close friends together, business people that I'd been in mastermind communities with or that I'd helped over the years casually and growing their companies. And I sat down with five of them at my home and I walked them through my predicament. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do, but I know I need to leave this industry and go into something else. And I asked them, where do you think I'm strong? And they started to point out areas of my past business experience that I'd forgotten about. One of the big ones was, you're really strong at franchising. And I was like, well, yeah, but I kind of had diminished what I was strong at. What they were able to point out to me was my strengths in business were much greater than my strengths in the actual industry itself. So because I'd been in this private currency business in an Internet company, I was thinking of what are my strengths at running Internet companies? What they reminded me was I had strengths around people Operations, leadership, growing the skill sets of people, recruiting, interviewing, and hiring of people. I had deep domain expertise in the franchising world. I was good at guerrilla marketing and pr. So all of a sudden they laid out in front of me all of these areas of strengths and I realized I could go from any industry to any other industry quite easily. So the problem isn't that you don't have the skills to move. The problem is that you're frozen because you can't see your situation as clearly as those around you. Right now we have a member of our COO Alliance, Lindsay Smith. She's been a member of our CEO alliance for four years. Now she's leaving the industry that she's in and she's in search of moving off to the next industry. She's working with one of our COO alliance partners as an executive search firm. She has other CO alliance members helping her rebuild her resume, rebuild her confidence, and think about what her next step in the industry is going to be. So it's the wisdom of the crowd and it's you. Putting yourself in those right rooms and around those right people is going to help you with the next stages of your career. At some point in your career, you're going to want to consider going from the COO role to the CEO role. And if you don't have the proper skills and confidence and connections in place, you're either going to fail at that jump or you'll never try to make the jump. The reason that you're never going to try to make that jump is you will start to rebuild that imposter syndrome that many of us have throughout our day to day. But if you realize it can be done and you have examples of people around you who have done it, the leap for you is going to be much easier than it could be today. Trying to go on your own. I'll give you a couple of really specific examples of this. We have Matt Woll, who is one of the very first COO alliance members. He was the second in command for a company called Acceleration Partners. He was a member of the COO alliance for a year and a half, and he really got to build and hone his operational skills, the confidence and connections of those people around him. And because he was getting so good in his role and I was coaching he and his CEO, we were able to work through a coaching transition for him to move into the CEO role and to understand what he then needed to let go of. Because it's not just taking on more responsibility, it's also Learning how to delegate and get some of that off your plate. The amazing thing that happened to Matt Wool was right around that same time, our very first CEO alliance member, Zach Morrison, was also making the switch from CEO to CEO at a company called Genuity. He built Tenuity. He was making that switch. And it was again through my coaching, through the time that we spent together, that you learned how to start delegating more of the COO responsibilities. And he learned how to adapt his style to be more CEO, to stay at that 30,000 foot level. So if you surround yourself with other people that are doing it, if you spend time working with mentors and coaches on how to do it, you can make that jump. But if you don't, you're probably always going to be stuck with that glass ceiling that you're putting in place for yourself today. The big takeaway on this is you can make the leap, but you have to learn how to think differently and approach the role completely differently. Most leaders suck at adapting their leadership style the way that they should be. And if they're not good at it, they end up frustrating their employees. They end up hearing that they're a micromanager, or they have employees that are completely bewildered, or they end up with projects coming back to them that aren't done the way that they want to. But the problem isn't your employees. The problem is you as a leader. In my experience, back in the very earliest days of leading people, I realized that I was training a group of franchisees that were all running the exact same business. They all typically had the exact same problems, but I had to learn to coach each of them individually based on their unique strengths, based on their unique abilities, and based on the unique mindset based on and confidence that they're coming in on that specific task. Luckily, I was actually given some training around something called situational leadership. It's one of the core skills. In fact, it's the first module of my invest in your leaders course. And it's a skill that I've spent time over the years getting more and more training in. If you learn how to adapt your style based on the skills and confidence of the person that you're talking to or coaching and that specific project that you're working with them on, your results are going to get better, their results are going to get better, and everybody's going to have a lot more fun at work. In fact, using situational leadership over the years, I've been able to now start coaching some of the CEOs at the very highest level. But what happens is I don't coach them on their unique ability. I coach them on areas of the business that they're actually not that strong in. As an example, I was coaching someone named Seth Bader runs a very successful, very big hundred and some odd person law firm. So he's very, very good at the competency of law. Very, very good at running a law firm. I never coached him on any of that. On the area of recruiting and interviewing and hiring great people, he'd always struggled with a proper interview process. So the style that I used on that one specific area was very different. On a section of the business that I really wasn't coaching on at all. Back in the early days when I first started leading people, I had a couple of my employees complaining that I was micromanaging them and I didn't realize that I was actually doing something wrong. Later in that same summer, when I was coaching the same people, one of my employees came to me and said he felt like he was drifting and that I didn't care and that I wasn't helping him enough. And I said, well, I thought you used to think I was micromanaging me. He goes, yeah, but I need you to micromanage me. On this project that opened my eyes up to something called situational leadership. It's the first module in my invest in your leaders course. I've spent tons of time now learning how to adapt my leadership style based on the skills and the confidence of each of the people that I'm coaching and on the specific projects that they're working on. What's happened is because I'm now in tune with how to change my style, they're feeling supported, they're feeling cared for, and I'm helping them get better results. It's the number one skill that you need to work on as a leader. It's called situational leadership. Check it out. As module number one of my invest in your leaders course. There's times in our business where leaders have to pivot and change our approach to leadership. Sometimes we have to go from like a peacetime situation to a wartime situation. And if we don't are either our business will crumble or the people around us continue to crumble. I faced this years ago as we were starting to go through Covid where the entire model for the COO alliance had to change because our model was five in person events per year that our members came to and all of a sudden we couldn't go to in person events. So we had to completely iterate, completely change. And I had to literally on the fly, over the course of about a week, recreate and reinvent an entire new business and not lose the current clients that I had, but also continue to scale in a very different economic time. The ability to be a wartime CEO and to act quickly is what our people are looking for. Because at times followers are looking to follow. And that's when leaders need to lead. Coos are pulled in tons of directions. And our problem is that we don't chunk our time or block off our calendar to work on the same kinds of projects at the same time. I was actually going through that this morning, filming videos right now for LinkedIn and in my head because for the last four days I've been working on scripts and longer form videos for my YouTube channel, videos that we're trying to get to the 8 to 20 minute mark. I was starting to record longer videos for LinkedIn. The problem is that I didn't have a gap in my calendar or a natural chunk in my calendar to remind me to reset and to get into a different style of business. Almost like if you're going to go from doing press meetings to working on planning, or you're going to go from doing accounting work to sales and marketing, very different mindsets, very different approaches. You need different chunks in your calendar to able to work on those same kinds of projects so that you stay in that particular flow. Not only do I feel that this is a common mistake, but I don't think that executives ever really think about how can I put all the same kind of work in the same kinds of parts in my calendar. In fact, my schedule today is all around doing videos and coaching CEOs, which is effectively the same kind of work. Taking problems and helping people move those forward, taking questions and answering them live. But if I was to go from this into accounting and then go back into coaching, everything would get messed up. One of my recent learning experiences around coaching, and I've been coaching CEOs now for 34 years. One of my recent experiences was me being coached. It was me showing up at a group coaching program of Dan Martell's and I've been in Dan's coaching program now for about seven or eight months. And I realized that even though I have deep domain expertise, I have deep expertise around business. I built very large companies. The teacher can always become the student and I can actually sit down with open ears and open eyes. Not only can I learn the content that Dan is teaching, but I can also watch Dan as a coach and as a Leader. And I can take some of those ideas back into my business as well. So I again started to realize that as the student, I can actually leverage up the results that I'm getting and the benefits that I'm getting from each of those individual coaching sessions. You know, an additional aha with this is that every single good athlete still has a coach. Every great coach still has to have a coach. Vulnerability is good in business until it's bad. Years ago, I. I decided that I was going to continue to get more and more vulnerable with my team, which was amazing. I showed them my weaknesses. I showed them the areas I was struggling. I showed them the areas of frustration that I had. And it was really good because they realized it was okay and safe for them to come to me with those problems too. And it was good until it wasn't. And the reason it wasn't was at one point, I came to the team and started showing them the real fears that we at the leadership team had, how we were really struggling with profitability, how we were really worried about our model. And all of a sudden, I realized my team was frozen because they still needed to trust and believe in their leader. And I was creating a problem where they could no longer trust and believe in me or the leadership team because they just didn't think we had our together. And I realized that there was a time and a place with who I can be vulnerable with. And sometimes I need to keep some of those cards close to my chest. So be careful with going too vulnerable. But yes, you have to be vulnerable. In a way, it's kind of like parents, right? As children, we need to believe that our parents have got this. And if our parents all of a sudden say that they're scared and they don't know how to Parents, they don't know how to cook and they don't know how to grow us. Cycle, who's got me right? There needs to be a little bit of belief that you still got this. So be cautious with how much vulnerability you have. But yes, there is a balance. And yes, you have to be vulnerable. If you're a CEO and you're too busy to take enough vacation time, like five or six weeks a year and completely disconnect from your business, or you feel like you're completely overwhelmed and working on all the areas of the business and you're never going to get caught up or you really don't have time to spend with growing the actual people that you have that report to you, it's time to get a second in Command, it's really time to get that true VP of Operations or COO into the company so that they can actually free you up to work in your area of unique ability. My big experience again on this one. I'm going to go back to a company called Tinuity where I was coaching the CEO Ben Kirschner. And Ben realized that he was very bogged down in the day to day and needed to elevate so that he could actually work on more strategic ideas like selling the company, taking the company to the next level, getting more top tier Fortune 100 clients. But because he was so bogged down in the day to day, he didn't have that ability to. So what we started to do was coach and grow one of his direct reports, Zach Morrison, into that true COO role. And Tinuity ended up going from 40 employees to around 1400 employees. Fifteen years later, if Ben the CEO, had not learned how to delegate more, how to remove himself from the day to day, and how to empower and hire someone truly to be in that COO role, his business might have grown, but it certainly wouldn't have gone from 440 employees to around 1400 employees. The reason I love this story is because as an entrepreneur, we only start a company for one of three reasons. To give us cash, to give us free time, or to have that feeling of accomplishment. And often we get stuck. And the way that you can unstuck it is to have a second in command in place to help you make your dreams come true. Coos are fact finders and they're always going to be asking the questions, looking for the data, pulling together reports, making sure that it's all perfectly figured out. And the reality is perfection is slowing them down and slowing the company down. COOs need to be a little bit more like their entrepreneurial counterpart or they're making it up on the go. They're shooting from the hip, they're kind of going to build the plane as they're flying the plane. The problem is if you spend all of your time working on getting everything perfect, you're going to frustrate not only yourself, but the team, and you're going to slow down the actual operation. So in my experience, it's important for the CEO to bullet point out the reports, to think about the critical few things, and to realize that really good is much better than perfect. Here's the number one rookie mistake that almost every CEO makes when they start off in their job. They actually come into the company with lots of experience, with lots of skills, and they want to get going and the CEO is so glad to have them that they want to get them going and they end up making a couple of decisions too early that really hurt them. The decisions they make wrong are they fire people way too soon. They hire and bring people into the company way too soon, and they initiate some of the big, hairy, complicated projects way too soon. In the first month. They need to be spending more time just getting to know people, knowing the history, showing up at meetings, really getting to know the culture and the DNA of the individual and the organization before they make any of those critical business decisions. In fact, if they can slow down the firing, the hiring and rolling out complex projects for at least 90 days and spend more time really connecting with people, they're going to avoid that number one big problem that so many CEOs have. If someone is looking to actually become a chief operating officer for an organization that's going to be first time getting into that CEO role. The biggest advice that I have for them is to grow their skills, their confidence and their connections as soon as possible. Get yourself into something like the COO Alliance. Devour the content in a course like the online invest in your leaders course. Read the proper books around business and leadership like the one minute manager. Really start to devour that content so that you grow your skills and that you actually start to shed the imposter syndrome that you actually show up with day to day. Almost every single leader I've ever met has some of that imposter syndrome. And to go into that CEO role, you need to gain that new level of confidence. And then lastly, it's the connection. That's why so many members of our COO alliance feel so plugged in and connected because they have hundreds of other second in commands that they can actually work on their skills, work on their connections, and that actually builds a strong layer to go off of. If you focus on those three things, you're going to have an incredible success story as you move into that first COO role. Foreign. You know, there's a question that I really wish some people would ask me and the question is, why does Everybody ask you about 1-800-got-JUNK when you left the company 17 years ago? And here's my response. I don't think I tell them about all the other successes that I've had over the last 17 years because I try to keep them in my back pocket a little bit. I end up bragging about the success of my customers and I don't talk about the role that I played in coaching people in growing the CEO alliance and coaching those members. In talking about the success of people in my investing your leaders course, I become a bad promoter at my work at having grown the success of my clients. So they tend to still talk about the one story where I last did that, and I left 1-800-gauge on 17 years ago. So I wish they would ask me about what I've done to grow these coaching clients and what I've done to grow the members in my course. And I think if we spent more time focusing on those things that I specifically did, our listeners would probably get a lot more value. So hopefully some people will ask me that question going forward.