A COO's Responsibilities Should Change Every 6 Months

23 Oct 2026 · 2 min

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1:59

In this talk Cameron Herold argues that a COO’s set of roles and responsibilities should be refreshed roughly every six months because the COO’s primary function is to achieve results through people. He explains that the COO must continuously delegate all core projects to team members, then spend time coaching them to build the skills, confidence, and connections needed to own those projects. By repeatedly delegating and developing talent, the COO can shift higher‑impact work onto the team, allowing the COO’s own focus to change. Herold highlights the importance of automating, optimizing, and off‑shoring tasks, and shares a personal example of promoting his executive assistant from EA to Director and then VP of Operations and Sales, illustrating how delegation creates a cascade of responsibility. He references his “Invest in Your Leaders” training, which teaches delegation, project and time management, situational leadership, and one‑on‑one coaching as the core competencies that enable a COO to clear their plate and reset their role every six months.

Chapters

This is one of the most interesting concepts of a COO, but every 6 months you're really going to have a completely new set of roles and responsibilities for you because your job is to get results through people. Let me explain what I mean here. Every week where you sit down and you look at all the core projects that are on your plate, it doesn't say at the top of your to-do list your name, right? It doesn't say Fred's to-do list. It just says to-do list. Well, your job is to delegate everything except genius on that to-do list To people that are on your team. Now, often you get blocked here where you're saying, oh, I don't have anybody I can delegate that project to. Pick somebody, delegate it to them, and then spend your time coaching them on the skills and their confidence and their connections so that they can work on that project. Your time is about delegating more and then spending your time growing people so that they can take that stuff off your plate. So pretty much every 6 months, the roles and responsibilities of what you're working on changes Because you should be able to get most of that stuff off your plate and onto other people. Likewise, you're helping them to automate and to optimize and to stop doing some of what they're doing or to be able to delegate or offshore some of their projects too. Even my executive assistant Meredith, after about 4 or 5 years of being my EA, finally became Director of Operations. Now she's VP of Operations and Sales because I've helped to elevate her to work on higher impact projects. And she now has an EA that she can delegate projects to. And I'm always looking at my team to say, what can they be working on so that I can get more of the stuff off my plate so that they can be working on the higher impact activities? If you find that you're doing the same stuff that you were doing 2 years ago, it's because what you're not doing well is delegating and you're not actually coaching your team. Some of the core skills in my Invest in Your Leaders training are skills around delegation, project management, time management, coaching, situational leadership, one-on-one coaching, the skills to be able to get more off your plate so that your role can actually change every 6 months.