An Operations Manager asks Cameron Herold how to advance to director and executive roles. Herold explains that higher titles reflect larger roles: bigger spans of control, broader responsibilities, and more strategic contributions. He recommends asking for more responsibility, improving leadership skills (courses/coaching), aligning with the CEO by reading the books they value, seeking frequent feedback, and viewing coaching as a normal part of growth. He illustrates with salary/title examples and his experience coaching senior executives.
Chapters
I want to ask about leveling up, especially like I know a lot of people here are CEOs. I am Operations manager. How do I get to like the next step level up to like a director level and then from a director level, say upwards.
What I see is as a person moves up in terms of their title, it's their roles and responsibilities are becoming larger, their span of control in terms of people that they're leading and growing becomes larger and that the level of strategy or strategic ideas they're bringing to the company becomes bigger. So years ago to have a, to have a COO title or a CFO title or a CMO title or a CTO title, 20 years ago you had to be a major person in a major company to get a C level title. We've kind of had title inflation or deflation. I don't know what you would call it. Where now if you're in a 20 person company, you've got a COO, you're probably not really a COO, you're probably a director of operations or maybe a VP of operations with a title that's a lot bigger than you. But what's interesting, we did a survey with different titles and you'll see that as the titles increase, the compensation tends to increase. But it's usually because their roles and responsibilities are becoming more, their span of control is becoming more, and they're bringing more strategic thinking into the table. When I was the COO at 1-800-got junk. So I left there 16 years ago now, which is incredible. My Salary back in 2007 when I left was 307,000 310,000. That was in 2007. So that's probably more like 750 today or 600 today. That's a true CEO. If you're making 120, you're probably more in the Director of Ops role. So the way you move up in the organization is ask for more responsibility. Go through things like the invest in your leaders course to grow your leadership skills and your functioning areas. Devour the books that your CEO is building so that you're on the same page. So if the CEO is reading Traction, read it. If they're reading, scaling up, read it. If they're reading who read it. If they're reading double, double, devour it, right? Try to get the same level of skills or so that you can build that commonality and understanding of what they're talking about and then really go to them constantly and just say, where can I get better? Give me feedback of where to continue and where to get better. Like any high powered athlete, you take the best in the world at golf. They still have a coach, right? They're still working on their mindset and their skill set. So don't look at coaching as a negative. I coach CEOs all the time. I coach the CEO and the second in command at Sprint. You know, they're the 82nd largest company in the US and I coached them for 18 months. Jamie Jones was, you know, a two and a half million dollar salary plus bonuses. And I coached him for 18 months because he was still trying to get better. So I think it's just that it's constantly trying to improve will get you there.
