A Cameron Herold YouTube talk describing the core behavioral differences between CEOs (entrepreneurial, start-now) and COOs (process-oriented, plan-first). He explains how these differences motivated creation of the COO Alliance, shares profiling practices (Colby profile) used to understand CEO/COO DNAs, and offers practical communication strategies for the roles to work together effectively.
Chapters
Most entrepreneurs start by just starting. They kind of start now, they plan later, right? Shooting from the hip, winging it. And they need to be that way because if they overthink it, they'll paralyze. Most of the CEOs tend to ask a lot of questions before they initiate a project, or they like putting a system or a checklist or a playbook in place before they start the project. And now we have to teach those two people almost like men are from Mars, women are from Venus. We have to teach them how to speak to each other. It actually wasn't even a strategic move so much as just me listening to my clients. I was coaching a few different clients about seven years ago. They had about 50 to 300 employees, three different companies. And they all wanted me to get their COO together, just to brainstorm. And so I pulled together 10 CEOs together for two and a half days. And at the end of two and a half days, nine of the 10 wanted to keep meeting. And that was literally the start of the CEO alliance. And then we kind of realized over time, pretty much in that first year that there were YPO and EO and Vistage and Genius Network and so many groups for entrepreneurs, but there really wasn't anything for that second in command. And so that we just kind of doubled down and went hard on it. Well, they're also just very different DNAs. It's almost like an accountant showing up at a legal mastermind, or a lawyer showing up at a medical mastermind, or a guy showing up at a bridal shower. We don't fit. We're not supposed to be there. We kind of need to have our own tribe. And we just left MIT last week. We had a whole huge group of second commands from a number of different countries. One flew in from Amsterdam, spent two and a half days together completely masterminding. And a lot of the discussions were, how do we support this crazy, entrepreneurial, bipolar, manic idea, perpetual motion machine of an entrepreneur that they all love, but they realize they need to figure out how do they support that person. And then they want to get deep into the weeds on certain discussions that most entrepreneurs don't want to spend hours and hours talking about playbooks and systems and processes and dashboards and, you know, they want to stay at that 30,000 foot level. It's interesting. We had. We started profiling all of our COO alliance members about six years ago, and then we also started profiling their CEO. So we use a Colby profile. And Colby. The Colby profile talks about how A person initiates or starts projects, and most entrepreneurs start by just starting. They kind of start now, they plan later, right? Shooting from the hip, winging it. And they need to be that way because if they overthink it, they'll paralyze. Most of the COOs tend to ask a lot of questions before they initiate a project, or they like, putting a system or a checklist or a playbook in place before they start the project. And now we have to teach those two people almost like men are from Mars, women are from Venus. We have to teach them how to speak to each other. The COO needs to be able to speak to the entrepreneurial CEO in sound bites, you know, in executive summaries, and let them know we have all the information, but we're not going to give it to you because we know your hard drive is full. And then the CEO needs to say, hey, I know you want to ask me more questions, so let's just go for a quick walk and you can ask me seven questions just to catch up to speed. And that's been really kind of an elegant dance over the last few years as well. Is really starting to learn the personality profiles of both. So stay ahead of the curve as a CEO. This next video is packed with great leadership lessons for you. It'll really help you as you continue in your growth.
