Cameron Herold says the path to COO has shifted: technical skills in automation and AI now let younger people reach the role faster, not just seasoned leaders. He cites a 21-year-old COO at a 100-person company, but notes that as companies scale, leadership wisdom matters more.
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So a really interesting question about COOs is how long does it take to become a COO? My thoughts around this have really changed over the years. My thoughts around that have changed because in the days, maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, a COO had to have the leadership wisdom of having built companies. Because a lot of the roles of the CEO were things like situational leadership, coaching, delegation, time management, running meetings, interviewing, aligning people, dealing with strategy. A lot of the soft skills of leadership, those are skills that can be learned and practiced over a period of 5 or 10 years. Now what we bring into the organization is the tech stack. All of the things around leveraging technology, around automation, around AI, around optimizing of processes, and a lot of those skills can be learned very early on as well. So while I used to think a CEO of a company had to be maybe 35, 40 years old, we've seen some of our members of the COO alliance become COOs at quite a young age. One, as an example, is 21 years old. He's the COO of a hundred person company. Now, he doesn't necessarily have all the leadership wisdom of having built companies and led teams and led people, but his understanding of technology and automation and leveraging the tech stack has been massive in the growth of their organization. So I think what we're starting to see is the age may be coming down a little bit, but I think it's still very important to actually grow the skill set of your second in command and for them to always keep scaling as well. Right. If your company goes from 100 employees to 200 employees to 400 employees, the skills of that second in command need to continue to change. And as the company starts to add more and more people, the wisdom and leadership skills that you need are so much more important than than the technology skills that you need in an earlier stage company. By the way, if you like this leadership lessons, you'll love the advanced leadership lessons below. Check out this video.
