Making the CEO Iconic! The Key to Leveraging Your COO Career

I think that's where that personality trait of just wanting to make the CEO iconic and wanting to build the brand is more important than leveraging your own career. Your career will come, but if you focus on the brand first. When I go in, I do speaking events inside of big companies to teach them all of this stuff. And when they're, when they're kind of signing me up to come in and speak, they're not really sure what they're doing. They know they're supposed to, but they're not kind of sure what's coming. And all of a sudden they're going, we've been over complicating the shit out of this stuff. Like, it's just not that difficult. It's, I think first and foremost it's somebody who really wants to help make the CEO iconic. You know, they, they realize that they are the yin and yang to the CEO. It's about the entrepreneur's vision, it's not their own. So it's someone who truly wakes up in the morning wanting to make the CEO iconic and really wanting to help reverse engineer their dreams versus someone who's trying to get to the CEO role someday.

Now that's an interesting comment for you to make because I think in my experience There are two types of COOs. There's one that is in the vein that you're talking about, that is truly views herself as the partner to the chief executive and is really the operator, so to speak. Almost like a chief of staff. Right. But at least in my world, growing up in the tech industry, that's not what most COs in my experience are, maybe at some of the bigger tech companies, but it's sort of the hypergrowth earlier stage or even mid stage or even, you know, even at a billion dollars. Most of the COO's that I seem to see, and this is my impression, I don't have data, but it's really the CEO in waiting job. And so tell me why you think that, like, being a COO is actually a profession as opposed to. No, no. I just hang out here, everybody makes sure I'm not an asshole, and then when the, the old man kicks off, I get the prize.

Well, I think, I think it was kind of like what, what makes a great C coo? Because I think what truly does make the great one is to know what their role is and to stick in that lane. Right. Versus trying to. It's like the, the football player who's playing in some specialized role and he just understands he's not supposed to Play on the defensive line as well. Right. He's, he's got a role and they play it or like a Navy seal, they know exactly what their role is. I think that's what truly makes them great. Now, Sheryl Sandberg is not out looking for a CDO role. She's clearly playing a fantastic second to Mark.

Do you think she views herself as a, if you will, professional coo?

I think so. That would be my gut right now. I haven't asked her, but she's on my list to actually want to talk to a couple of CEOs and kind of get some insights from them because.

You know, I wonder, you know, as a former cmo, my sense is CMO is a job that people aspire to, and it's a job they sort of understand early in their life or career. Just like CEO, just like cfo, just like, you know, today, often we call them now CPOs, Chief Product Officer, whoever, whoever runs R D or builds the carbon dulators. You know, that's at chief engineering job. These are jobs that, you know, young people can understand pretty quickly, and they're jobs that get celebrated and have seeming career paths. But interestingly enough, there isn't like a COO path. Really. There isn't a, like, there's no like COO training at Stanford or. Did I miss that?

No, you didn't miss it. That's actually why I started the COO alliance was there was nowhere for the second in commands to actually network and learn and mastermind together. Um, so one of the things that, that I encountered, we did a lot of personality profiling on about, on the whole membership, the CEO alliance with their CEOs and the COO's. And we did a personality profile using the Colby profile. And their, their profiles were completely different. The CEOs were very entrepreneurial, quick starts, and the COOs were very high fact finders and follow throughs. So they would ask lots of questions and put lots of systems in place, and they just see the world from a very different lens. You know, I, I've always said I've never had a unique idea in my life, but I can always reverse engineer dreams. You know, I've played the second in command so many times in different companies that when the entrepreneur tells me where they want to go, I'm like, oh, I get it, by the way, let me make this happen. No, because they're so scattered with, you know, all the ideas and they need to be. And they're high visionary. They're. They're often very bipolar. And very add COOs tend to be very operational and very linear and very much reverse engineering.

Do COO as a career, COO as a role, as a job. I'm going to train for that job. It's not a holding spot for CEO. What kind of ego do you need to have to, to land there?

Well, my, I'm pretty insecure. I know I probably don't come off that way with confidence, but it's confidence on my content. But I, I wake up every morning still feeling like this kid from a small town in northern Ontario wondering how the fuck I got here, you know, knowing I've worked hard, but I've been lucky and dots have connected. So I don't, but I don't have a need to, I don't have a need to be the CEO. I just, I want to build stuff and I see the, I see the CEOs banging their head on the wall, I'm like, stop, let's go out the door. Like, I just see the path of least resistance and it feels good to help them with that. I mean you can do some pretty amazing things doing it too, right? You can get paid really well doing it and you can.

Well. And I don't know, I don't know outside of the tech world, but people often say to me that the CMO job is the hardest job to fill in tech. And I get why they would say that. It's a hard job to fill for sure because the spec is gigantic. It sort of looks like, you know, essentially Steve Jobs is what people are looking for. But the other one that I would think would be, um, even harder would be coo, especially professional coo, not CEO and waiting. Or, or we're going to put you in the COO job and you and the CEO are going to transition over a two year period. So none of that. You're a fucking coo. That's the end. That's the pot at the end of the rainbow.

Here's why it's hard. And Harvard wrote an article, Harvard Business Review wrote an article about 10 years ago called the misunderstood role of the COO. And they just, they, they lined up seven distinct types of COOs. So you could have one who's very outward facing, one who's inward facing, one who's process and engineering focused, one who's sales marketing, one who's product. So it really is the yin and yang. So whatever the CEO doesn't love or isn't good at, get the COO who's really good at it and loves that shit. You know, Brian liked it and he liked finance and I liked operations, execution, culture, meetings, call center. Like I liked running the business. So we were both culturally very similar and we trusted each other implicitly. Like so you just have to find that culture fit. But someone who loves doing all the stuff you don't.

And it's so fascinating you say that Cameron, because as you're talking, I'm thinking back and you know, I'm that outwardly facing, loud, you know, creative strategy kind of a guy. And I'm not, I'm ops, day to day, trains run on time guy. And so my teams, the people who were my direct reports were always the opposite of me and it took a lot of them to contain me, if you know what I mean. And then I also think about it though, as a three time CMO who actually decided I don't want to be a CEO, but how I tried to partner with the CEOs and interestingly, you know, I had two CEOs who were more inwardly facing or you know, certainly more introverted and pushing them out actually took a little bit of work. And in one case at Science with Bob Howe, Bob was an extraordinary strategic thinker, probably the best one I ever knew. I mean a mind that was an amazing place to hang out with or hang out in or however you want to think about it. And, and he was an incredible public speaker, amazingly charismatic and smart and yet some, somehow he was so big there was room for a, a bunch of us. And so we could have, you know, Mary Meeker, when she was still at Morgan Stanley, called the Science management team Murderer's Row. You know, we could have Murderers row because Bob was huge, but somehow his bigness made room for other very big people, myself included. And so it's interesting how that, how you can meet that ying and yang even with an overlap in capabilities or a 180 difference in capabilities. As long as you find that way to meet for sure.

And that's exactly what it is. And I think that's where that personality trait of just wanting to make the CEO iconic and wanting to build the brand is more important than leveraging your own career. Your career will come, but if you focus on the brand first. When I go in, I do speaking events inside of big companies to teach them all this stuff. And when they're, when they're kind of signing me up to come in and speak, they're not really sure what they're doing. They know they're supposed to, but they're not kind of sure what's coming and all of a sudden we've been over complicating the out of this stuff. Like, it's just not that difficult.