Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Often The COO Gets MORE Respect Than the CEO

18 Dec 2022 · 1 min

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A short spoken segment from Cameron Herold about how COOs position themselves to gain respect comparable to CEOs. Herold contrasts the operational COO role with the entrepreneurial CEO, describing a yin-yang partnership where responsibilities and decision domains are clearly divided and where public spotlighting by the CEO can shape perceptions of who’s making which decisions.

Chapters

So what's interesting about COOs and how do they position themselves to get the same level of respect as the CEOs do? It's interesting. Often the CEOs get more respect than the CEOs do, because the CEOs are a little less crazy than their entrepreneurial CEO is. So it's often not so much about the respect that they're trying to gain, but maybe it's the understanding that in certain areas, the COO does get to make the decision, and in other areas, the CEO makes the decision. And they're more like a yin and yang partnership than they are like someone reporting to somebody else. And you can't go above the CEO's head to see if, you know, the CEO will change their mind. So I think it's often more about the roles and responsibilities and clear reporting structures and clear communication channels. Also, the CEO shining the spotlight on the CEO to make them look good even though they're delivering all the hard decisions, and the CEO shining the spotlight on the CEO as well, to make sure that we understand they're supposed to be a little crazy. There's supposed to be a lot of entrepreneurial.