Strategies for Emerging COOs

You know, the school system really messed us up as children. Right. The school system told us that we had to be the smartest person in the room, that we had to memorize all the. Now we did back in those days because there was no Internet. Right. So you had to be the smartest person. But now I realize I just have to know who the smart people are or I have to be able to find them quickly. That was allowing me to feel I don't need to be the smartest one because I never was the smartest. So that was one that allowed me to supercharge. My learning was realizing I can learn about the stuff I'm passionate about and I can outsource everything except genius. I've worked a lot over the years getting partially from getting involved in a lot of mastermind communities where I realized if I was the smartest person in the room, I was in the wrong room. And I just kept wanting to plug myself into these networks where I could really learn from others. And I didn't learn well in the school environment, but I really learned well in a peer environment.

Yeah. So those types of environments. And that's exactly what you created in the program, the CEO alliance, it sounds like. So maybe you could, you really went after that specific function. Why was that? And why build a program around that?

I had been the COO for 1, 800 got junk. I took them from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six years. And I also had been the second in command for a couple of other companies. And then I had been coaching CEOs all the way as high as I coached the CEO of Sprint, Marcelo Pleray, and also coached his second command, Jamie Jones, for 18 months. So when I started working with coaching of entrepreneurs and then also working with their second in command, I realized there was a very huge split in the skill set and the behavioral traits of those two communities. And then I also noticed there were a lot of groups for entrepreneurs and CEOs already. Right. We had YPO and EO and Vistage and you know, the Fortune 500s have great communities for CEOs. And there's, there's organizations for marketers and lawyers and dentists and doctors, but there was never an organization for the CEO. So I wanted a mastermind community where the CEOs could actually network and communicate and learn from each other and with each other without getting distracted by the C level or the CEO kind of distractions, the 50,000 foot level they fly at. So we started the organization five years ago. We've now got members from 17 countries and they meet every single month for three hour events. And I just actually sit on the side facilitating. It's pretty amazing.

Oh, that's amazing. So you've launched this and it has a whole life of its own. Tell me where you see most CEOs, where do most of them get stuck and what are the mindset shifts that need to happen for them?

Well, it's interesting if we think about like at the highest level, like the queen bee COO is Sheryl Sandberg, right? She's the second in command for Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg. She's the operational interface for his kind of extroverted marketing and sales and kind of the savant. She has to really play in the operation zone and not deal with vision. So what happens with a lot of COOs is as soon as they realize the CEO's job is vision and culture, and their role is to make sure that it all happens. The second thing is they have to get very comfortable with telling the CEO what no one else is usually comfortable saying. It's almost like the emperor's new suit, right? Where the emperor's wearing that magic robe of clothing that doesn't exist and the little two year old says, but the king is naked. The COO has to be the one to tell the CEO what no one else wants to tell them. And when they can get very comfortable with that, the bond of trust gets very strong very, very quickly because the CEO realizes that COO absolutely has their back and they become that TR& Yang partnership. So that would be one, one area that we've seen a lot of CEOs struggle with is just the imposter syndrome. You know, they wake up every day feeling like, wow, this is the biggest thing I've ever done. How do I take this to that next level? And they worry about their own skill set and their own abilities to continue to. To learn or continue to run the business. That's one of the things we've noticed in the CEO alliance is when they meet all these other members, they realize they're just like everybody else, right? So they have that quiet confidence that then allows them to learn. So that would probably be an area as well.

Have you ever dealt with a situation where the CEO is confused about how to implement a vision or should they be doing the vision? So let's say we have a CEO who has a vision, but it's so high level that it actually isn't crystallized enough for the CEO to execute on it. And they find themselves getting involved in Creating the vision. How do you work it out between the role of the CEO and the coo?

That's a great question. And I'm not sure if you've read through my concept called the Vivid Vision, which is now a registered trademark. I covered it in my first book, Double Double. But I also wrote a book called Vivid Vision and then it's also been copied in my the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs that I co authored with Hal Elrod. So the concept of the Vivid Vision is this. Most CEOs, most companies have a one sentence vision statement or a mission statement, right? They took their favorite words, they voted on all their words, they kept six or seven, and they mashed them up into one sentence. And that was their mission statement, right? Go team. But it didn't communicate enough about the company. It left way too much for interpretation. So the Vivid Vision idea that's now being used all over the world, the CEO creates a four or five page description of their company three years in the future as if it's already come true. Almost as if the CEO of L' Oreal or Sprint or Nespresso hopped into the DeLorean time machine with Michael J. Fox, traveled into the future, and December 31, 2024, they got out of the time machine and they walked around their company and they described everything they could see three years from now. They described the company culture, they described the meeting rhythms, they described operations and IT and marketing and customer service. They wrote down what the customers were saying online. They described what the employees were writing in. Indeed. And on Glassdoor, they literally described every aspect of their company as if it had come true three years from now. And it ends up as a four or five page written description that they get a really good copywriter to polish and a good designer to make it kind of look and feel like their brand, that four or five page PDF and get shared with the leadership team who gets to figure out how to make it come true. So in the construction world, it's like building a home, right? The homeowner knows what they want this beautiful home to look like, but they don't necessarily know how to do electrical or plumbing or drywall or hang cabinets. But if they explain the vision of their home clear enough, the contractor can draw blueprints or plans to make the vision come true. When the homeowner signs off on the blueprints and the contractor signs off on the vision, they hand those to the employees and the workers can literally build a home without ever speaking to the homeowner. So that's what's been missing in corporate America and in the entrepreneurial world is everyone is trying to use a vision statement as a way to try to describe the whole company, and they feel like they're herding cats and trying to hold people accountable. But no one can see what the CEO can see. That's the really strong tool that I created years ago that's now been launched globally, and companies are using it to align, to inspire, to attract key employees, and then to figure out how do they create the blueprint or the plans to make it come true.

Yeah, and some of the best teams I've seen on an exercise like that also contribute to that. Like the CEO leads, but they get some feedback on some spots that they may be missing or things they hadn't thought about and engage their leadership team to be able to do that. Do you also recommend some of that or do you like it to kind of be in mostly the CEO?

And yeah, I rehearse my life. It to be largely the CEO who's creating the vision of where the organization is going. You know, if we think about the classic example of Apple, Steve Jobs really didn't care what the team thought. He had a vision for where Apple was going to be and a vision for what the products were going to be like. And then they get to figure out how to make that happen. But if you try to incorporate everyone's opinions, it gets so watered down. It's like a big kumbaya group hug. No one really cares. Now, the CEO has to be cognizant that if they have a vision to take, let's say, Apple, and they want to turn it into a pizza restaurant, well, everyone's going to quit. They have to have some alignment with the DNA of the organization and the skill set of the organization and their capitalization and what the market and economy want. So they're always listening, but it truly has to be theirs. You know, the great example is 2007. Steve Jobs did not want the iPhone to be released. What was the one thing at the bottom of the iPhone that he just didn't want to have? You didn't want the keyboard?

Oh, yes, right.

We've almost forgotten that BlackBerry had the PDA. Right. And now we could never even imagine a phone with a physical keyboard. That just sounds stupid to us. But if Steve Jobs had listened to all of his employees and the customers, he would have put a keyboard on the phone. He was so clear on what he was building that he found the people that were crazy enough to help him make that come true. So that's why the CEO has to architect the vision and then find the who's to make it come true.

What advice would you give to a CEO COO who just isn't getting that from their CEO?

I would actually either find my TEDx, that I did. I've done three TEDx talks. One that's on the main TED website about raising kids as entrepreneurs. But I would have them find my TEDx video on your vision statement sucks and show that to their CEO. It's about 18 minutes. And their CEO will get that big kind of wet fish slap in the face where they'll realize there's no way that people can read their minds. Right. They just have to see a better way. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And the problem is there wasn't really a better way until we codified this concept. Right. So it's 100 years ago we didn't build companies with core values. Now it's insane to think you could ever build a great organization without core values. Right. We didn't build an organization without a core purpose. And then Simon Sinek came along. Simon used to be on our board back when we were building one, 800 got junk. Five years before he wrote his book, Simon was on our board of advisors. So you know, those concepts are now codified. Well, the vivid vision is that missing cornerstone of the business.

Yeah, absolutely. I just have this going on with several clients right now. So that's good. Well, let's talk a little bit about you. What's the most impactful thing you've done for your own development along the way?

Well, the first one was realizing that I didn't have to have all of the right answers. So, you know, the school system really messed us up as children. Right. The school system told us that we had to be the smartest person in the room, that we had to memorize all the now we did back in those days because there was no Internet. Right. So you had to be the smartest person. But now I realize I just have to know who the smart people are or I have to be able to find them quickly. That was allowing me to feel I don't need to be the smartest one because I never was the smartest. So that was one that allowed me to supercharge my learning, was realizing I can learn about the stuff I'm passionate about and I can outsource everything except genius. Secondly was really obsessing about people and making sure that my learning was always attached to building that world class company culture that I really cared about. My employees they would care about my customers. So my number one metric with all the companies I work with, the number one metric that they measure is employee net promoter score. The second metric is customer net promoter score. The third is their dollars profit, and then the fourth is their revenue goal. But if they don't do it in that order, it's backwards. If you think about your customer first, your employees all feel burned out and overworked and uncared for. But if you obsess about their happiness, they'll go through brick walls for your customers, which allows you to charge anything you want. And all the profit and revenue comes from there. So my learning, my learning has really stayed around how to grow people, how to care about people, how to build great company cultures. And then where I'm terrible, you know, it. And finance, I just outsource that stuff.

Yeah, you definitely don't want to be doing where your zone of genius isn't. But at the same time, I do believe they're just different forms of intelligence. Right. There's not one type of intelligence. And. And yes, there's this book smart piece. There's memorization capability. Don't give me a spreadsheet to analyze financial services numbers. I'll probably switch the numbers on you. But there's intelligence in other ways, like being able to pick up information in a room that other people can't see or reading body language in a way that other people can't do.

Yeah. I was also groomed at a pretty young age in a lot of the soft skills of leadership. So I got involved in an organization called College Pro Painters. And it's real. In its heyday of its growth, College Pro became the largest residential house painting company on the planet. And every year we had to hire and train 800 franchisees. And then they had to go out and hire and train 8,000 painters. And I was in the top 30 people of that organization that had to hire 8,800 people every year. So some of the training that we ended up getting was around training of people. So I learned that there's three styles and then there's a rotation that people go through in their learning. So you've got your auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learner, right? They learn from watching or from reading or from doing. But then this, the kind of cycle that you go through in learning is the abstract concept or abstract conceptualization, which is ac to the active experimentation, which is the role playing and practicing to then the concrete experience of using the concept and then the reflective observation of thinking about how you learned and what you did and then going back to learning more about the abstract concept and you continually on that cycle. So I just always see myself as a learner in those core areas. And then I release myself from being good at the stuff that I know I suck at. You know, whereas in the school system I was told to get a tutor in French, I was told to get a tutor in science, instead of saying, wow, you're horrible at that, why don't you hire somebody to do your French, hire someone to do your science, and why don't you just go and do these two or three things that you're great at and give you energy? And I think companies would focus more on that with their teams and their people, which is easy to do when you become bigger in corporate. Right. You start getting very strong siloed and functional area strengths. But when you're in an entrepreneurial organization of 50 to 500 people, it's often hard to allow people to delegate everything. Except genius.

Yeah, absolutely. So given that, what if anything, are you doing now? Since you're a lifelong learner, what do you love to do in terms of growing your leadership? Where are you focused?

I'm engaged in a number of Mastermind groups, so I've gone to the main ted conference since 2010, so I go to the main five day TED conference. I've been in the Genius Network, which is a network of about 360 CEOs from around the world. I've been in that for seven years. I go to war room, I've gone to three baby bathwater events, I've gone to five mastermind talks events. I was an entrepreneur's organization member from 95 to 2000 and I've worked with YPO and EO in 26 countries. So I'm very plugged into a lot of these networks and organizations. I devour podcasts and auditory books or audible books on business areas and then just kind of, I watch for the shortcuts. I was the solid C minus student in school, right. I was the 2.5 GPA. I think that's roughly. I was never smart enough to equate what it was in letters, but let's say it wasn't above a 2.5. But what I noticed was the flies banging their head on the windows always ended up dead. You know, the one one's trying harder never got out the window, but the smart one noticed there was a door over to the right and they just turned and went out the door. So I'm always looking for the Shortcut. I'm always looking for that path of least resistance. And for me, I think my learning is around that. How do I find the shortcuts? Or instead of worrying about how do I do something, I try to figure out who can I get to do my something.

Yeah, it sounds like the bulk of your learning is learning from others.

That's the sense of others and, and also learning who I can delegate to so I don't have to get good at it. You know, I just realized I don't have to be good at stuff. I just have to know the good people so they can do it for me. So if you focus on, I think Dan Sullivan and. Oh shoot, Dan Sullivan and another friend of mine wrote a book called who not how. And it is about thinking about who can actually get the work done for you instead of how do I actually learn it and do it.

Once you let that go, if you're really good at the visioning part, that's where your zone of genius is for most of our CEOs. Right. And deciding what that should and clarifying that, but figuring out the how, then.

Can you take that down two or three layers? Right. Can the CEO make sure that their whole C suite and VPs are only working in their unique ability areas? Can we make sure that if you don't have an executive Assistant, you are one? Can we get people fractional or full time EAs to free up their time so they only work in the unique ability. Can we restructure people's roles and responsibilities? And then all of a sudden you have this. It's almost like an orchestra. You know, you would never expect the person playing flute to be good at the drums. They're just really good at the flute and they practice the flute. Right. And if you can find all of those people to do and they don't have to be full time people. The person who plays in the orchestra goes home at night. You can have somebody just working on different aspects of your business for four hours a day or for four hours a week. They don't need to necessarily be 40, 50 hour a week people.

Yes. Yeah. You know, at the same time I'm wondering, it doesn't apply across the, the board in terms of the concept of just play to your strengths. So you play to your strengths on your capabilities and what you're good at. But when I think about, you know, that whole concept of strength finder and just, just focus on your strengths, I've found actually that doesn't help leaders and, and, and I'll do you would. Do you. Would you agree? And I can explain why, but.

And I think it's mostly because strength finders is more of a concept. And what I'm talking about is more of a very. It's just I'm really good at coaching, I'm really good at speaking, I'm really good at doing media interviews. I'm really good at strategy, and I pretty much suck at everything else, or I'm okay at it, but I get drained of energy. So that has nothing to do with strength finders. It's just more of really knowing what am I good at and what do I get energized from and getting everything else off my plate. I don't really care what my five strengths are from the strength finders process so much as just. And you can look at that with a marketing person. You know, I have a CEO that I was talking to the other day, and they have an amazing designer who's doing all of the posting on social media. And I'm like, your social media posting sucks. You're not getting any engagement. And she goes, well, my designer's doing it. I'm like, well, that's the problem. Your designer is an amazing designer. But they don't know anything about the hashtags and how to post and who to connect with. And she's like, oh, I didn't think about that. That isn't a strength finder survey thing.

Yeah.

It's more of looking at the actual roles and responsibilities and the tasks. So what I use is a system called an activity inventory. And I have the person sit down and pretend. Let's say that we followed you around with a video camera, kind of Gary Vee style for an entire month. Right. We filmed you doing everything in your business for 30 days. And then you replayed the film and you wrote down everything you did, opened emails, replied to emails, you know, attended meetings, prepped for meetings, hired people, interviewed, whatever. You might have 86 things on your list. So what I like doing is opening up a spreadsheet. And I write down every task, one task per row, in column A. So I might have 86 rows. Right. Of all the stuff I do in column B, I categorize everything in one of four ways. Either I for incompetent, meaning I suck at it. C for competent, meaning I'm okay at it. E for excellent, meaning I'm really, really good at it, but I don't necessarily love doing it. And then U for unique ability, meaning I'm really, really good at it, and I get Energized while I do it. And then the third column is, if I was to pay someone just to do that task, right? If I was to pay someone just to clean toilets, if I was to pay someone just to book flights, if I was to pay someone just to reply to emails, what would the hourly rate be for every task? And then I try to delegate everything in column B that I'm either incompetent or competent at. I get everything that I suck at or I'm okay out off my plate first. And then I look at my effective hourly rate, right? So if I'm $500 an hour, $1,000 an hour, whatever my effective hourly rate is, I've got to delegate everything below that hourly rate, Right. If I was paying an executive $500 an hour or $250 an hour, and they're doing $25 or $50 an hour tasks, I'd lose my mind. Like, why am I paying you $5 an hour to do a $50. Right. So that's why I start with this activity inventory that has nothing to do with strength finders.

Yeah, no, the different. The total difference is about the activity. You're describing the activity and the zone of genius. Whereas, yeah, on the strengths finder, it's more like, okay, I'm really, I'm. I'm very decisive. That's a strength of mine. What I found is too much decisiveness that don't double down on your decisiveness that becomes pushy and obnoxious. So. So just playing to that isn't actually a leadership goal.

I agree. Yeah, I think, I think it's good to have awareness. What I like doing with a lot of these personality profiles is having the executive team do one personality profile per year. So let's do strength finders this year and let's share with each other so we learn how the other person works. Next year, let's all do Colby. Next year, let's all do Myers Briggs. Next year, let's do colors next. Like, you can find a different one to do every single year to learn about each other, but yeah, don't double down on what you read.

Yeah, absolutely. So what's your. You talked about mission and how important it is for vision. We've talked about how important it is to have a mission, a meaningful mission outside yourself, because otherwise you're working for identity, ego, and self image. And ultimately that's not gonna serve you. What's your meaningful mission?

So my core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. So everything I do helps Entrepreneurial organizations actually scale. So my CEO alliance helps CEOs make their dreams happen. My five books help CEOs, my speaking helps CEOs, my mastermind, my second in command podcast, my invest in your leaders course are all driving towards that community. So if the government wants to hire me, I'll say no, right? If it's an organization that I just don't kind of vibe with, I'll say no. But if it's an entrepreneurial and it can be entrepreneurial at the corporate level. You know the reason I worked so well with Sprint and with Marcelo Claret. Marcelo had sold his first company, Brightstar, for over a billion dollars to SoftBank, was appointed the CEO of Sprint to turn it around, make it entrepreneurial and sell it, which he did to T Mobile. Now Marcelo is the chairman of of Softbank. He's on the board of of WeWork, on the board of Google. But he was an entrepreneur hardcore. So Sprint was a very entrepreneurial kind of organizational turnaround that worked with me. So that's my whole core purpose.

Got it.

And why it's always been that way. It's funny, Simon was actually, Simon Sinek was at my home back around 2007 or 2008 in 2007, and we were sitting around having dinner by home. And this was two or three years before he wrote the book Start with why and before his famous TED Talk. And he was asking me why I did what I did. And I was just like, I just. I find that entrepreneurs are working too hard. Like, I want to give them the shortcuts. Why? It's like, I don't know. I've always done it. Like, I started coaching entrepreneurs in 1989. So I've been coaching entrepreneurial companies for 32 years, really, since before coaching was a thing. CoachU and the International Federation of Coaches started in the early 90s. I was coaching in 1989. I'd coached Kimbal Musk, Elon's brother, in 1993. So I've always helped these entrepreneurial organizations. It just always felt good. And then as long as I'm doing my coaching and speaking and media interviews, I would do it for free, except my kids have to eat right. So it's not about me anymore.

Well, and they require a lot.

I. I buy these bags of groceries and I'm like, where's all the fruit? Like, I bought. They ate it, like in an hour. I'm like, how do you devour six containers or eight containers of food? It's nuts.

So what, what do you think the biggest challenge is facing leaders fast growing companies today. And I always want to look at like, what's the blind spot that you're seeing?

One is focus. You know, there's so many opportunities that they're surrounded with that. There's this lack of focus. I think it's about working on the critical few things versus the important many. It's. It's being able to stay focused on that vision. I think another blind spot is that a lot of leaders are focused on growing themselves. You know, I'll speak to EO as an example, or ypo. You know, we're so focused on growing the CEO of the organization and EO and in ypo, but the real leverage is growing your team. Right. If they would actually focus on growing the eight managers that they have. That's why I launched the invest in your leaders course. You know, most entrepreneurial CEOs are incapable of doing everything they're learning. They should actually be aware of what needs to happen, but their team should be trained on how to actually do it. I think the huge blind spot. So I was coaching a CEO of a company from 40 employees up to about 700. He just raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus, a real big successful company. Number one company to work for in Florida, Entrepreneur of the year by Ernst and Young. And I taught him a tool that's in my invest in your leaders course. And he goes, wow. He goes, this is going to change the company. I'm like, no, Bobby, it won't change your company. What will change your company is if you take your 27 managers and leaders and train them in that skill. He's like, holy shit. I'm like, yeah, the real growth, like that's the blind spot, right?

Yeah.

How do you give the skill set to all of the people? Because I think the CEO is at the bottom of the org chart, right? The org chart should be flipped upside down with the CEO at the bottom, supporting the ce, the C level, and bps. We're supporting the managers, we're supporting the employees. And our job is to grow their confidence and their skills, give them more confidence, give them more skills. And that, I think is a blind spot where they're only focused really on their own growth often.

I couldn't agree more. And I love you flipping the org chart. That visual alone is exactly where it should be. And I think a lot of CEOs, particularly in the EO community, I would say YPO are learning junkies. I could say I'm one as well. But it's just sort of gluttony and consuming one thing onto the next versus how are you going to take this and actually do something with it?

Let me speak to that. So I was in the an EO EMP class. The entrepreneurial master's program of 2009 was my class. And one of my classmates who then became a client was Sebastian Tondor. Sebastian ended up building about an $800 million company in Geneva, Switzerland. I coached him from like a hundred up to about 500 million. So Sebastian will only read or study or watch business content about a project that he's working on this quarter. If the, if the content isn't related to stuff that's on his plate, he doesn't want to learn it right now. And this is where Verne Harnish and I vehemently disagree. Vern's like, read another book, read another book. Read a book a week. I'm like, no, that's insane. That's giving you too many random ideas that aren't tied to what you're working on so you'll forget about them by the time you need them.

Too distracting.

Yeah, and it's distracting. Secondly. And then third, it becomes stressful because you have all these random ideas that are now on your to do list that have nothing to do with what you should be doing. It's actually hurting you now if you change that and said, yeah, read a book a week, but read a book that's tied to a project you're working on this quarter. Right? If you have a board meeting coming up in two months, you should read Marissa Levin's book about boards, Right? If you're working on a strategic planning meeting in two weeks, you should read Kyan Krippendorf's book on the 48 stratagem. Right? We should always be learning about what we're working on. And that's what was wrong with the school system. We were studying all this random stuff that didn't make sense because it wasn't tied to anything that mattered to us that month. So that's where I really want leaders and members to work on stuff is learn about stuff that you're working on. That's why the 12 modules of my invest in your leaders course are so important because all 12 modules are tied to what they work on day to day. They do emails every day. They interview probably once a week or once every two weeks. They run meetings every day. They're doing coaching all the time. They're doing delegation all the time. Time management, project management, conflict management. So the 12 skills that we cover in the Invest in your leaders course are all tied to stuff that executives are working on every single day. But the next business book they pick up isn't necessarily tied to anything that they're working on over the next year.

And if you don't apply it right away, it's just going to be another flavor of the month and go out the brain.

And then you forgot it and you wasted the 3 hours or 12 hours reading it and it probably caused you angst and stress because you thought you should be working on it, but it's not tied to the plan exactly.

Well, I really appreciate you coming on sharing some of this. Where can people learn more if they want to get involved in either of those organizations?

Well, take a look@InvestInYourLeaders.com is where the course can be found. And then all five of my books are available on Amazon, Audible and itunes if they look up my name. And then the CameronHerald.com or COOAlliance.com are the three main and then also take a look at the Second Command podcast. There's some good content there as well.

Great. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you, Susan. So don't stop now. Click here. There's more great videos that you can keep learning from and together we're unlocking amazing leadership lessons together.