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

The 3 Daily Habits of a World-Class COO

27 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:23

In this concise monologue, Cameron Herold outlines the essential daily responsibilities of a high‑performing Chief Operating Officer. He identifies three core focus areas: (1) continuously gauging how team members feel, their frustrations, and obstacles; (2) maintaining clear visibility of the organization’s key projects and OKRs to track progress; and (3) monitoring the top three metrics for each business unit on a daily and weekly basis, comparing them to goals and historical performance. He adds a fourth, “bonus” habit: actively developing people’s skills, confidence, and networks so the COO can achieve results through delegation rather than personal execution. The overall message is that a world‑class COO spends every day listening to people, tracking outcomes, and building the team’s capability.

Chapters

There's a couple of core tasks that every COO needs to be really good at. I'm going to walk you through what those core tasks are. Number 1 is understanding the lay of the land with your people. How are they feeling? What are they frustrated with? What obstacles are they encountering? How are they feeling vis-à-vis the other people that they're working with? That's number 1. Number 2 is you have to understand the core projects, the core OKRs that are on everybody's plate so that you know how everyone's doing on those core projects or those core OKRs. Number 3 are the metrics. Your job is to understand the core metrics at a top-level leadership team level for the organization on a daily and weekly basis. You should be able to know every single one of the top 3 metrics from each business area and how they're doing against their goal, against historicals, what they need to be adjusting, where they are in terms of that metric. I would say those are the 3 big things that on a daily basis every COO needs to be focusing on and needs to be thinking about. And then the last one, kind of the bonus this would be your job is to grow people. Your job as the COO is not to do work, it's to get results through others. So your job is to grow their skills, their confidence, and the connections so that you can delegate everything except genius. That's the plus one of what every COO needs to do on a daily basis.