Cameron Herold breaks down what a COO should do every day: read the room to catch team frustrations, track core projects and OKRs, and know the three key metrics for each business area. The bonus move is growing people so you can delegate instead of doing everything yourself.
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.
