Cameron Herold identifies three problems COOs face: CEOs who demand systems but ignore them, teams drowning in busy work, and CEOs meddling outside their expertise. He advises holding CEOs accountable to their own rules, setting tight project constraints, and teaching CEOs to run skip-level meetings instead.
Chapters
I'm going to walk you through what tend to be a few core problems that most COOs struggle with. Number one is their CEO wants the company to have systems, but not for the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur shows up late for meetings. The entrepreneur doesn't follow any of the systems. The entrepreneur breaks the rules but wants everyone to follow the rules. Your job as the COO is to ensure that the CEO is following the systems and that they understand that concept of what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Another problem that often COOs have is that people are busy working on busy work, but not necessarily productive and getting enough work out the door. Well, our job as a leader is to ensure that when we delegate projects to people, we show them how little money we want them to spend on the project and how little time we want them to spend on that actual project. The third thing is the CEO ends up meddling in different business areas, often because they're bored, because they don't know what else to focus on, or they've done it before and they see a problem and they don't know how to stop themselves by jumping into that area. So your job as the COO is to teach the CEO how to do a proper skip-level meeting. The CEO can go and skip over the VP of Marketing and talk to the people in marketing by saying, here's some things I'm noticing. What do you think? Here's some things I'm noticing. What are we doing about that? Here's some things I'm noticing. What are your thoughts around that? So your job is to teach them the skills of actually being good at running skip-level meetings.
