Cameron Herold argues COOs succeed by growing people, not just managing operations. He uses the two-ladders metaphor: climb the skills ladder and the confidence ladder so your team can handle what you delegate. Real examples from 1-800-Got-Junk, College Pro Painters, and others show how this works.
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One of the things that happens as the COO elevates in our role, our director of Ops, is we don't have to be good at each functional area. We have to be good at leading people. We have to be good at caring about people. You have to care more about each of your direct reports, personal lives than anybody else does. That's all they need. I played the second in command a couple of different times. I was the COO for a company called 1-800-gotjunk and I grew them from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six and a half years. That was the fourth company that I'd built. I also was a co founder of a group that's now called Gerber Auto Collision in the US it's the largest collision repair chain in North America. And then I opened the west coast of the United States for a group called College Pro Painters, which became the largest residential house painting company on the planet. Two of my employees back in 93 were Kimbal Musk, Elon's younger brother, and then Peter Rive, his Cousin who built SolarCity. They were both employees of and franchisees that I trained and coached. So when I was in the College Pro Painters days, they taught us that in a one month period we had to train 800 university students to run a house painting business. So we had to hire them and train them to then go out and hire 8,000 students. So imagine training 800 people to run a company and you basically have a month or two to do that. And then they had to hire 8,000 people to then paint houses. We had to become operationally world class at deploying all of these people and growing their confidence and their skills so they could actually do it. Because we didn't have time to do it. There were only 30 of us at the head office. So what we identified were the skill sets that people needed to be really, really good at to then scale. And then what I looked at was the more that I grow people, I think of every manager and leader in my company like they're climbing up two ladders. So on one ladder they've got their left hand and their left foot climbing up the ladder and then the ladder right beside it with their right hand and right foot climbing up that ladder. Imagine climbing up two ladders beside each other. One ladder is skills and one ladder is confidence. If either ladder starts to shake, you're going to freeze, right? If the skills ladder is shaking, you're going to stop. If the confidence ladder is shaking, you're going to stop. So My job is to grow them and to grow their skills so they have more confidence and grow their confidence so they can grow more skills. My job is to not do work. My job is to have my to do list, which does not have my name on it. Right, Dave, your to do list does not say Dave's to do list. It just says to do list. Your job is to delegate everything on your to do list to someone and then grow their skills and their confidence and their connections so they can do that. So if you grow people, grow their skills, grow their confidence and grow their connections, you can delegate everything except genius. That's how I've scaled every company. If we would ever send a kid off to play little league baseball and we didn't teach them how to hold the bat or how to toss the ball or how to catch the ball, if we didn't give them the basics for baseball, they would come home at the end of the first day and go, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Baseball's kind of cool, but you just suck at it. That's why business is difficult, is all of these people are out there trying to run a company with no skills to how to do it. They're constantly bumping their head against the wall going, oh, I can't hold my people accountable. You don't hold them accountable. You hire accountable people. Oh, like we can't get all this stuff done. They don't have enough time. No, you don't actually know priority management. You don't know how to allocate time. That's what I mean about growing your people. If you haven't read my newest book, the Second in Command, go grab a copy right now on Amazon and you'll learn how to unleash the power of a coo. And if you already are a CEO, you'll learn how to really build an incredible partnership with your CEO. It's one of the reasons why I've even been able to coach some of the people at the highest level, is I don't have to be good at running their company. There was a stage where I was coaching the CEO of Sprint, you know, the 82nd largest company in the United States. I'm coaching the CEO Marcelo Claret and his CEO, Jamie Jones. Jamie is CEO of Sprint. His base salary was $2.8 million a year, plus his bonuses, plus his long term incentive cocktail. I'm like, what the am I doing coaching him for? Because I didn't have to coach him on what he was good at. I Had to kind of give him more confidence to become more entrepreneurial and how to break down some of the corporate bureaucracy. Even coaching Marcelo, who's infinitely more capable of me at scaling Sprint, still didn't have some of the base level skills to be an entrepreneurial leader. One of the things that happens is the COO elevates in our role. Our director of ops is we don't have to be good at each functional area. We have to be good at leading people. We have to be good at caring about people. You have to care more about each of your direct reports, personal lives than anybody else does. If you care more about their hopes and their dreams and their frustrations and their insecurities and their what's happening in their home lives. Like, if you care more about the struggle they're having at connecting with other people on the team and you just help them with those relationships, you help them collaborate, you help them manage time and projects and say no, that's all they need. It's why I could coach all these companies that I have no industry experience in. I coached a company with 40 people up to about 600. Now they have about 2,500. It's called Tinuity. They're one of the largest digital marketing agencies on the planet. I coached their leadership team, six of them, for a period of four years. I've never run a digital marketing agency. I don't know anything about digital marketing agencies. But I coach them on execution and operations and culture and people and meetings. They. They became the number two company in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. Their COO was the first member of the COO alliance. And I was coaching them without understanding their industry at all. So us as COOs don't have to be good at the functional areas. We have to be good at people, we have to be good at communication, we have to be good at caring, we have to be good at delegating. And we have to get more stuff off our plates so that we can spend our time growing people. So, Liz, let's say you've got something on your plate right now. You're like, I don't have anybody to delegate this. To pick someone, delegate it to them. And using situational leadership, coaching, one on one coaching, time management, project management, use those skills to help grow them so they can do it better, but get it off your plate. Just like your CEO has got stuff off their plate and on your plate now. Your job is to get results through people.
