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

The True Job of a COO: Connecting the Dots | Ben Plomion

9 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this segment Ben Plomion outlines the distinctive responsibilities of a Chief Operating Officer (COO) versus a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in midsize to large organizations. He emphasizes that the COO’s core function is ultimate cross‑functional coordination—communicating with marketing, sales, HR, customer success, product, and engineering—to keep the organization aligned. By contrast, the CEO must dive one to two levels deeper into each function, gaining enough insight to ask the right questions, ensure fairness (e.g., applying policy changes consistently across teams), and ultimately “connect the dots” across the entire enterprise. Plomion stresses that while CEOs need not be subject‑matter experts, they must understand enough to evaluate decisions across all departments.

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I think if you're a leader, if you are putting at a C-level in a midsize to large company, you have a very large team. I knew how to communicate internally and externally to a variety of stakeholders. I knew how to work with teams from different organizations. So when you're in marketing, you work with marketing, communications, product, sales. So you develop this sort of cross-functional ability that you can take any role that you go to. And I think the COO, by definition, is the ultimate cross-functional role because you have to communicate not just with marketing and sales, but also HR and customer success and product engineering. CEO takes you to one or two levels deeper because not only you have to understand your teams, but you also have to understand those teams very deeply. Let's say in terms of HR principles, you want to make sure you're being fair and equitable. If you make a change for the sales team, do you make the same change for the marketing team? So being a CEO means you have to go 1 to 2 levels deeper across every single team. You don't have to be an HR expert. You don't have to be a product expert, but you have to understand enough to ask the right question across every single team. Otherwise, it's difficult to connect the dots. And I think one of the primary jobs of the CEO is to connect the dots across the organization.