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

Understanding Title Inflation - Are You Really a COO?

12 Sept 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:50

Cameron Herold explains how title inflation leads organizations to give senior-sounding titles (like COO) to people who function more like directors of operations. He argues the COO title should match real responsibilities—P&L ownership/visibility, low oversight, high autonomy, and clear metrics—rather than be given prematurely.

Chapters

Is COO a high position? Well, it depends. Because of title inflation, we're often giving out big titles to people that are actually in more junior roles. So if somebody is really a director operations that you have to delegate a lot to them and you're always coaching them, you're always managing them, you're always helping them with their project, maybe they don't really have a lot of P and L responsibility or even P and L visibility. Then they're probably a director of operations with a COO title. That means you've given out a title too quickly. The COO title is important. It's not more important than the director title. What's important is putting the right title on the right person for the roles and responsibilities, the amount of responsibility they have for the P and L, the less amount of oversight that they need and the amount of autonomy that they can really have in their role as well as the metrics they're responsible and the projects that are on their plate.