Unleash The Power of Your COO | How to Find The Right COO (Chapter 5)

What's your vivid vision of what the company will look like, act like and feel like? How will the org chart change to get you there? That clarity allows you to answer the question, what do I need in a second in command? As the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland says, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. Leaning out into the future helps you find the right road. It allows you to figure out where you're going so you can reverse engineer that future and figure out the people who will help make it come true. Part 2 hiring a COO Chapter 5 starting the process it's all about the people. Everything that you will do and no matter what the level of success you're trying to achieve, it'll depend on the people that you have supporting you. Figure out the types of people you want and try your best to get the hiring right. Roman Cowan, COO Alliance Member and COO of College Hunks Hauling junk. You've checked your management team, your structure, what whether you have too many core projects and whether there are holes to fill. You may have tried consultants and new function roles or an ea. If you still need a second in command, then it's time to hire the perfect COO for you and the business. There are a number of ways to do that, including a word of mouth posting, a job listing, or contracting a recruiter. Before you can start on any of them, however, you need to sit down and figure out exactly the type of person who will fill the need that you have identified and then how to find that person. Your activity inventory has helped identify your unique abilities and where you are lacking. Now continue a similar exercise to determine the type of person who would be the Yin to your Yang. Simply put, their unique abilities and weaknesses are likely the opposites of yours and they share your core values for the organization. Consider the domains they'd oversee and the personality traits that would complement yours. The CEO and COO tend to have strengths in different areas that creates a well rounded package, but unless the fit is perfect, those differences can also lead to tension. That's why I go back to repeating that a CEO has to truly know themselves to hire the right partner. The deeper your understanding of your skills and weaknesses and unique abilities, as well as the areas that you want to delegate, the better your chances of finding the person who likes doing what you don't and is great in the areas where you suck. Defining such a person might sound daunting, but it doesn't have to be a long, drawn out process. You can Your activity inventory and core needs provide the parameters. A couple of focused hours spent using them as a framework should give you a good idea of what you're looking for. That's the information you'll use to write a job description that is extremely specific, including the behavioral traits you require in a second in command, which will depend on the areas of the business reporting to this person, as well as the core responsibilities and metrics for which they'll be accountable. Specify what you want them to oversee equally. Make it clear what you'll be keeping under your purview and don't want them to touch. This is where understanding yourself is key to preventing you from falling into stereotypes, assumptions and lazy thinking. There's a popular belief that CEOs should be gregarious cult like figures. Steve Jobs is one of the best known examples. But you don't have to be like that. Nearly any type of personality can make a successful CEO, and it's fine you don't have to play a role. If culture is where you lag, then accept that fact and delegate culture to a coo. It's not a sign of weakness. It doesn't matter who does it as long as it gets done. If you're a strong engineer who invented the product and what you really want is to stay involved in the technical side, then your UA might not be cheerleading. In that case, specify that you need someone who can be an outward facing culture person while leaving the technical aspects of the product while alone. There's almost no part of the business that you can't assign to a coo. Legal, Finance, Engineering Culture the division of labor is entirely driven by uas and personality, although the CEO obviously still needs to attend board meetings and planning meetings that require top level input. In theory too, a CEO can also keep as much for themselves as they want, as long as they have the bandwidth and enjoy doing the work. After all, it's their business. That's especially true for entrepreneurs. They just need to make sure that they're thinking strategically about the best use of their time and energy. Two in a Box at the Bottom, not the Top it's easy to approach hiring a second in command as hiring a leader. That's not how I see it. A COO is a supporter as much as a leader. Which is exactly how I see the role of the CEO too. When you've got your two in a box, a yin and yang combination of CEO and coo, that box belongs at the bottom of any org chart, not the top. The CEO and the COO have a joint mission to support the people of the front lines and their customers. They're the most two senior people in the business, but that doesn't mean that they should be at the top telling everyone what to do. Instead, they should be serving the organization by removing obstacles, providing support, aligning and inspiring people. I visualize org charts upside down with the CEO and the CEO at the bottom, supporting the other C level and VPs above them who are supporting and growing the managers above them, and so on. It's true that our grandfathers wouldn't recognize the definition of CEO and coo, but it's also true that their old school hierarchical business model doesn't work anymore. Most people know that intuitively. Leaning into the Future to help get clarity about the ideal person you're looking for, try leaning out into the future imagining your business three years from now. What's your vivid vision of what the company will look like, act like, and feel like? How will the org chart change to get you there? That clarity allows you to answer the question what do I need in a second in command? As the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland says, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. Leaning out into the future helps you find the right road. It allows you to figure out where you're going so you can reverse engineer that future and figure out the people who will help make it come true. Maybe the future holds growth through acquisitions or a move into multiple new markets. Strategizing those steps will highlight gaps both in the structure and the systems of the business and in your personal skill set. When Brian leaned out into the future thinking of building 1-800-God chunk, we realized he needed to launch a franchising sales and coaching programs and build a marketing calendar and a budget campaigns, create a leadership training program for his people and do recruiting and interviewing. He also realized he didn't know how to do those initiatives and how to make them happen, and that it would be much more effective to find someone who had the skills he needed rather than trying to learn them himself. That's why he brought me in. Your plan for the future doesn't have to be perfect, so don't get stuck on the details. You simply need a direction for the company and an understanding of what it will look like so you can envision where a new second in command would sit. And you don't have to shape the future alone. Sit down with your leadership team, ask questions, and come up with a working plan. You don't have to know everything. Whenever I used to ask my mom how to spell a word. Her response was D I C T I O N A R Y. She was smart. Traditional schooling does us all a disservice by teaching us that we should aspire to be the person who has all the answers. It's a ridiculous goal. As my mom understood, you don't need to know stuff, you just need to know where you can find answers. Kids increasingly realize they don't have to know all the answers, but they have to know how to find the answers quickly. That's why so many of them are turning their backs on college. And they realize there's no need to spend huge amounts of time and money learning information they can find out easily for free. It's the Same as Business More than ever, effective business leaders recognize what my friends Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy outlined in their book who not how you solve problems by finding the right people, not by endlessly having to learn how to do everything on your own. Dan and Ben explained that business leaders no longer have to know how to tackle every situation. Rather, they have to know how to find other people to do it for them. It's a powerful and common sense approach, but it also requires overcoming many of the areas and the ideas that we were brought up with. It's not as if I see a lot of teachers running large companies. The school system teaches us that if we're bad at something, we should get a tutor to work at it and get good at it. The reality is that if you're really bad at something and and you work at it, you'll still likely only ever become average. If you're really bad at something, you don't have to work at it. Instead, you can get a COO who's great at it. At a stroke, you've leveraged your combined abilities to address the company's needs in a different way. It should be a relief for a CEO to realize they don't have to invest in getting better at skills. They can just find the right person instead of continuing to struggle. Even if the tasks are those that fall under the traditional auspices of the CEO. No CEO should feel that they need to master areas of the business that don't play to their unique abilities. Your exact list of what you need a COO to do will be highly unique, but you'd be a fool if it didn't start with all the things that you suck at or hate. That's the whole point of the exercise. If you're great at strategy, the COO had better be great at execution. If you're a natural at execution, then the COO needs to be great at strategic thinking to balance that out. Just because you're the CEO doesn't mean you have to be great at stuff that other CEOs are great at. You might absolutely suck at strategy, which means you need to hire a second in command who can fill that gap. Strategy is a skill and a way of thinking and asking questions. It involves connecting and networking and masterminding. And not all CEOs are good at that elements or enjoy them. Some CEOs are amazing engineers focused on technology who have weaknesses in strategy, vision, culture and people. No problem. Just hire a COO who excels at those areas. Just because you're the boss doesn't mean you need to do everything that the business needs. It's far better to find the right person to follow through. Traditionally, CEOs have been the visionaries, but you can turn that dynamic duo on its head if doing so will play to your strengths. Traditionally, men worked outside the home and women stayed home with kids. But now many families find it's better to have a stay at home dad and a breadwinner mom. There are no rules, Core Values and Behavioral Traits the CEO sets the core values for the company and needs a COO who supports them. They might be the result of conscious decisions and even consultation throughout the business, or they might be embodied by the CEO's own personal conduct. To hire the right second in command, however, a CEO needs to figure out what the core values are and how to identify them in a potential hire. It's far easier to recruit someone who already lives by the same core values than it is to take someone on who doesn't and then persuade them to fall in line. The key is to figure out what the core values are and what are the values that are simply nice to have. The difference is that core values are make or break. Not only will you live by them under all circumstances, but you're willing to fire people who break them. That's the key. Other cultural qualities might be a bonus or an aspiration, but they're not core values. That's a distinction that most CEOs will agree with. I use the example of growing up in the Roman Catholic Church. When my dad told me that people confessed to the priest all the bad things they'd done, I assumed the priest spanked them. When my dad explained that they just had to say some prayers to make everything better, I concluded that they clearly weren't breaking the church's core values. In my family, if we broke core values, we got a spanking. As well as spelling out the core values you need in a second in command, you should specify the necessary behavioral traits that they'll need to mesh with yours and the company as a whole. If you're focused and shy, then you're looking for a gregarious leader. Do you need someone more detail oriented or someone focused on a bigger picture? As we'll see later, these needs sometimes change over time, which is why I'm no longer coo at 1-800-got junk like a marriage the closest equivalent in ordinary life to finding a COO in business is finding a spouse. Once you're crystal clear on what you're looking for and can describe it, you'll pass over anyone who doesn't fit the bill because a bad marriage is not worth it. When you drop your job description of the right COO and you're not creating a list of nice to haves, you're listing the essentials that are 100% required. A candidate without all of them need not bother to apply. You're looking for trust, core values, behavioral traits, skill sets, strength, and desires that complement yours, all in a package that comes with a personal chemistry that might grow into a deep friendship. Bear in mind another parallel with a marriage. When you finally end up with the right person, you're not going to be able to change their personality. Focus on exactly what makes the right match to get off the right start. If this process sounds like high stakes, it is. It can feel like a hellish ordeal to go through. Remember, though, that you don't have to go through it alone. You have a whole leadership team to help you. You don't even have to be the person who conducts the interviews. You can use an executive search firm, your board of advisors, or members of your leadership team as long as they're all clear on who you're looking for. Not just a Cameron I'm constantly asked to be COO for companies and I just laugh. For one thing, most people who ask can't afford me yet they really need to find a way to hire a truly competent CEO. For another 90% of the CEOs who asked me to be their CEO, I'd be a horrible fit. I can see that because I can understand myself and I can see where I add value. To successfully hire a second in command, a CEO needs to be able to see that people who simply assume that they can plug me or someone like me into their business to solve their problems don't understand the nature of a strong working relationship. Sometimes I don't have the skills to work in their business or don't like the tasks that need to be done. Sometimes I don't have the required behavioral traits rates. Sometimes there's no trust factor. I can see those mismatches where my yin doesn't fit someone else's yang, but the CEOs who approach me can't. That's because they aren't thinking about the situation in the right way. They're simply trying to plug an execution hole with anyone. And they've heard my name. They've not considered what the shape of that hole is and who can best fill it. So don't stop now. Click here. There's more great videos that you can keep learning from, and together we're unlocking amazing leadership lessons together.