Unleash The Power of Your COO | What No One is Telling You About Delegating Tasks (Chapter 3)

The COO is the CEO's right hand and left hand. To be most successful, they need to be able to pick up where the CEO leaves off at any given time. A COO is a combination of a mind reader of and publicist for the CEO. Lindsay Smith, chief strategy officer at Title Alliance Chapter 3 why hire a COO? The right COO can bring so many benefits to a CEO. The exponential power of the right two in the box, the circle of mutual complementary energy of yin and yang, but only if the CEO knows what they're looking for. Before you know what you need from a coo, you need to understand the kind of CEO that you are, who you are, what you do, and what skills you need to bring to the mix and activity inventory CEOs aren't always given to self reflection, but that's where finding the right second in command starts. It might not be an appealing prospect, but thinking of it this way, hiring a COO is going to make your business better, make your life better, and make you better. Put the time into pinpointing the changes that will improve your situation most, make your personal situation more sustainable and make the time you spend on your business more effective. Otherwise, you'll end up hiring someone who would make someone else's life better, but not necessarily yours. The best place to start is with an activity inventory, a process I learned from Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach. Imagine if someone followed you around for a month and filmed everything you did, from replying to emails and booking flights to chairing meetings and planning budgets. Make a list of all the tasks the camera would capture, then categorize them in one of four ways. I for incompetent, meaning you suck at it. C for competent, meaning you're okay at it. E for excellent, meaning you have a high level of skill at it but you don't love it and then UA for unique ability. This is what you're best at and you would do it for free if you didn't need to feed yourself and your family. The fourth concept is key. Sullivan shows us that unique abilities are what allow you to maximize your leverage as a leader by ensuring you only work on projects and areas of the business that you're best suited to. When you're in the realm of unique abilities, you love the work and you feel energized by it and the people around you gain energy from you. If you're spectacular at something but don't get energy from doing it, by the way, don't class it as ua. Leave it as an E instead. The interesting thing about unique abilities is that they're difficult to recognize because often what actually come most naturally to you. Something might seem so simple that you assume anyone could do it if they just copied what you do. But that's not the case. The whole point is that not anyone could do it. Other people might be excellent in your unique ability area, but that doesn't mean they love doing it. It doesn't mean they would do it for free. In my case, I'm excellent at sales, but I don't love selling. I find it difficult and the thought of one more sales call drains me. That's an E for me. My unique ability is speaking and coaching. If someone could fly me around the world by private jet so I didn't have to spend all my time in airports, I would do every speaking event I got offered. I'd take my wife with me and we'd party. I'd fire up audiences, build a brand, and love the process. I don't particularly enjoy the networking and travel, both es, but speaking is amazing. It's a unique ability area for me, for sure. It wasn't until I worked with Dan that I came to understand my unique ability, though looking back, I realized it always involved recruiting and rallying people. I was good at sharing my ideas, starting from winning public speaking contests in second grade. I also loved being on stage and playing the lead role. In 1989, when I was 24, I started helping entrepreneurs through coaching, which I enjoyed and it was quite a step given the business and life. Coaching didn't even become a profession until 1993. In fact, by 1994 I'd already coached 120 entrepreneurs. Once you've broken all your professional tasks down into four categories, you can start to identify work that you could delegate. The first step is to get all the incompetent and competent tasks off your plate. Stop doing these tasks at once. Outsource them, optimize them, automate them, delegate them to an employee, or hire an executive assistant to do them for you. Now take all the higher value initiatives that you don't love doing that are beyond the purview of an EA or a regular employee and put them into a bucket that builds out a job description for a second in command. Then you hire a great COO to do the important high value work that isn't one of your unique abilities. If that sounds too simple of a description, it's really not. Once you know what you need, the whole exercise becomes a lot more straightforward. Free up time, multiply energy, and get more done. The I'S C's and E's on the activity inventory. Don't just reveal the task you don't love doing those tasks actually SAP your energy and that of the company. If you continue handling them, you'll be a net drain on the organizational capacity. Just because you've always done something doesn't mean a that it needs to be done or b that it needs to be done by you. Remember your to do list doesn't mean that you have to do it. Identify what drains you I get overwhelmed by running operations, for example, because I've got a million things I want to get started on. I need someone to take all the ideas, prioritize them, run them, and manage the team and resources so we can get more done faster. That shit is key, but it's not my unique ability. Once you know what sucks energy from you, you start to crystallize the role that you need in the second in command to fill. The right COO gives you a chance to customize your experience within the business by getting stuff off your desk. That has to be done, but again, not by you. The right COO frees up the time that you've been spending on tasks outside your unique abilities so you can devote more time to the areas you love and they give you more energy. Then you can feed that energy into the rest of the organization instead of projecting exhaustion, frustration or stress. That's where a COO adds real leverage. Part of the CEO's job is to be the Chief Energizing Officer to bring more positive energy to the business every day. By working only on high impact areas that give you energy, you will positively affect the whole organization. On the other hand, if you spend time working on roles that you hate or aren't good at, your negative energy will be detrimental to everyone. No one wants to see the CEO slumped over a set of spreadsheets with their head in their hands. Quantum physics talks about momentum creating momentum and energy seeking other similar energy closer to home. Consider how meeting a grumpy barista in the morning can set a negative tone for your day, just as meeting a friendly and positive one can leave you filled with energy. If that momentary interaction with a relative stranger can affect your day, which it has been scientifically proven to do, then just think about how important it is for leaders who work with employees for dozens of hours every week to take responsibility for their attitude, impact and energy position for growth or exit Every CEO will eventually exit the company, whether they sell, retire or die. That's not meant to be mawkish. It's realistic Even though most CEOs feel like they want to lead forever, a COO can be a key ally in helping to position the company for the CEO's eventual exit. The CEO's obligation to their shareholders is to build an organization that runs itself, doesn't solely rely on the CEO, and can continue on with someone new. That resilience and longevity require having the necessary systems and teams in place. Those systems are best put into place by a COO to ensure the company can continue to scale without the current CEO. Remember, too, that a COO might be or become the CEO's heir apparent. A business will always have the CEO because someone has to be the leader, setting vision and strategy, being accountable and serving as the legally required someone signing officer. But it won't always be you Trusted Partner People assume being a CEO is exciting, but I don't have to tell you that it can be quite lonely. You're isolated. You can't really tell your board of directors or advisors everything that's going on. You can't lean on your employees when you're scared, overwhelmed or overworked, worried or unsure. You can't share with your spouse without risking or stressing them out if things aren't going well. The CEO needs to keep their game face on and project excitement and positivity to others so they feel inspired to follow them. But where can the CEO turn for positivity and reassurance? The answer is a trusted and reliable coo. When I spoke with Jim Morris Rowe, the COO of 155 for the second in command podcast, he recalled his experience as CEO. It was lonely as hell. As a COO, he sees himself as filling a friendship role for his own CEO, David Hassell. His experience meant that intuitively he recognized the value of filling that void. No matter how invincible a CEO might feel, they should never underestimate the value of having a partner. You need someone you can trust, be vulnerable with, and open up to the yin to your yang. You need someone who will tell you the truth, including what they think you're wrong, so that you can keep moving forward in a positive direction. It's not simply about your personal feelings. The whole health of the company depends on you feeling and being happy, stable and supported. That's how you can provide stability and support to anyone who looks to you for direction, which is everyone. It's never a good idea to hire people for roles just because you like them. They're not there to get along and hang with. They're there to do a job for the COO however, it's essential to find someone you like. A CEO needs to make sure that they have a COO they'd gladly hang out with, whom they like and respect and whom they can share non work activities to build their connection. Whether that's playing tennis or golf, going for a run, a bike ride or cooking a barbecue. That natural affinity helps build mutual trust. And that's how you get to be two in a box. If it's not there, you risk bringing the wrong energy into the organization. At 1,800 got junk. Brian and I had an unfair advantage. He'd been the best man at my wedding three months before I started to work with him. So we already knew everything about each other and implicitly trusted each other because we'd been in a business group together as entrepreneurs for years. He'd seen me build two other companies. He knew how I thought and reacted as well as what my skills were. He knew me so well that it was an easy decision once he decided he needed to see out. You can't always replicate that foundation of friendship. Of course, it's rare that you are friendly with exactly the right person you need professionally. But you can build a foundation. When you find someone you like and respect, make sure the person you choose fits you and the temperament. Be clear on what you're looking for, including the need for friendship. In an often lonely role, the COO should be the CEOs built in business, life preserver, best friend and sometimes therapist. A complete support network for everything in a single individual, keeping up and handling disruption. As we've seen, the role of the COO originated with complex businesses like airlines that were highly challenging to run. But recently COOs have become increasingly common in startups and disruptors, technology, computers, automation and Internet global organizations. Robotics have given every single business a wake up call, enabling huge leverage and introducing new business models. With exponential growth, Even highly experienced CEOs can get left behind. And businesses that don't adapt will die. As I and others have said many times, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, then you're out of business. The COO must not simply understand the rate of change, they must also embrace it and get out ahead of it. That's where youth can be an advantage. I was a second in command for the first time at age 33. Today, our youngest COO alliance member, Julia Gordy at 26. Younger COOs tend to have impressive strength in technology, automation and digital marketing, even though they often have room to grow on the people side of the business, such as hiring, aligning teams, onboarding, building consensus and conflict management. That's fine. They can develop these skills quickly. I find it fascinating to watch kids play video games like Minecraft because the games are all related to the way that work gets done in real life. Collaborating as a team, talking remotely with people around the world, dividing tasks, project planning, delivering asynchronously. Young people understand the new ways of working. If you want your business to succeed, you need to understand as well. In the past, people showed up to work at 9am, left at 5pm but now many people can work at any time, over a 24 hour period and in multiple time zones. They don't have to be in an office, they can work from anywhere around the globe. In fact, I'm currently sitting in Denmark running the COO alliance from Europe and proofreading this chapter in a cafe. When harnessed successfully, these changes massively leverage the power of the COO and therefore the CEO. The CEO is often learning at the same rate as the COO. Entrepreneurial CEOs in particular may have an oh shit moment when they realize their business is by far the biggest endeavor they've ever undertaken. Maybe the company started as an idea with a friend, but then it's every day it's a little bit bigger than the day before and eventually they realize they need help. When I became involved with Brian, Disruption had just emerged as a business model. We brought a new spin to an old industry. We collected junk with a brand quality, focus, areas to connect the customer and a premium service. We didn't send garbage collectors to someone house. We sent clean cut college students in uniforms and shiny trucks. We did the work for the customer so they didn't have to lift a finger other than point at what they wanted hauled away. Think of all the coffee shops that existed before someone said let's call them Starbucks. There were 17,000 independent junk removal services when we started and we saw the opportunity with the right systems in place for branding. We were disruptors and we harnessed the Internet by aiming for 30% of our bookings to come from online instead of through the call center. In that way we changed the industry. The pace of change continues. Just look outside at the great resignation and all the businesses that have to keep up or die. One of the roles a COO plays is to think strategically and learn from better companies and other industries. That's one of the reasons I started the COO Alliance. Its strength comes from giving COOs access to 170 plus other COOs from 17 countries who see opportunities differently. This cross pollination inspires, educates and offers a place to ask questions so our members can concentrate on working on the business and not just in it. A quick note. It's a little ironic, but by starting the COO alliance, I've become a CEO. It feels very different. Given the choice that many times, I would probably rather still be a COO as it better suits my natural temperament. But it turns out I approach this new role a bit like I approached my COO role. Anyway, I'm a rare breed, combining some entrepreneurial CEO DNA, a bit of mania, a bit of excitement, a bit of marketing pizazz with the COO's ability to get things done. Rocket Fuel the Right COO is a game changer. As I mentioned previously, the power of the Right two isn't just a doubling, it's exponential. Brian and I were like nitroglycerin. We ignited productivity and rapid growth. In October of 2000 when Brian shared with me his vivid vision, what he then called his painted picture of what his company would look like, act like and feel like in 2003, I could see and I knew how to build it. Not only was he okay with moving aside to let me get focused on it while he focused on his unique abilities. We had a remarkable yin and yang in those years, which is why people ran around conferences saying I need a Cameron. Everyone around us could see it. A strong relationship, real trust and a great skills match. We didn't interfere with each other's jobs. Other times when I'd been a second in command have been different. At College Pro Painters, I wasn't officially the second in command, but rather I ran a division territory with full autonomy. Even though I reported to a VP who reported to the CEO. I had so much autonomy that it was like a COO role. When I was president of a private currency company and then the second in command for a franchising group at an auto body chain, I again had autonomy. But when a tender got junk was the only time I was truly a CEO responsible for executing someone else's vision. Regardless of the exact title for your second in command, the right person under the right circumstances can amplify, multiply and ignite your potential as a leader and the potential of your company. Stay ahead of the curve as a CEO. This next video is packed with great leadership lessons for you. They'll really help you as you continue in your growth.