Cameron Herold argues a COO's job must shift every six months by delegating non-genius work and coaching people to own it. His assistant Meredith became VP of Operations through years of targeted development. If you're doing the same tasks after years, you're failing at delegation.
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This is one of the most interesting concepts of a COO, but every 6 months you're really going to have a completely new set of roles and responsibilities for you because your job is to get results through people. Let me explain what I mean here. Every week where you sit down and you look at all the core projects that are on your plate, it doesn't say at the top of your to-do list your name, right? It doesn't say Fred's to-do list. It just says to-do list. Well, your job is to delegate everything except genius on that to-do list to people that are on your team. Now, often you get blocked here where you're saying, I don't have anybody I can delegate that project to. Pick somebody, delegate it to them, and then spend your time coaching them on the skills and their confidence and their connections so that they can work on that project. Your time is about delegating more and then spending your time growing people so that they can take that stuff off your plate. So pretty much every 6 months, the roles and responsibilities of what you're working on changes because you should be able to get most of that stuff off your plate and onto other people. Likewise, you're helping them to automate and to optimize and to stop doing some of what they're doing or to be able to delegate or offshore some of their projects too. Even my executive assistant Meredith, after about 4 or 5 years of being my EA, finally became director of operations. Now she's VP of operations and sales. Because I've helped to elevate her to work on higher impact projects. And she now has an EA that she can delegate projects to. And I'm always looking at my team to say, what can they be working on so that I can get more of the stuff off my plate so that they can be working on the higher impact activities. So again, your job every 6 months is to get everything off your plate onto the plates of your team and to grow the skills and the confidence and the connections of them so so that you can take on more responsibilities to scale the organization, take on more from the CEO, and continue driving the organization forward. If you find that you're doing the same stuff that you were doing 2 years ago, it's because what you're not doing well is delegating, and you're not actually coaching your team. Some of the core skills in my Invest in Your Leaders training are skills around delegation, project management, time management, coaching, situational leadership, one-on-one coaching, the skills to be able to get more off your plate so that your role can actually change every 6 months.
