In ‘good company’: Why a chief operating officer is a CEO’s best friend
A 2006 Harvard Business Review article on the “second in command” role of a COO says that there is very little that is common among the skills and backgrounds of COOs of different organisations, making it very hard to answer “what makes a successful COO?"
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Chief Technology OfficerVisitIIM LucknowIIML Chief Marketing Officer ProgrammeVisitIIM KozhikodeIIMK Chief Product Officer ProgrammeVisitThe article highlights a few types of roles the COOs can play:
- Executor: focused on execution of leadership strategies
- Change agent: bringing in a turnaround or organisational transformations
- The mentor: an experienced COO is also a mentor to the CEO
- The other half: complementary in skills to the CEO
- The partner: A co-leadership or two-in-the-box model (as termed by the article’s authors Nate Bennett and Stephen A Miles)
- The heir apparent: a way to prepare a leader for the possible top job
- The MVP (most valuable player): a way of promoting valuable leaders instead of losing them to competition
The article also talks about vanishing CEOs — where companies promote COO as CEO and do not fill up the vacant slot of the second in command.
Some 17 years later, the COO role has evolved into a more critical one. Explaining the differences between CEOs and COOs, LinkedIn Talent Solutions says a differentiation can be made in the way they deal with issues. “The chief operating officer (COO) of a company is second in command, reporting to the chief executive officer (CEO),” says the LinkedIn descriptor. “While a CEO is concerned with long-term business goals, the COO is focused more on implementing company strategies into daily
