A lot of the advice on hiring a COO promises the owner a lighter desk. The COO sorts the problems, settles most of them, and brings the owner a short list with an answer attached to each. I work beside owners as a fractional executive, and that promise costs them the one thing they cannot hand to anyone: knowing whether the company is moving toward the place they said it was going.
A COO, full-time or fractional, earns the seat by making the work visible, to the owner and to everyone carrying it. A lighter desk for the owner is a side effect at best.
Founders were taught to want a summary
The filter is standard advice to founders. A 2017 piece on the Entrepreneurs' Organization blog, The Key to Your Growth: A Perfectly Matched COO, says a good COO understands which problems to bring to the CEO and which to settle without consulting them, because most CEOs "want a summary and a resolution." It is a reasonable instinct for a busy owner, and it is the line I push back on hardest. (The same piece has the COO help run the day-to-day operations so the founder can step back from them, a split I argue against in a separate post.)
A summary tells the owner what someone else decided mattered
I listen to what people do more than to what they say, and a summary is somebody's words about what happened. It tells the owner which problems came up and how each one was closed. It does not show who is keeping pace with the plan, which step has slipped two weeks running, or which team gave up on a fix because the problem was marked resolved and the work never changed.
None of that is a knock on the COO. A good one will settle most problems well. The owner just has no way to tell which calls went wrong, because the evidence of those calls never reaches the desk.
The COO's job is to show everyone's steps
When I describe my side of the partnership, I put it this way: "Both have to share the vision. Both have to show they're walking it. One is responsible for drawing the map and bringing the visibility of everyone's steps to walk it to them."
That last part is the piece most COO job descriptions leave out. Visibility means the owner sees every step of the plan, who is taking it and where it stands, and the escalated problems are only one part of that picture. It also means the team sees the same picture, so the people doing the work and the owner are reading one plan rather than two versions of it.
In practice that looks like a short page everyone can read each week, with each step, who holds it, and whether it moved. The EO piece recommends a weekly meeting between the CEO and the COO, and that meeting is the natural place to read the page together. Problems still get solved without the owner in the room. They get solved in view, and checking the work that way is how an owner learns what to trust the COO with next.
Skip the page when the owner already sees every step
Some owners still sit close enough to the work to see each step themselves. They walk the floor, sit in the weekly reviews, and know which manager is behind before anyone tells them. For that owner, a short summary from the COO costs nothing, because it is a second look at something they have already seen, and a weekly page would be paper the business does not need.
That usually describes a smaller company. The EO piece puts the point where a COO title fits at about 100 employees, and by then most owners can no longer see every step firsthand. Once that happens, the summary stops being a second look and becomes the only one, and that is when the page earns its place.
Ask for the steps before you ask for the summary
If you have a COO, or are about to hire one, ask for one thing in the first month: a single view of the plan that you and the team both read, showing every step and who holds it. If what comes back is a list of problems already solved, you have hired someone to keep you comfortable, and the company will run on their picture of it.
Getting that shared picture down to the managers is its own problem, covered in why change stalls between the decision and the work. The page on what a fractional COO or CFO does covers the seat itself. If you are deciding what your COO should be showing you, that is a conversation I like having.
John Wyatt · John Wyatt's page · All posts · RSS