A title is something a company gives you. The authority to do the job is something a CEO has to hand over. Here's what I learned in the gap between the two, and what CEOs can do to set their COO up from day one.
People assume that once you have the COO title, you're doing the COO job.
For a stretch of my career, that wasn't quite true for me.
I had the title. What I didn't always have was the room to use it. Decisions that were mine on paper still waited on someone else's yes. Ideas went up and didn't come back down. I spent most of my energy keeping things running and very little shaping where they were going.
I don't think that's rare. I think it's one of the most common situations in operations, and one of the least talked about.
What the title gives you, and what it doesn't
A title tells people where you sit on the org chart. It doesn't tell them whether your decisions stick.
That part comes from somewhere else. When a COO makes a call, does it hold? Does the leadership team act on it, or wait to see what the CEO thinks? Is the COO in the room when the big decisions get made, or told about them afterward?
Those answers don't come from the title. They come from the CEO, and from the culture the CEO builds around the role.
Where my COO job actually started
Mine started with reinvention.
When the headlines started saying AI would replace roles like mine, I took it personally. So I learned it. I earned the certifications, and then I started building. An invoicing workflow. Vendor tracking. Contractor onboarding and offboarding. A tutoring product of my own.
Nobody assigned those to me. I scoped each one, decided the guardrails, made the calls, and answered for the results.
That's when I found out what the COO role really is. Not the title. The ownership. Deciding what the real problem is, building the system that fixes it, and standing behind the result.
I also learned something about myself. For some of the work, I'd been waiting for permission I never needed.
Some of it does need to be handed over
I want to be honest here, because this is the part that matters for anyone in the seat.
You can own a lot without anyone handing it to you. You can't own all of it. Some authority only comes from the top: decision rights over a function, a budget, a leadership team that follows the COO's call because the CEO has made it clear they should.
That's culture, and culture starts at the top. A CEO who sees the COO as support will get support. A CEO who hands over real ownership gets an operator.
I've seen both sides. Earlier in my career, a mentor made room for me to grow, and it's the reason I became a Chief of Staff at all. I've also learned what it feels like when that room isn't there. The difference was never how capable I was. It was whether the room got made.
What a CEO hands over so a COO can do the job
If you're a CEO with a COO, or about to hire one, these are the things that turn the title into the job.
1. Decision rights, in writing.
List the calls that are the COO's to make without checking with you. Share the list with the leadership team. Ambiguity here is where most COOs lose their footing.
2. A number they own.
Not a project. A metric or a function that is theirs, month after month, with the authority to change how it's run.
3. Backing in the room.
When your COO makes a call, don't quietly reverse it. If you disagree, have that conversation in private. The team is watching whose decisions hold.
4. Permission to say no.
A COO who can't push back on a priority, a timeline, or even you, can only execute. Make it safe to disagree.
5. A seat before the decision, not after.
Bring your COO in while the strategy is being shaped, not once it's done. That's where their view of how the company actually runs is worth the most.
What a COO can do while the room is being made
If you're in the seat and the authority isn't all there yet, you're not stuck.
Own what you can, end to end. Build something. Ask for decision rights by name, one at a time, and deliver on each one visibly. Bring decisions instead of options. And make your work easy to see, because ownership nobody notices is hard to build on.
The title and the job
Today, when I talk with founders about a COO role, the first thing I ask isn't about the scope. It's about what the CEO is ready to hand over.
The title is the easy part. The job is what you build together.
If you're a founder working out what your COO needs from you to do the job well, that's the work I do. Let's talk.
