An organization can have a COO who improves operational efficiency. As strategy becomes more complex, though, the tougher question becomes: is the COO also enabling the organisation to execute what it needs next?
The Shift Beyond Operational Control
The traditional COO role focused on discipline, optimising operations and costs, and converting strategy into plans. Those have not been resolved. The nature of the remit has changed, but so has its scope.
In most global organisations, the COO role is to turn strategy into enterprise execution, reinvent the operating model, initiate transformation, link functions that have historically worked in silos, and measure resource allocation against competing priorities.
Unlike traditionally, modern day COO works at strategy, execution, and CEO partnership, and makes stakeholder engagement and organisational alignment central to the discussion.
Why is the Operating Challenge Different?
Strategy can be sound, but the operating model may no longer be able to deliver it. That tension is pushing COOs to ask different questions:
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Is the organisation designed for the strategy it is pursuing?
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Are decision rights clear?
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Are capabilities in the right places?
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Can the operating model adapt as strategy changes?
Transformation is not just a project; it's also an ongoing state, shaped by AI, digitalisation, cost pressure, supply-chain resilience, changing business models, and M&A integration.
Agentic AI is changing the way work is done, which demands new ways to think about operating models and organisational structures, rather than just optimising current processes, for COOs.
The CEO-COO Partnership
The CEO-COO relationship is shifting from the CEO assigning direction to the COO becoming integrated.
The CEO is in charge of the business plan; the COO is in charge of executing it. The shift requires trust, an explicit understanding of roles, complementarity, shared strategic priorities, decision rights, and constructive challenge.
There's no competition for the stronger COO. The role expands the CEO's reach from strategy to enterprise-wide implementation and uncovers implementation risk, capability gaps, and transformation inflection points that are not evident.
The Succession Dimension
COO and president roles remain an important route to the CEO position. COO's role often serves as a “finishing” position that provides broader enterprise and stakeholder exposure.
That does not mean every COO is a CEO waiting. The developmental experiences that matter- enterprise perspective, P&L exposure, board engagement, external stakeholder management, strategy, transformation, talent leadership, and crisis leadership- vary by organisation and by individual.
The Taplow Perspective: Mandate Over Title
From a global executive search and leadership advisory standpoint, the critical question is not “What does a COO normally do?” That would be: “Why does this organisation need a COO right now, and what is the need that the role is being recruited to address?”
Scaling, transformation, operational complexity, CEO bandwidth, M&A integration, international expansion, cost transformation, succession, or organisational redesign each one of these requires a different COO profile. The right COO follows the mandate, not the other way around.
Closing Thought for Boards & CEOs
The title “COO” can describe radically different jobs. One COO may own operations. Another may lead to transformation. Another may integrate multiple business units. Another may act as the CEO’s execution partner. Another may be a CEO succession candidate.
The most important design choice is not whether to have a COO. It is what the organisation actually needs its COO to accomplish now, and how that differs from the traditional operating mandate.