The role of the chief operating officer is evolving rapidly as organizations navigate an increasingly complex and fast-changing business environment. In this episode of McKinsey Talks Operations, host Daphne Luchtenberg explores how the COO role has become both more critical and more complex—and why it is increasingly a pathway to the CEO role.
Daphne is joined by McKinsey Partners Darryl Piasecki and Tony Gambell, who jointly lead the firm’s global COO Excellence initiative. Together, they discuss how COOs act as true partners to CEOs, deliver on enterprise strategy, and move beyond traditional operational leadership to become strategic leaders at the center of the organization.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daphne Luchtenberg: In many organizations, the person overseeing day-to-day operations isn’t always referred to as the chief operating officer, or COO. Today, we’ll use it as a convenient shorthand, recognizing that the role of COO can be as diverse as the organizations it serves, with titles ranging from president to chief supply chain officer. Yet no matter the title or organizational nuance, one truth remains—the role of COO has never been more critical or more complex. Operating in an increasingly complex external environment, COOs are expected to be true strategic partners, not just traditional operational leaders who keep everything running on time and on budget.
It’s no surprise that the COO role is increasingly becoming a proving ground for future CEOs, with 40 percent of new CEOs in 2024 having held either COO or president titles just before stepping into the top job. So what does it take to thrive in this high-stakes role? And how can COOs not only keep the wheels turning but also shape the future of their organizations?
Before we launch into the conversation, I really want to get a point of view from you both about what prompted you to kick off this COO effort now.
Darryl Piasecki: Working with COOs is not new. Tony and I have been counseling COOs for 15 to 20 years now, and in the process, we’ve discovered that there’s a lot out there for CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite roles, but there seems to be a bit of a gap in what is being published and disseminated around the COO role specifically. That’s perhaps because the role is so varied across organizations. Not every organization has a named COO, even though someone is filling that role. So I think that’s made it tough to focus on in the past.
Daphne Luchtenberg: And Tony, how about you?
Tony Gambell: Darryl makes a great point about the gap in focus on COOs. For me, COOs are the unsung heroes of the C-suite. They’re the ones who turn strategy into action. It’s usually behind the scenes, but the role is so varied and complex, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. So what’s exciting to me about this effort is we have an opportunity to shine a light on the incredible work COOs do and explore how they can amplify their impact even further.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Why is now the moment that this topic is so important?
Darryl Piasecki: Well, put simply, operations delivers a strategy. Other functions, of course, are valuable, but ultimately, the operation produces the goods or services in a manner driven by the business strategy. And today, CEOs are spending an increasing share of their time focused externally.
We’ve all seen the impact of rapid media cycles and social pressures on companies. This leaves less time to focus internally on the operation, and this is where the COO can fill that role. Now, it’s not to say that’s as simple as putting their heads down and just producing—the COO must recognize the operations mandate and have a clear, actionable vision and a well-defined agenda.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Tony, can you say more about this interesting and important relationship between the CEO and the COO?
Tony Gambell: The COO has to be tied in with the CEO on everything. The CEO is defining the vision and strategy for the company. The COO is delivering the vision. That can be complex and difficult when things are changing every day. Supply chain strategies take a long time to shift, but COOs are expected to deliver all the time. So that relationship is going to be really important between the CEO and COO—to have trust and give respect to the challenges the COO faces every day.
Darryl Piasecki: It depends on the context of the company, the context of the sector, what’s happening right now, and the context of the CEO themselves. What strengths do they bring? What gaps do they have? When working with COOs, I usually start with two questions.
The first one is: “Why does the company have a COO role? What is it intended to do? What purpose is it providing?” And then number two: “Why are you specifically in that role? What strengths do you bring? What experiences? What are you brought in to deliver that someone else could not?”
Daphne Luchtenberg: In 2024, we published an article on the COO agenda. Can you lay out the set of actions that we put down on paper?
Tony Gambell: There are really five things that a COO should focus on when developing their agenda: define a vision, build a clear plan and one they’re ready to execute, foster strong relationships, focus on organization and talent, and establish a personal operating model.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Darryl, let me ask you, then, about the importance of setting a vision. Can you say more about that?
Darryl Piasecki: We’ve mentioned vision a couple of times already, and this is absolutely essential because everything else cascades from here. So you’ve got to take the time to start here and get this right. It needs to be grounded in the business strategy, the mandate for operations, and the context.
It’s got to be clear to everyone in operations as well as to adjacent functions—and it needs to be measurable.
It sounds really simple, but I found that, in practice, it is actually more difficult, and many operations leaders move forward without a very clear articulation of what drives the business outcomes. You’ve got to cascade what the vision is to what actually drives the outcome of operations.
One company I worked with worked really hard to raise the performance of individual sites until all of them showed green on their dashboard, only to discover that the company-wide operating performance was still red. This is a case where the linkages were broken between the overall strategy and the operational initiatives that were happening on the ground.
So now, once we have a vision, we need to transition that to action. A vision without a plan is just a wish. So you’ve got to have a plan and the ability to execute well.
Now, the specific time horizon for that plan varies, but it must be long enough to include the strategic elements needed for your context at the time. We’ve all heard about 100-day plans. There’s nothing magical about 100 days; just know that’s simply the tactical first part of executing the plan. But in all cases, you need to start with the vision, and then the plan will follow.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Tony, tell me about some of the nuances when it comes to putting that plan down on paper.
Tony Gambell: A lot of the challenges, and the things we talk about, are the nuances. Let me go through a couple of examples. One COO I’m working with has a growth agenda and, at the same time, is being asked to cut costs. Another COO is being challenged as they’re working through a merger and trying to figure out how to focus on running the business while also focusing on integration. Another COO is focused on driving OTIF [on-time, in-full] and, again, with the conflict of having to reduce costs. So all these things are the nuances, but they’re all part of the everyday life of a COO.
Darryl Piasecki: I’ll share two examples of COOs I’m working with now. In both cases, it comes down to clearly articulating the business need in the given context and finding those drivers or the “what matters.”
One scenario is where the overall business strategy is a requirement for growth. They’ve got lots of infrastructure they need to grow into, and this is where the operation needs to focus on service to be competitive in order to grow in their sector.
The other one was a logistics company that needed to increase throughput to meet forecast demand but didn’t have the time or the capital to invest in infrastructure. So it was really about how do you operate to increase throughput with what you have. Everyone often assumes that operations is about cutting costs—and often pressure from other functions and stakeholders is about cutting costs—but in both of those scenarios I just described, saving a few cents per year isn’t going to deliver the strategy. It’s really about service or throughput in order to deliver the business strategy.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Darryl, we were talking about the operating model before, so say a bit more about the COO’s operating model.
Darryl Piasecki: COOs need to manage how they spend their time, how they spend their attention, how they lead, and how they interact with other stakeholders. I like to use the analogy that their role is more about being a head coach than a star player. And the COO needs to make that shift and think about what COO-only topics are. It’s no longer just about being a great operator.
One COO I worked with used a basketball analogy and described it as leaning into your left hand, which meant to improve shooting with your nondominant hand, or in the COO role, getting stronger in areas that are outside your core expertise.
He had been a great operator throughout his full career, but now he needed to learn things like business case analysis to pitch ideas to the CEO or CFO for major operations and investments. This required reviewing, explaining, and asking hard questions of his own staff.
Another COO reflected that in his previous role, he was a great operator and site leader, but then he had to learn more about technology as they were implementing an ERP [enterprise resource planning] and advanced manufacturing technology. This required him to learn much more about technology and how to interact with the tech organization.
Daphne Luchtenberg: I like that, Darryl. Because in fact, what you’re saying is you need to learn the language of your peers. You need to learn the language of the CIO [chief information officer]. You need to learn the language of the CFO. Tony, can you say a bit more about how you build those stakeholder relationships as a COO?
Tony Gambell: Oftentimes, the constraint on delivering the strategy lies with stakeholders and people who are outside your own organization. So developing deep relationships with people like the CIO, the CFO, the CHRO [chief human resource officer]—all those are going to be important because they help unlock different parts of the strategy that you’re trying to deliver. They give you degrees of freedom that you don’t have in your own organization.
Darryl Piasecki: This goes back to that COO-only aspect you talked about before. If a COO tries to maintain that same operations focus and effectively acts as a super-site leader, no one is interfacing with the CMO, no one is interfacing with the CIO, and that’s actually a gap that’s going to hold back the operation. This then becomes a COO-only topic, where the COO needs to engage with those stakeholders in order to implement their vision.
Tony Gambell: There’s no one else in the organization who can bridge that gap. So the COO really has a new role now to engage other stakeholders in a way that enables their teams and enables them to deliver their strategy.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Yes, because operations is where it all comes together effectively, right? So how do you then coach COOs to think about their own success?
Tony Gambell: We often coach COOs when they are new to the role. We also often coach COOs who are seasoned, but something has happened to change their agenda. And in all those situations, it’s just important for COOs to have a different sounding board, a different voice to talk through things. So we work with COOs in a lot of different ways, but at the end of the day, our work with COOs is around helping them really clarify and crystallize their agenda in a way that’s executable.
Darryl Piasecki: I would say the other area where counseling helps COOs is in setting that vision, the strategy for the business drivers that really matter. I’ve seen multiple COOs who try to do a little bit of everything. They’re trying to focus on cost, they’re trying to focus on throughput, and they’re trying to focus on service, without actually stepping back and thinking, “What matters for my business context right now? What matters for my business strategy right now?”
Strategies are often defined not only by what you choose to do, but also by what you choose not to do or what you choose to deprioritize. I’ve seen great success among COOs who can really articulate: “Here are the two or three things that matter for my business and help the organization focus and help the organization make those independent decisions.”
Daphne Luchtenberg: And then when you’ve got that vision, the next piece is to make sure you’ve got the team in place to execute on that, right?
Tony Gambell: Yes, that is the next step. And the reality is you could have the best vision and the best plan to deliver that vision, but you really do need people to execute. So I work with COOs quite often and talk through the different people on their teams and understand their capabilities, their capacity, and their overall will to drive the type of performance the COO is aiming to achieve. And look, there’s always a gap, and there’s always something to work through. Some of that is solved with leadership, but a lot of it is solved with finding the right people for the right roles to execute.
Daphne Luchtenberg: I can imagine you’ve both gotten a lot of insights from the COOs you are working with as you’re building the coaching relationships. What’s standing out in those conversations?
Darryl Piasecki: Since we started this effort, we’ve talked to dozens of COOs, and one question I always ask is: “What would be helpful?” And unprompted, the number one answer is always that they value getting together with peer COOs. They really want a community. So we’re looking to put a lot of effort into building that and bringing groups together.
Daphne Luchtenberg: What’s the one piece of advice you would give a COO who is enrolled today?
Tony Gambell: I think the most important thing for a COO is to know what matters—to know what matters to deliver the vision for the company, to know what matters to execute their plan, and to have the ability to discern when things change and the “what matters” changes.
Darryl Piasecki: Yes, spot on, Tony. The other thing I would add is that as a COO, you’re going to have more demands than you have time for and more things vying for your attention. You need to really focus on “What are the COO-only topics that I need to spend my time on?” And then delegate the rest to your team.
That may mean you need to upskill your team or make changes to get the right people in place to enable you to delegate, but [it really comes back to] focusing on those COO-only topics—who you engage with and where you focus your energy.
Daphne Luchtenberg: So, Tony, what’s on the horizon for you and Darryl as you both build out this program?
Tony Gambell: Next, we continue to be excited about helping COOs become better COOs. Whether that’s providing new insights, connecting folks in a community to other COOs, or just being a sounding board one-on-one, the time for the COO is now, and we’re excited to be a part of that.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Thanks so much for joining me. I’m going to be inviting you back later in the year so we can hear more about this exciting new development for the COO Excellence Forum.
That was a fascinating rundown of what COOs should be thinking about. It seems clear that the role of the COO has transformed from being a traditional operational leader to being a true strategic partner. Working alongside the CEO, this role has a hand in delivering the organization’s vision and strategy.
That shift is critical in today’s complex environment. The best COOs articulate a clear vision, build strong teams, foster stakeholder relationships, and delegate the day-to-day operations to focus on strategic priorities.
COOs should build their agenda around five pillars: vision, plan and execution, stakeholder engagement, organization, and talent. And they should have a personal operating model to ensure a sustained impact and organizational alignment.
The COO role is mission critical for delivering strategy and for driving system-wide outcomes. By driving a clear agenda, COOs can unlock their full potential and position themselves as transformational leaders—and even future CEOs.
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