Once upon a time, COOs could exercise direct authority over most of the assets, processes, and teams needed to drive performance. Those days are over. Today, the COO controls far fewer of the levers that determine operational performance. To deliver results, effective COOs now act as a strategic bridge, connecting their purpose with that of other stakeholders to foster trust, collaborate more closely, and strengthen the organization’s resilience.
Stakeholder engagement has become a core part of the COO agenda, shaping how strategy turns into execution, how organizations navigate complexity, and how they sustain productivity and performance under pressure. Nowhere is this more visible than in the COO–CEO relationship. For many COOs, a primary source of impact comes from making the CEO’s role easier: mobilizing strategy, reallocating resources, and serving as a trusted decision partner—freeing the CEO to tackle a list of responsibilities that is only growing longer. That partnership often deepens the COO’s engagement with the board, widening the scope of results the role can deliver (see sidebar, “The COO and the board of directors”).
This high-level engagement means that the COO role is no longer only about executing today’s strategy. COOs must shape tomorrow’s strategy as well, through the choices they make about operating models, capabilities, technology, and talent. By translating signals from across the organization and its ecosystem into practical trade-offs, COOs help determine where the company can go next.
This article builds on McKinsey’s broader work on the evolving COO agenda, which explores how COOs deliver strategy for enterprise-wide impact. Here, we focus on how the role has changed, why stakeholder engagement has become a binding constraint on performance, and what works in practice. We outline how leading COOs take a more intentional, structured approach to stakeholder strategy—and tailor it to their business model—so they can focus their time, align diverse interests, and unlock value at scale.
Success is outside the COO’s sole control
Today, many of the decisions that shape cost, speed, resilience, and customer experience are made—or materially influenced—outside the COO’s formal remit. As a result, performance now depends on how effectively COOs work with and through others.
The most consequential of these relationships fall into two groups. First are peer leaders inside the enterprise, whose decisions may now determine operational outcomes. Second are external stakeholders whose expectations, scrutiny, and influence shape the organization’s room to maneuver.
Peer relationships shape operational outcomes
The COO has always worked closely with peers, but the density and intensity of these relationships have risen materially. Four functional leaders now stand out as particularly important for the COO to cultivate relationships with.
Finance: The primary relationship is, as always, with the CFO. COOs and CFOs have traditionally partnered to free up operating cash flow, manage costs, and improve capital efficiency. Today, that partnership is even more central as capital allocation decisions increasingly determine which operational initiatives move forward. Investments in automation, resilience, sustainability, and growth all compete for funding, making alignment on trade-offs—not just cost control—a core part of the COO’s job. Accordingly, COOs need a clearer understanding than ever of the CFO’s priorities: the problems the CFO most needs to solve, the metrics the company is expected to meet, and the growth opportunities to target.
IT: At the same time, the rise of advanced technologies across every aspect of operations has elevated the importance of the chief information officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO). The COO’s relationships with these two leaders can best ensure that resources spent on AI and related technologies deliver lasting ROI by codeveloping solutions to the biggest operating problems the business faces. The old model of identifying an operational issue (such as snarled vendor payment processes or delayed product launches) and throwing it over the wall for IT to solve is no longer fit for purpose (if it ever was). With so much investment at stake, companies cannot afford to roll out AI solutions that users reject as too complicated, opaque, or unreliable.
HR: The chief human resources officer (CHRO) has also become a far more critical partner. Demographic shifts, tighter labor markets, and accelerating skills requirements mean that talent availability and capability are now binding constraints on operational performance at every level of the organization, not just among senior managers or highly specialized technicians. When an industrial services company’s attrition rate reaches 70 percent, or a manufacturer can persuade only 200 of 700 temps to convert to full-time status, the limits of traditional site-based hiring seem clear. Workforce strategy—covering hiring, reskilling, productivity, and engagement—can therefore have an even greater effect than in generations past on throughput, quality, and resilience. While the CHRO may lead talent programs, it’s often the COO who is responsible for managing operations talent and accountable for the outcomes those programs enable—particularly at the front line on factory floors and in service centers. As with the CIO and CTO, COOs can’t transfer the problem to the CHRO; instead, the model is codevelopment of an operational talent strategy.
Marketing: Finally, rising customer expectations have pulled the COO and the chief marketing officer (CMO) into closer orbit. Shorter product cycles, greater customization, and higher service expectations require faster feedback loops between demand signals and operations. The marketing function is closest to what customers value and how the company’s offerings perform in the market—insights that directly inform operational priorities and trade-offs. When operations and the commercial side of the business work hand in glove, the entire organization’s performance can improve: Marketing can more confidently shape demand based on what operations can deliver, and operations can adapt faster to what customers respond to.
Taken together, these peer relationships mean that operational excellence is no longer something the COO can deliver independently. It is the result of sustained alignment across capital, technology, talent, and demand, and requires interdependence between functions that have spent decades as separate organizations.
External stakeholders redefine the scope of engagement
Changes in business models and rising transparency have expanded the range of external stakeholders that influence operational outcomes. COOs have long managed relationships with vendors, labor unions, and regulators—in some sectors, balancing demands from multiple regulatory bodies while maintaining reliability and affordability. But now they must do so under 24/7 social media scrutiny that can extend far deeper into the supply chain than was possible in the past.
Strong, knowledgeable relationships with suppliers and partners have also become more consequential as supply chains grow more global, specialized, and fragile. Disruptions—whether from geopolitical shocks, climate events, or capacity constraints—can quickly cascade, elevating the importance of proactive engagement and shared risk management across supply chain tiers.
At the same time, the influence of media, civil-society organizations, and local communities on corporate decisions has increased. Public interest in safety, sustainability, labor practices, and social impact can accelerate or stall projects, reshape cost structures, and force major operational changes. For COOs, these stakeholders are no longer peripheral reputational concerns; they are operational variables that affect speed, resilience, and long-term value creation.
As external expectations rise and information flows accelerate, effective engagement evolves from reactive to forward-looking. COOs who build trust, anticipate concerns, and maintain open lines of communication with stakeholders are better positioned to navigate disruptions and protect operational continuity.
The question then becomes: How does a COO who manages all of these internal and external relationships—while also doing everything that operations leadership requires—avoid being stretched too thin?
Balancing focus and depth with flexibility
As the number of influential stakeholders grows, the challenge for COOs is where to focus their attention. Time, attention, and political capital are finite, and broad, undifferentiated engagement quickly becomes unsustainable. What distinguishes effective COOs is not how many relationships they maintain, but how deliberately they choose where—and how deeply—to invest.
Leading COOs therefore treat stakeholder engagement as a core element of their operating model: structured enough to force prioritization, but flexible enough to adapt as strategy, performance pressures, and external conditions evolve. Just as important, they commit to understanding not just the other stakeholders’ purpose, but the reasons underpinning that purpose. That means they approach engagement as a learning process. In many cases, stakeholders do not fully understand the COO’s agenda—and COOs often have only a partial view of what motivates their stakeholders. Authentic engagement creates the space to listen, test assumptions, and build shared understanding before positions harden.
Forcing prioritization
A useful starting point is a structured reflection exercise that helps COOs move from a broad inventory of stakeholders to a short list of relationships that matter most in shaping and executing a strategic mandate. A reflection exercise adapted from “Nail your firsts: A new CEO’s guide to stakeholder impact” provides a practical template for doing so (table). Instead of cataloging stakeholders exhaustively, the exercise pushes COOs to focus on two questions at a specific point in time: At this time, who most affects our ability to deliver the COO agenda? and How should we engage them differently, given our missions and what we both want to achieve?
The exercise begins with prioritization based on the collaboration’s importance to the current strategic mandate. This is measured as the degree of value at risk without collaboration, ranging from “highest” to “none.” The reflection exercise then asks the COO to assess the strength of a relationship, from “very strong” to “none.”
The exercise then moves to action planning, explicitly comparing the stakeholders’ objectives with the COO’s operational priorities and identifying where interests intersect. Many COOs find that this comparison alone surfaces why some relationships stall: Engagement may be frequent, but it is misaligned with the issues that actually matter.
Just as important, this step forces humility. Because agendas are rarely completely transparent at the outset, the process works best when COOs use it to listen and learn—testing their assumptions about stakeholder motivations and constraints, without seeking to validate a preexisting view. Authenticity, not choreography, is what builds credibility and traction.
The final requirement for the exercise is to repeat it regularly, particularly early in a COO’s tenure or during periods of rapid strategic and operational change. It’s far better to check on stakeholder relationships more frequently than to let them wither from neglect or fester due to misunderstandings.
As relationships develop, COOs will also start to sense which ones deplete their energy and which recharge it. Relationships that recharge are especially valuable because they usually reflect mutual respect and honesty. One COO told us, “The CFO became my thought partner: someone who believed in my ability, was completely honest, and gave great feedback. That proved so essential to my effectiveness as COO that I think every COO should try to find a thought-partner peer.”
Understand the other stakeholders’ ‘why’
Every leader operates against a specific purpose, which translates into metrics they are accountable for, risks they are managing, and outcomes they are expected to deliver. Clarifying the reasons underlying the purpose—through direct questions and careful listening—makes it easier to see where priorities genuinely overlap and where they do not. The overlap is where shared purpose lives. When that common ground is explicitly defined, alignment becomes more durable and execution moves faster.
It is just as important to name the gaps. If one leader is pushing their top priority without understanding the other stakeholders’ priorities, the relationship is headed for conflict. Leadership research underscores that meaningful growth often requires examining the assumptions and trade-offs that shape decisions under pressure. Picture a simple Venn diagram: one circle for the COO’s mandate and one for each of the other stakeholders. The intersection represents shared purpose. The outer sections represent each executive’s separate accountabilities—and, at times, potential for friction. Effective COOs recognize that those outer portions are not “distractions” from shared work; once properly understood, they can offer new opportunities to shape stronger enterprise-level solutions.
Reflection exercise for COO stakeholder prioritization and engagement
| A. Prioritization: Who are the most important stakeholders who materially affect the execution of the COO agenda? | ||
| Stakeholder name | Current relationship strength | Importance to current mandate |
| Very strong | Highest (almost all value is at risk without collaboration) | |
| Strong | High (significant value is at risk without collaboration) | |
| Acquainted | Medium (moderate value at risk without collaboration) | |
| Weak | Low (little value at risk without collaboration) | |
| None | None (no value at risk without collaboration) | |
| B. Action planning: Use the following as a template to evaluate one stakeholder from your list, then repeat for others. | ||
| ||
Be explicit about ownership and delegation
The reflection exercise in the table helps clarify which relationships require the COO’s personal involvement and which do not. When COOs become the default point of contact for too many stakeholders, decisions are slowed and impact is blunted.
Effective COOs are explicit about:
- which stakeholders they own personally
- which are managed by trusted deputies
- how information flows back to them when issues escalate
This kind of clarity is also key to energy management. Some relationships create momentum and insight; others consistently drain attention without advancing execution. Leading COOs pay close attention to this dynamic, ensuring that their personal involvement is reserved for relationships where their presence truly changes outcomes.
They also recognize that this threshold is not fixed. As business pressures intensify, strategies shift, or external conditions change, relationships that once required hands-on involvement may be delegated—and others pulled back into the COO’s orbit. Recalibration is a feature of the model, not a failure.
Anchor engagement in outcomes and review it continuously
Finally, leading COOs anchor stakeholder engagement in operational outcomes, not activity levels. They track whether engagement is improving execution—faster decisions, fewer surprises, greater resilience—not simply whether meetings are occurring. The table provides a practical mechanism for doing this: By revisiting relationship strength, valence, and alignment over time, COOs can see whether engagement is actually shifting dynamics in the desired direction.
Because stakeholder influence shifts as strategy evolves and conditions change, this reflection is revisited periodically rather than treated as a one-time exercise. Over time, it becomes a living record of where the COO invests attention and why—one that can be refined, handed forward, and reused as the organization evolves.
Tailoring the stakeholder approach by business model
While the underlying principles of stakeholder engagement are consistent, the way they are applied varies significantly by the company’s business model and the COO’s mandate.
Across sectors, three broad archetypes illustrate how leading COOs can tailor their stakeholder strategies, combining elements from the archetypes according to current strategic and operating priorities.
Service-centric: Prioritize people and customer-facing processes
In service-intensive sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, and media, operational performance has long been shaped primarily by people-intensive functions such as customer experience and frontline execution. Yet these same factors are becoming critical in industries traditionally perceived as “industrial,” such as mining or equipment manufacturing. COOs in these environments can concentrate their stakeholder effort internally, particularly on peers and leaders who shape talent, incentives, and customer-facing processes.
Peer stakeholders—especially the CHRO and CMO—often rank among the most critical relationships. Workforce availability, skill levels, and engagement directly affect capacity and quality, while customer expectations evolve quickly and require constant communication between demand and delivery. In these settings, COOs frequently find that allies and champions inside the organization are the primary force multipliers, helping cascade priorities and reinforce behavioral change at scale.
External stakeholders matter as well because of their impact on trust and reputation. Regulators, media, and advocacy groups can amplify service failures or poor conduct, so COOs should ensure the company responds quickly and offers clear escalation paths.
Product-centric: Focus on assets, supply chains, and labor stability
In product-focused (and typically asset-heavy) industries—such as consumer goods manufacturing, energy, transportation, and infrastructure—operational outcomes depend heavily on physical assets, complex supply chains, and organized labor. COOs in these environments often face a broader mix of powerful external stakeholders whose actions can materially disrupt performance.
Unions, regulators, major suppliers, and local communities frequently appear high on the priority list, even when relationship strength is uneven. Here, the potential for conflict is often structural rather than situational, reflecting deeply embedded incentives or regulatory mandates. Effective COOs engage these stakeholders early and deliberately, recognizing that alignment is often partial and progress incremental.
The central internal partnership under this archetype is with the CFO, particularly on issues regarding capital allocation, maintenance strategies, and resilience investments. Champions and allies within the engineering and procurement functions then play a critical role in developing executable plans that navigate external and internal constraints. Stakeholder engagement is less about persuasion and more about disciplined negotiation, risk mitigation, and continuity of operations.
Innovation-centric: rebalance toward speed and external engagement
In innovation-led companies—whether digital-native or platform-based organizations, or companies in fast-moving sectors such as pharmaceuticals, consumer technology, and media—the COO role is starting to converge with technology leadership. In some cases, this is evolving toward a combined COO–CIO or COO–CTO mandate, reflecting the extent to which software, data, and systems have become the operating model.
As a result, internal peer alignment—especially around product, engineering, and architecture decisions—is often strong, with many stakeholders already acting as champions or allies by design. The greater risk for COOs in this archetype is underinvesting in external stakeholder relationships that fall outside the traditional value chain.
Regulators, policymakers, and civil-society organizations have become particularly important for technology and other innovation-centric companies to cultivate. These stakeholders often emerge late in the decision cycle, when change is costly and options are limited. Leading COOs counter this risk by deliberately strengthening relationships early, even when immediate operational exposure appears low.
For these organizations, stakeholder strategy serves as a hedge against regulatory shock, reputational risk, and sudden constraints on growth.
Stakeholder stewardship never ends
Because stakeholder influence shifts as strategies evolve and conditions change, effective engagement is never complete. For COOs, the task is not to design a perfect stakeholder map, but to maintain one that remains useful over time.
Leading COOs begin with a deliberate assessment when they take the role—clarifying which relationships matter, where alignment is fragile, and where influence must be built. They then revisit that assessment periodically, particularly as performance pressures, leadership teams, or external conditions change. In practice, this discipline becomes part of the COO’s operating rhythm, not a one-off exercise.
Over time, the most effective COOs come to treat stakeholder strategy as an institutional asset. They document priorities, engagement logic, and lessons learned, creating a record that can be handed forward to successors. In roles where accountability is high and tenure is often shorter than the change cycles underway, this continuity matters.
Operational excellence has always been a team sport. The best COOs manage that team deliberately, building stakeholder engagement and shared purpose throughout the operating model. The result is a repeatable capability that endures beyond any one leader.
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