SucceedinG As A COO

The COO Success Playbook For 2024

A Chief Operating Officer (COO) resource that looks at the role, the requirements of the role in 2024 and the plays that ensure you succeed.

The Role Of The COO

We analyzed 100 COO Job Descriptions between March and April 2024; these are the most common requirements in priority order.

COO Salaries

Our research found that although the roles were similar the average salaries for Chief Operating Officers varied massively between countries. For example:

It was much lower in countries like Spain.

12 Plays A COO Should Consider In 2024

The team at ZOKRI has assembled 12 COO plays that will set you up for success in your roles in 2024/2025. We can help with any or all of these as a team and would welcome a conversation.

#1 Master Strategic Alignment & Focus

The primary challenge for a COO is aligning day-to-day operations with the organisation’s overall vision. The COO must seamlessly integrate the practical execution of tasks with the broader strategic vision.

As consultants, we often encounter organisations that regard progress as slow. They feel that they should be achieving and creating more than they do. What is missing is the ability to clearly articulate what would be called a ‘winning strategy’. When then should follow, but often has not is alignment and focus. We see that teams’ and individuals’ attention is divided between too many initiatives and tasks, many of which do not align with the strategy.

Your Strategy Needs To Create Space Between You & Them

Aligning the company’s operational activities with its strategic objectives and integrating business and functional strategies is an operational advantage.

You need to connect company, business, and functional strategies to ensure the impact of your organisation’s execution. As a result, chief operating officers are responsible for aligning operations with multiple levels of strategy. This alignment is crucial for driving the organisation towards its long-term goals and ensuring operational efficiency across all levels.

Great Strategy Deserves
Great Execution

The Good Strategy Test

Execution Capability Test

As consultants, we often encounter organisations needing help aligning their departmental, company, and functional strategies. These strategies are often overlooked in favour of day-to-day, business-as-usual execution.

Recognising the importance of bridging the gap between these different levels of strategy, we work with the organisation to emphasise the critical role of department strategy in aligning company and functional strategies.

Reducing hierarchical decision-making and simplifying the strategy execution process leads to more consistent alignment and precise organisational communication. Reducing decision lag also speeds up execution. Good strategy alignment can help empower those closest to the work to make decisions.

Creating a strategy is only part of the challenge. Communicating strategic decisions so that everybody understands how they contribute is equally important. We often discover that employees do not clearly understand the organisation’s strategy.

This lack of accessibility to the strategy hinders alignment efforts. To address this, we need a clear and accessible operations framework that explicitly outlines the strategy, assigns responsibilities, and defines success metrics.

Through better guidance and collaborative efforts with the organisation’s leadership and teams, you will witness a transformation in how strategies are perceived and executed. The organisation will begin to appreciate the importance of department strategy as a bridge between company and functional strategies and take steps to reduce hierarchy, simplify execution, and make the strategy more accessible to all teams.

#2 Get Everyone Better At Measurement

As a Chief Operating Officer, you want to know how the business performs. However, relying solely on KPIs can hinder your ability to adapt and make a real impact.

Traditional data tends to reflect the past, giving us a limited and delayed view of our actions and what needs our attention. This reactive approach prevents us from making proactive changes that could drive our operations forward.

Questions Data Answers That Everyone Needs Access To

We recommend COOs leverage various analytics approaches to enhance the effectiveness of measurement.

Train Teams To Discover Outcome & Lever Relationships

By incorporating these advanced analytics methods into your approach, Chief Operating Officers can gain a more comprehensive and forward-looking understanding of their operations, enabling them to make informed decisions and drive impactful changes.

5 Core Use Cases

OKR

Increase share of spend from ICP customers

The best Key Results act on high confidence lead measures

#3 Use Proven Ways Of Driving Efficiency

As a team of consultants, we have found that prioritising transparency is crucial for any organisation. It sets the stage for clear communication and allows individuals to align their efforts with the business’s goals. By using a strategic framework, like OKRs, that emphasises transparency, organisations can eliminate redundancies and ensure everyone is working towards the same objectives.

Setting clear priorities is equally important. Once transparency is established, teams need clear direction on where to focus their efforts. Clear priorities bring focus and unity to team execution, ensuring that efforts are aligned with the organisation’s strategic goals. We often need to coach teams on using prioritization frameworks to enable teams to propose and select better goals and initiatives.

Coach Teams In How To Use Prioritization Frameworks

Additionally, we have observed that reviewing organisational structure is vital for effective operations. Organisational hierarchies are inevitable, but it’s essential for chief operating officers to consistently review and improve structures at each level of the organisation. This involves identifying and addressing unnecessary dependencies and areas of the business that may lag in development.

One approach is to create cross-functional teams to work on business problems and opportunities. By ensuring a team has all the skills necessary to achieve a business outcome we can minimise external dependencies and speed up execution.

Finally, it’s essential for Chief Operating Officers to ensure that their teams do not equate “more” work with “better” work. Quality and outcomes should always take precedence over quantity, and it’s the responsibility of leadership to communicate this to their teams effectively.

#4 Reverse Low Engagement

We have found that frameworks like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), team meetings, and personal development plans can significantly contribute to ensuring everyone cares about their work and the organisation’s objectives.

Why OKRs?

OKRs provide a clear and measurable way to set and communicate organisational goals. By aligning individuals and teams with the overall organisational goals, employees can better understand the impact of their work and feel a sense of purpose.

According to a study by Deloitte, “clearly defined goals that are written down and shared freely.” are the number 1 factor for job satisfaction. They went on to say, “Goals create alignment, clarity, and job satisfaction”

When teams are responsible for measurable goals as part of a bigger metrics picture, it’s easy for them to see how they contribute to the organisation’s objectives.

Regular team meetings allow everyone to discuss progress, challenges, and successes. These meetings reinforce the organisation’s mission and values, keeping employees engaged and connected to the bigger picture. Open, honest discussion helps ensure we work on the most valuable things.

Personal development plans help employees see a clear path for growth within the organisation. Employees who feel that their personal and professional growth is supported will likely be engaged and committed to the organisation’s long-term success.

The modern organisation values the manager as a coach. The COO can help to build that culture by emphasising coaching.

By integrating these frameworks and practices into the operations process, COOs can create a culture of accountability, transparency, and continuous improvement, ultimately fostering higher levels of engagement and commitment across the organisation.

#5 Reduce Operational Inefficiency

Ineffective operational practices are often characterised by redundancy and inefficiency, leading to suboptimal performance. This can be attributed to a lack of alignment within the organisation, resulting in duplicated efforts, conflicting priorities, and inefficient resource allocation.

A clear strategy and mature measurement model can help identify areas of overlap and effort. It should be easy to see where teams contribute and highlight duplication.

Operational redundancies prolong processes and consume additional resources, including time, budget, and energy. This ultimately hampers overall productivity and effectiveness. Inefficiencies lead to the need to address critical priorities, posing potential threats to the organisation’s security and stability.

To mitigate these issues, COOs must implement streamlined processes, foster clear communication, and establish team visions, values, measures and goals.

The COO can use data further to understand where the organisation slows down. They help identify bottlenecks and points where decisions lag. This allows them to focus their efficiency efforts on the biggest opportunities.

Fostering a culture of accountability and transparency will mitigate operational redundancies by ensuring that resources are allocated effectively and aligned with organisational priorities.

#6 Develop Interpersonal Skills

Improving interpersonal skills is critical for Chief Operations Officers (COOs) seeking to mitigate common failure points and foster effective communication. Proficiency in this area enables COOs to build rapport, understand diverse perspectives, and enhance their leadership acumen, thereby driving positive outcomes within their organisations.

Furthermore, adept interpersonal skills empower COOs to navigate intricate organisational dynamics, cultivate collaboration, and articulate their vision and strategies to stakeholders at all levels. This, in turn, leads to streamlined project implementations, heightened team performance, and enhanced alignment between technology endeavours and business objectives.

#7 Talent Spotting

In addition to honing interpersonal skills, identifying and nurturing emerging talent within the organisation can play a pivotal role in addressing COO failure points.

Aligning Strategy, OKRs & People

Companies can establish a robust leadership pipeline by pinpointing individuals with high potential and providing them with requisite support and opportunities. This approach mitigates the risks associated with COO turnover and fosters a culture of innovation and growth within the organisation.

#8 Accelerate Decision-Making & Learning

Increasing decision-making speed and bolstering confidence in decisions’ impact can significantly contribute to overcoming common COO failure points. By making prompt and assured decisions, COOs can more effectively respond to changes in the business environment, technology landscape, and customer needs.

Train Experimentation Skills In Every Team

“How can we test this quickly, easily and cheaply?

We could categorise some customer accounts manually, create a hard-coded test page, and do an A/B split. We need over X customers for the test to be significant. The result should be available in under 30 days.”

When coupled with the ability to define, run, and close experiments, this can result in heightened agility, improved alignment with business objectives, and overall performance.

#9 Remove Complex, Outdated Operating Frameworks

Many COOs are grappling with complex or outdated frameworks, such as traditional hierarchical models, that no longer align with the demands of the modern business world. It’s time to embrace more contemporary frameworks, such as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), designed to foster alignment, focus, and agility across the organisation.

In an era that demands cross-functionality, growth, and agility, sticking to traditional models can hinder rather than facilitate progress. These outdated frameworks often fail to effectively align company vision, strategy, execution, and culture, leading to a cumbersome strategy execution process that borders on paralysis by analysis. Leveraging tools such as KPI trees and OKRs is imperative to establish clear, measurable key performance indicators that align with the company’s objectives.

Embed OKR Skills At Every Level

Objective

Verb

Systemize the lead generation process so we are less reliant on hiring new reps and can scale to meet our growth targets

What Why

Chief Operating Officers must implement frameworks tailored to how businesses operate today, not 20 years ago. Embracing an experimentation mindset is crucial, encouraging a culture of innovation, learning, and adaptation. It’s time to foster a new paradigm for operations that is agile, responsive, and in tune with the ever-evolving needs of the business world.

#10 Increase Empowerment

We frequently observe that identifying areas for collaboration is crucial for enhancing team engagement and productivity. When teams are involved in creating their own goals and empowered to decide how to achieve them, they are more likely to stay engaged and deliver the required outcomes.

It is essential for chief operating officers to support open collaboration, whether setting priorities, determining the execution path, or assigning responsibility. This approach generates more ideas, enhances collective buy-in to strategy on the functional level, and reduces the number of dependencies, delays, and defects.

Moreover, we have identified that inefficiency has significant consequences for businesses beyond simple outputs. Employee morale suffers when work is inevitably wasted due to poor management processes. It is imperative for chief operating officers to ensure that the management in place consists of necessary decision-makers, avoiding unnecessary complications in execution.

Our research has also shown that employees who feel responsible and accountable for their work are more engaged. Therefore, we recommend that chief operating officers instil a framework that enables autonomy, giving employees more power over when and how they work. Not only does this help employees be more fulfilled with their work, but it also leads to greater happiness, significantly impacting employee engagement. Embracing flexible, autonomous teams will be a winning strategy in the future of work.

#11 Be Dynamic & Future Focused

Our experiences and observations have highlighted the importance of maintaining a growth mindset. Our advice to COOs is that it is crucial to demonstrate the benefits of success and failure and encourage a culture that embraces both. A growth-minded leader fosters an environment where teams operate without fear and risk aversion, expanding the potential for positive outcomes. A growth mindset enables proactive decision-making when coupled with forward-thinking goals.

Align Metrics, Values & Guiding Principles

Value: Customer Responsiveness

Keeping the strategic vision at the forefront is essential. Corporate strategy should be treated as something other than a static checklist item but as a guiding force for operational decision-making within departments and functions. Amidst the intricacies of day-to-day operations, it is easy for even the most adept chief operating officer to lose focus and become reactive. The power of alignment and proactivity can be reinstated by aligning operational activities with the overarching strategic vision, informed by pertinent data.

Moreover, we advocate the use of outcome-based goal setting. While retrospective data measurements such as KPIs have their place, we assert that they should not be the focal point of strategic decision-making for chief operating officers, as they are inherently backwards-looking. While KPIs provide insight into past occurrences, taking control of operations requires focusing on what will happen in the future. This shift is only possible when goals are structured around desired, future-based, measurable outcomes.

#12 Utilize Cohesive Management Systems

With the role requirements emphasizing strategy, KPI, goals, processes, people, and culture, the COO needs a cohesive management system that brings these overlapping areas together.

ZOKRI is the only platform that supports strategy, KPI trees and scorecards, OKRs and related initiatives, values and guiding principles, personal goals, and development planning. Multiplying the resources of every team and the productivity of every individual.

Strategy & OKR Maturity Multiplies Revenue

An Operating Model For 2024 & Beyond

As strategy and OKR consultants, we’ve learned that focusing on outcomes is crucial for success. Traditional frameworks often prioritise quantity and production, but modern frameworks emphasise the importance of measurable impact supported by data.

Chief Operating Officers are vital in pushing operations strategy into the new era. It’s essential to evolve beyond outdated frameworks and redefine success. Rather than focusing on bureaucracy and volume of work, the emphasis should be on achieving measurable outcomes.

Connecting strategy and execution is a common challenge for modern businesses. More clarity often needs to be between creating a data-driven strategy and perfecting day-to-day operations. Chief operating officers are strategically positioned to bridge this gap. By using goal-setting frameworks, strategic objectives can guide teams, while measurable results inform progress.

Empowerment over control is a critical principle in modern operating models. Instead of micromanaging decision-making processes, leadership should empower teams to make decisions. Chief operating officers can shift their organisations to a better operating model for 2025 and beyond by aligning teams through corporate strategy and flattening the decision-making hierarchy.

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Matt Roberts

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