This creates a snowball effect that sets the tone for the whole journey. Yet sometimes, it’s hard to occupy a new C-position, especially if you are switching companies, roles, or both.
According to Gallup, it takes 12 months for a person to reach their peak performance potential. Unfortunately for a person in a C-suite of a startup, this timing does not correspond well to the expectations from the position. The situation is especially challenging for COOs occupying a role that is often vaguely defined.
Below, I provide 4 ideas on how to start strong wearing your 1st pair of COO shoes. These ideas are based on my personal experience. I got lucky, as I was able to organically transition from my previous role of running revenue and business development streams into a COO role by tackling more and more challenges in the company.
This COO playbook should help with ideas on how to overcome the first intimidating months in a new role.
Onboard horizontally
The pace and intensity of the modern business world requires companies to specialise in order to maintain competitiveness. So do the employees of companies. However, there is a catch. According to David Epstein’s book Range, “overspecialisation can lead to collective tragedy, even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.” The solution is to counterbalanced hyper-focus with breadth and interdisciplinary insights.
A COO is probably the only non-CEO executive whose job is to operate across all the functions and products in the company to bring this important “breadth” into the executive room. Onboarding is a great place to start exploring the narrative of the organisation as a whole.
Mingle between departments and levels in the company, get in listening mode, and try to understand how the company works from different perspectives. There is a huge upside to being a person who can see all the pieces together.
Build a robust financial model
A good manager needs to understand the company not only from a narrative perspective, but also from a numerical perspective. What are the key dependencies of the business? What are the key drivers of our business model? What is the sensitivity between the key drivers? Building financial models is a great way to truly feel the company.
A solid granular financial model should help put into numerical perspective what a 10% increase in price will do to the conversion rates, what will happen if we increase the user acquisition budget by 20%, and if we decide to focus on growing repeatable purchases through discounts – how much it will impact the profit?
Building the financial model will require you to meet a lot of people in the company and analyse past data – an important source of info that is frequently ignored by newcomers.
Launch a dynamic, goal-setting framework for the company
There are many out there, but my favourite is the Objective and Key Results framework (OKR). This framework is a cascade of measurable goals in which a high-level objective is broken down into a constellation of sub-objectives, which are supported by key initiatives and projects.
OKRs enable to atomise every piece of the company and tie it all together in a structured way to create business value. Used by Google, Intuit, and others, the framework is an extremely powerful tool for building alignment and driving engagement at all levels of the company.
According to a recent Gallup’s study, highly engaged business units deliver 10% higher customer ratings and a 20% increase in profitability. Goal-setting frameworks are hard to implement and even harder to maintain, but given the potential benefits, managing the goals of an organisation is a great project for a COO to own.