The COO Playbook: When a CEO Needs a Chief Operating Officer

A chief operating officer runs the day-to-day work of delivering what the business sells, so the CEO can spend more time on where it is going. That makes it one of the most consequential hires a CEO makes, and one of the least defined. Two companies can both have a COO and expect very different things from the person in the seat.

This playbook is written for the CEO or board deciding whether to create the role and how to fill it. It explains what the role can cover, the reasons companies create it, how to tell whether you need one yet, and the choice between promoting from within and searching outside. It ends with a one-page mandate, questions for judging candidates and a 90-day plan.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

What a COO is responsible for

In the simplest terms, a COO turns the goals the CEO and board set into the day-to-day work that delivers them: how products or services reach customers, how teams coordinate, and how resources are used. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in a new tab) lists COOs among the chief executives who manage a specific part of an organization, and notes that their duties differ depending on the departments they oversee.

That last point is the one that matters for a hiring decision. In one company the COO might run manufacturing and the supply chain; in another, customer delivery, people operations and systems; in a third, the COO might be the CEO's partner across the whole business. Before you write a job description, list what the role will own and what stays with the CEO, the CFO and the other leaders. The same goes for seniority: there is no fixed ranking between a COO and a CFO, and it depends on how the company is organized and what each role owns.

The role is common at large companies but far from universal. Crist|Kolder Associates' 2026 mid-year Volatility Report (opens in a new tab) follows the companies in the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500. In its data to July 31, 2026, it counted 254 sitting COOs across 665 companies. It puts average COO prevalence from 2016 to 2026 at 35.8%, or about one in three companies, and counts only executives with the title "Chief Operating Officer", so presidents who run operations under another title are not included.

Seven reasons companies create the role

In a May 2006 Harvard Business Review (opens in a new tab) article, Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles reported on in-depth conversations with dozens of executives who had held the position and CEOs who had worked with COOs. They found that the job varies with the reason it was created, and identified seven reasons. The reasons can overlap: the authors note that one COO may play two of these roles at once. Their conclusion was that there is "no standard set of great COO attributes", which is why the reason has to come first.

The same study found that the most important factor in a COO's success was trust between the CEO and the COO. In the authors' account, the COO has to support the CEO's vision, keep ego in check and execute well, while the CEO has to "grant real authority and decision rights" and not hold back the COO's career. A CEO who is not ready to hand over decisions is not ready to hire a COO.

Do you need a COO yet?

A COO is worth hiring when the operating work has grown beyond what the CEO can run alongside strategy, investors, customers and the board, and when the company needs one leader to own coordination across several functions. If the strain sits in one function, a strong head of that function may solve it. If you need experienced operating leadership for a defined period, a fractional or interim COO is an option to compare before a permanent search.

The harder test is whether you understand your own operations well enough to define the role. In an interview in May 2025 I described a mistake founders make again and again: "trying to hire an ops person without learning the ops things yourself." (opens in a new tab) Early in one of my companies, I had a project manager trying to act as COO who didn't really know how to build systems. What fixed it was studying what the company actually needed from its systems and building rough foundational ones myself. They were messy, but they did the job, and my next COO or operations hire worked because I knew exactly what I was looking for. That was my route. In the same interview I said some leaders are better at finding talent, and for them it can work differently.

At a larger company the same principle applies at a different scale. Before you hire a COO, you should be able to describe how the business runs today, where it breaks and what good would look like, well enough to judge the candidates. If the operating model needs to be built or rebuilt, make that part of the mandate and assess candidates for that work. If you cannot describe the problem yet, start there, or bring in help to map it before you hire.

Promote from within or search outside?

In Crist|Kolder's 2026 report, 84.6% of the COO hires made in 2026 up to July 31 were internal promotions, out of 26 COO changes. The COO or president seat is also a common route to the top job. Of the 674 sitting CEOs the report tracks, about 44% moved directly from a COO or president role, a category that combines the two titles: 41.3% from inside the company and 2.7% from outside.

Two things follow for a CEO. First, assess internal candidates against the same written mandate as anyone from outside, so the decision rests on the job and not on familiarity. Second, if the role is partly a succession test, decide in advance whether the candidate will be told and what would make them the next CEO. An undeclared succession plan makes the trust the role depends on harder to build.

An outside search makes sense when no internal candidate can meet the mandate, including the experience needed for a major change in how the company operates. A separate guide compares COO and operations recruiters that run those searches.

Write the COO mandate before the search

Write one page before the first conversation with a candidate or a search firm. It forces the decisions the table above describes, and it gives every candidate, internal or external, the same brief. In the HBR interviews, executives stressed that the split of responsibilities between CEO and COO has to be settled at the start of the relationship, even though they did not agree on what each job should include.

How to judge COO candidates

A COO's experience is easy to describe and hard to test. Ask candidates to talk through operations they have built or rebuilt, and ask what they changed first and why. The questions below also probe for habits that work against a COO: controlling every detail, losing sight of long-term plans, poor communication and neglecting the people side of the business.

Ask the strongest candidates to review a real operating problem you share under a confidentiality agreement and present how they would approach it. Use it to assess how they diagnose, communicate and set priorities against the mandate.

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Across the selection research reviewed by Sackett and colleagues, structured interviews had higher corrected mean validity than unstructured interviews. These are correlations with job performance, not percentages of successful hires or a forecast for this particular executive role.doi.org (opens in a new tab)

Plan the first 90 days

The mandate's line on success at 90 days is the part to write most carefully. In a 2020 episode on making a new hire succeed, I described writing down what success at 90 days looks like before the person is hired, or at the latest as they start, together with the stages of the hand-over. My example then was someone completely owning the operations for one segment of the business. For a COO, adapt the stages to the mandate: agree what the new leader needs to learn, when decision rights pass to them and how progress will be reviewed. If you are the incoming COO, ask your CEO for this document in your first week.

1. 1

   Learn the operation before changing it

   The COO spends the first weeks with the leaders and teams they will run, reading the processes, metrics and problems already documented, and meeting the customers and partners the operation serves.

2. 2

   Take ownership with the CEO close by

   The COO starts making decisions in their area while the CEO is still involved, so both can see where their judgment differs and settle it early.

3. 3

   Run the area with weekly check-ins

   The CEO steps back from day-to-day decisions. The two meet weekly to review progress against the 90-day definition of success.

4. 4

   Report on results

   The COO owns the area and reports on the agreed metrics. The 90-day review is the point to confirm the mandate, or change it.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

If you wrote the mandate today, which of the seven reasons would you give for the role, and could you say what success looks like at 90 days?