COO Leadership Advice

In McKinsey & Company’s article “Stepping up: What COOs will need to succeed in 2023 and beyond,” author Darryl Piasecki explains why the chief operating officer role is becoming more visible, more strategic, and more central to enterprise resilience. Published on October 31, 2022, the article argues that the COO leadership role is evolving beyond day-to-day operations to encompass technology-driven growth, cross-functional leadership, board engagement, talent development, and value creation.

Executive summary for business leaders

Overarching theme: The COO is no longer just the executive who keeps the business running. McKinsey frames the modern COO leadership role as an internal enterprise leader who helps translate strategy into execution, builds resilience amid disruption, collaborates across functions, strengthens operational excellence, and develops the talent required for long-term performance. The article notes that the COO leadership role rebounded from 32 percent of leading companies in 2018 to 40 percent in 2022, while nearly 27 percent of Fortune 500 and S&P 500 CEOs in 2021 had been promoted from COO roles.

Major takeaways

1. COOs are making a comeback.
McKinsey notes that the COO role declined in visibility during the early 2000s, but has returned as companies face more disruption, complexity, and execution risk. As CEOs increasingly focus externally, COOs are often expected to provide internal leadership and operational direction.

2. Future COOs must anticipate change faster.
The article argues that stable five- or ten-year operating plans are less realistic in today’s environment. COOs need stronger external awareness, including market trends, regulatory shifts, innovation signals, academic and talent trends, and potential disruptions that could affect operations.

3. Cross-functional collaboration is now essential.
McKinsey emphasizes that COOs must work closely with sales, marketing, commercial teams, and other functions to understand the customer value proposition and ensure operations can deliver on it. This is especially important for customer journeys that cut across multiple parts of the organization.

4. COOs need stronger board engagement.
The article encourages COOs to move beyond scripted board presentations and use board interactions for focused problem-solving. McKinsey also notes that heads of operations should have stature comparable to other senior leaders, given the complexity and enterprise-wide impact of the role.

5. Operational excellence must be both cultural and technological.
McKinsey argues that supply chain disruption, geopolitical volatility, environmental pressures, and workplace changes require COOs to define excellence by outcomes. That may include stakeholder requirements, customer service, campaign execution, agility, learning from incidents, and technology-enabled performance.

6. Talent management is a COO-level priority.
The article highlights the need for COOs to create strong career paths in operations, address skills gaps, build diverse teams, walk the shop floor, engage employees at every level, and ensure the right people are matched to the right work.

Leadership talking points

The COO should be viewed as a strategic execution leader, not simply the person responsible for operational maintenance.

A modern COO must connect strategy, operations, technology, talent, risk, customer experience, and board-level priorities.

Operations should not wait for other functions to define the agenda; COOs should create forums that improve collaboration with commercial, marketing, finance, technology, and talent leaders.

Operational excellence should be measured by enterprise outcomes, not just efficiency metrics.

The COO role can be a pathway to CEO readiness because it requires enterprise perspective, execution discipline, stakeholder management, and resilience leadership.

Reflection questions

Is our COO spending enough time on long-term strategic planning, or too much time on day-to-day firefighting?

Do our operations leaders have enough external market exposure to anticipate disruption before it reaches the business?

Are operations, sales, marketing, finance, technology, and HR working from a shared view of customer value and business priorities?

Does the board hear from operations as a strategic function, or only as a reporting function?

Are we developing operations talent in a way that makes the function attractive, future-ready, and resilient?

Potential action items

Create a COO agenda that clearly defines the role’s priorities across strategy execution, resilience, talent, technology, stakeholder engagement, and operational performance.

Build a disruption-sensing routine that tracks market, regulatory, supply chain, technology, workforce, and customer signals.

Establish cross-functional operating forums with sales, marketing, finance, technology, and HR to align demand, capacity, customer experience, investment, and talent needs.

Upgrade board engagement by shifting from status reporting to strategic problem-solving sessions on operational risk, resilience, productivity, and growth enablement.

Assess operational excellence through outcome-based metrics such as customer service, throughput, reliability, safety, agility, employee capability, and stakeholder impact.

Launch a talent baseline review to identify critical skill gaps, succession risks, frontline leadership needs, and opportunities to strengthen the operations career path.

Recommended similar articles

Delivering the strategy: The COO agenda — A strong next read for COOs who need to define their role, clarify what drives value, and focus on “COO-only” priorities such as vision, execution, stakeholder engagement, organization, talent, and personal operating model.

What is the COO agenda? — A concise McKinsey blog post that helps COOs answer two foundational questions: why the organization has a COO and why this specific leader is in the role.

The COO agenda: Vision, plan, and execution — Useful for leaders who need to translate business strategy into an operational vision, execution plan, and performance cadence.

The COO agenda: Stakeholder engagement — A practical companion article on how COOs should work with CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CIOs, boards, regulators, suppliers, labor groups, investors, and customers.

Productivity at the core: How COOs deliver strategy — A newer McKinsey article on how COOs can use productivity as a strategic lever for survival, growth, ROIC, innovation, and resilience.

COO Excellence: The next generation of leadership — A McKinsey podcast discussing how COOs are becoming strategic partners to CEOs and how the role is evolving as a pathway to future CEO leadership.