An operations manager who assumes the role of executor is primarily responsible for implementing the strategies of the senior management team. Finally, the enormous variation in the roles and responsibilities of chief operating officers clearly implies that there is no standard set of “great chief operating officer” attributes. This makes it difficult for executive recruiters to find suitable candidates (as one of the authors can attest). Most importantly, it hampers CEOs and boards of directors, who must choose among candidates.
The existence of seven different roles suggests at least seven different sets of attributes, in addition to the basic and infinitely varying requirement that there be personal chemistry between the chief operating officer and the current chief executive officer. This approach to resource allocation must be data-based and pragmatic, similar to an investor's approach. Like an investor, the chief operating officer usually acts as a person who evaluates ideas, not as the one who presents them. Considering the deep 360-degree contextual knowledge of an organization that has an operations director and, ideally, the absence of bias towards projects, you can be a good judge of what should be increased or reduced in terms of resource allocation.
According to the classic concept of the 20th century, the chief operating officer is the person responsible for the processes of a company's daily operations. A word that makes me think about bureaucracy is that processes can have a negative connotation; in today's reality, especially in dynamic technology companies, they can slow down the company and quickly demotivate employees. Therefore, the job of a 21st-century chief operating officer is to protect the simplicity, speed, transparency in the exchange of contexts and the mobility of an organization against the natural tendency to bureaucratize. Lime is a smaller company than Target and Facebook, so its chief operating officer, Joe Kraus, has only three direct reports, all of whom are the heads of their respective departments.
Kraus reports directly to CEO Wayne Ting. The executor is what most people think of when they hear the term chief operating officer. The executors oversee the daily operations of the company, while the CEO focuses on the company's vision, public relations and larger-scale decisions. In this role, the chief operating officer can help streamline the CEO's responsibilities by minimizing his need to closely monitor the internal functioning of the company.
