Why the Chief Operating Officer Role Demands Strategic Leadership Not Just Execution

The COO Role Is Changing—and It’s Reshaping the C-Suite

The chief operating officer position has reached an inflection point. According to McKinsey research published in its Operations Practice series, COOs now occupy one of the most consequential yet least understood roles in the C-suite. The findings reveal a striking statistic: 40% of newly appointed CEOs in 2024 held COO or president titles immediately before their promotion. This signals a profound shift in how organizations view operational leadership—and suggests we need to reconsider what excellence looks like in this role.

McKinsey Partners Darryl Piasecki and Tony Gambell argue that COOs have evolved from traditional operators focused on efficiency and execution into strategic partners who sit at the intersection of vision, execution, and CEO collaboration. Their research, gathered through extensive interviews with dozens of COOs across industries, identifies a gap in leadership literature: while abundant resources exist for CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite roles, the COO position has remained relatively unexplored despite its increasing strategic importance.

The Strategic Imperative Behind COO Evolution

The transformation of the COO role stems from a shift in how CEOs allocate their time and attention. Modern chief executives face relentless external pressures from media cycles, social movements, activist investors, and regulatory scrutiny. This external focus creates an internal vacuum that COOs must fill—but not simply by keeping operations running smoothly.

Piasecki articulates the core premise succinctly: operations delivers strategy. While other functions provide valuable support, operations ultimately produces the goods or services that bring business strategy to life. This reality positions COOs as the primary engine for strategic execution, but only if they approach the role with appropriate strategic sophistication.

The research identifies five pillars that constitute the modern COO agenda:

• Defining a clear vision
• Building executable plans
• Fostering cross-functional relationships
• Focusing on organization and talent
• Establishing a personal operating model

Each pillar represents a departure from traditional operational management, requiring COOs to develop capabilities that extend beyond technical expertise.

Vision as the Foundation

The emphasis on vision setting challenges conventional wisdom about operational leadership. Historically, operations leaders received strategic direction from above and focused on efficient execution. The new paradigm requires COOs to translate enterprise strategy into an operational vision that provides clear direction while remaining measurable and actionable.

Piasecki shares a cautionary example: a company improved individual site performance until every location showed green on dashboards—only to discover company-wide operating performance remained in the red. The link between overall strategy and ground-level initiatives had broken down, resulting in wasted effort despite good intentions.

Creating effective operational vision requires understanding business context, competitive dynamics, and strategic priorities. It also demands clarity on role definition and personal contribution. COOs should be able to answer:

• Why does this organization have a COO role?
• What purpose does it serve?
• Why am I specifically in this position?
• What unique strengths do I bring?

The Complexity of Competing Priorities

One of the most useful insights from the research is the set of contradictions COOs must navigate. Gambell describes COOs facing seemingly incompatible demands: driving growth while cutting costs, running business-as-usual operations while leading merger integration, or improving service levels while reducing expenditure.

These tensions reflect the reality that operations sits at the intersection of multiple stakeholder interests. Excellence requires discerning what matters most in a given context—rather than attempting to optimize everything simultaneously.

Piasecki illustrates this with contrasting examples:

• In an organization with excess infrastructure capacity, the strategic imperative was growth, so service excellence took priority over cost reduction.
• In another organization needing higher throughput without time or capital for new assets, the COO had to maximize existing utilization creatively.

In both cases, reflexive cost-cutting would have undermined strategic objectives. Effective COOs align operational priorities with strategy—even when that requires difficult conversations with peers, the CEO, or the board.

From Star Player to Head Coach

The research offers a compelling metaphor: COOs must evolve from star players to head coaches. Operational leaders often earn the role through technical excellence and hands-on execution. Success as a COO requires stepping back from direct involvement to focus on issues only the COO can address.

One COO described this transition as “leaning into your left hand”—developing proficiency outside core expertise. That might include:

• Building business cases for major investments with the CEO or CFO
• Understanding technology architecture to engage the CIO during ERP implementation
• Improving talent assessment to build high-performing teams

This goes beyond new skills: COOs must learn the languages of their peers across the C-suite. Operational constraints often lie outside the operations function, making relationships with the CIO, CFO, CHRO, and CMO essential for removing barriers and creating degrees of freedom.

The Partnership Imperative

The CEO–COO relationship emerges as a central determinant of success. Gambell emphasizes that COOs must be “tied in with the CEO on everything,” because the CEO defines strategy while the COO delivers it. That interdependence creates both opportunity and risk.

Supply chain strategies, for example, take time to shift, yet stakeholders expect continuous performance. Those expectations can strain the partnership unless both parties maintain realism and communicate openly.

The research leaves some partnership complexities underexplored, including succession dynamics, authority boundaries, and credit allocation. It also doesn’t fully address what COOs should do when the CEO’s direction appears operationally infeasible. These scenarios matter for practitioners applying the framework in real-world conditions.

Organizational Design and Talent

The fifth pillar focuses on organization and talent—essential because even the best vision and plan require capable people to execute. The research suggests COOs assess team members across three dimensions:

• Capability
• Capacity
• Will to deliver

This structure is useful, though it leaves open practical dilemmas COOs face daily: when to coach vs. replace, how to balance loyalty with performance needs, and how to address persistent capability gaps.

The research also stresses delegation. Demand will always exceed a COO’s time; prioritization is non-negotiable. One helpful filter is identifying “COO-only topics”—areas where the COO is uniquely positioned to act—and delegating everything else. Done well, delegation builds leadership capacity in the team and frees the COO to focus on cross-functional constraints and strategic execution.

The Personal Operating Model

The final pillar is the COO’s personal operating model: how they manage time, attention, leadership approach, and stakeholder interactions. This model determines whether COOs can sustain the role’s demands while maintaining effectiveness and avoiding burnout.

The research suggests COOs benefit from sounding boards and external perspectives, especially during role transitions or shifts in strategic context. COOs often have fewer internal peers who truly understand the unique combination of responsibilities they carry.

When asked what would help most, COOs consistently cite the value of peer communities—networks where they can share experiences with others facing similar issues. Compared with CEO, CFO, and CMO communities, COO networks remain underdeveloped—possibly because the COO role varies widely by organization and has historically been seen as primarily technical rather than strategic.

Critical Perspectives and Limitations

While the McKinsey research is valuable, several aspects merit scrutiny:

• Not every company needs a strategic COO. Some stable industries may benefit more from a COO who drives disciplined execution and continuous improvement than from a broad enterprise partner model.
• Time allocation and role boundaries become harder. If COOs spend more time on boards, peers, and strategic initiatives, companies need depth beneath them to maintain frontline operational connection.
• Role clarity is often absent in practice. Many COOs inherit ambiguous mandates, overlapping authority, and CEOs who retain direct operational relationships.
• A single framework may not fit all contexts. Turnarounds, high-growth scaling, and mature optimization environments demand materially different COO models.
• Failure modes are under-discussed. More cautionary cases would help leaders recognize and avoid common pitfalls (misalignment, weak relationships, underperformance, or talent gaps).

The CEO Pipeline Question

The statistic that 40% of new CEOs in 2024 previously held COO roles deserves deeper examination. It suggests boards increasingly see operational leadership as strong preparation for the top job, but the research doesn’t fully explain why—or whether it correlates with better CEO performance.

Possible explanations include rising operational complexity, greater board emphasis on execution, and the COO’s cross-functional exposure. Another interpretation is selection: organizations may place high-potential CEO successors into COO roles as a proving ground. If so, defining COO excellence independently of CEO preparation becomes more complicated.

Open questions remain:

• Do former COOs outperform other CEO pathways?
• How does operations experience shape strategic decision-making?
• When does the COO role become a succession instrument rather than an operational mandate?

Practical Implications for Organizations

Despite limitations, the research offers actionable guidance for organizations seeking to maximize COO effectiveness:

• Define the COO mandate with specificity. What gaps does the COO fill? Which strategic priorities require operational leadership? What does success look like?
• Design the CEO–COO working model intentionally. Establish decision rights, communication rhythms, and shared expectations about time horizons and trade-offs.
• Support COO development differently. Facilitate peer networks, targeted executive coaching, and strategic exposure—not just operational responsibility.
• Align succession planning with real capability building. If the COO is a CEO contender, ensure they gain experience in governance, capital allocation, stakeholder management, and enterprise strategy.

Looking Forward

The McKinsey research on COO excellence arrives at an opportune moment. As complexity rises and stakeholder demands multiply, the point where strategy meets operations becomes decisive. COOs who can navigate that intersection effectively create outsized value; those who remain anchored in a purely traditional operator model risk falling behind.

Still, leaders should resist assuming one model fits all. The best approach is to match operational leadership design to the organization’s needs, industry dynamics, and strategic priorities. COOs who assess those realities honestly—and adapt their leadership accordingly—will have the greatest impact, whether as strategic partners, execution specialists, or a tailored hybrid.

What is clear is that the COO role has moved from the organizational shadows into strategic prominence. The challenge now is ensuring the mandate, capabilities, and support systems evolve with it—so operations can consistently translate strategy into results.