Chief Operating Officer: the role, the group view

The chief operating officer is the most variable seat in the C-suite. Two companies of the same size can run the role in opposite ways: one treats the COO as the executive who runs everything beneath the chief executive, the other does without the seat entirely and distributes its work across the leadership team. The Institute of Directors, in its guidance on the role of the chief operating officer, frames it as the executive responsible for day-to-day operations; in practice the remit stretches or shrinks to fit whatever the chief executive is not doing. For a board, that variability is the whole point: the COO is defined less by a fixed job description than by the gap it is hired to close.

What the chief operating officer actually owns

The COO began as the executive who ran operations while the chief executive ran the company, and that division still describes the centre of the role. A COO owns the execution of strategy: the board and the chief executive set direction, and the COO is accountable for turning it into operating reality across the organisation. Where the CEO works on the company, the COO works in it. The seat oversees the day-to-day operations, the operating model, the organisational structure, and usually the functions that convert plans into output: operations, supply chain, technology delivery, and sometimes the commercial engine.

The reach varies, but the accountability is consistent. The COO is the executive a board holds responsible when the strategy is sound and the execution is not. In most large organisations the COO will oversee the operating functions, set the cadence of operational and strategic planning, and own the operational excellence agenda that decides whether the company does what it says it will do. The title sits squarely in the C-suite, alongside the chief financial officer, the chief technology officer and the head of human resources; but unlike those seats, whose remits are defined by a discipline, the COO's remit is defined by subtraction. It is whatever running the business requires that the chief executive has chosen not to hold directly.

That is why the COO role resists a single job description. The role in an asset-heavy industrial group, where it centres on plants, logistics and operational efficiency, looks almost nothing like the role in a services business, where it centres on delivery and the organisational design beneath it. The constant is not the content of the work but the position. The COO is the executive who makes the operating machine run, so that the chief executive can spend their attention on capital, business strategy and the outside world.

The COO and the CEO: deputy, partner, successor

The defining variable in the role is the relationship with the CEO. More than any other seat, the COO exists in relation to a single person, and the same title can mean deputy, partner or successor depending on how the chief executive officer chooses to use it. This is the question a board should examine most closely, because the COO and CEO pairing determines whether the structure adds capacity or merely adds cost.

At its strongest, the arrangement is a genuine division of labour: the CEO holds strategy, capital and external relationships, and the COO holds internal execution as the de facto second in command. At its weakest, it is a title handed to a senior executive to retain them, with no real remit behind it. Boards see both, and the difference is rarely visible from the org chart alone.

The succession dimension is the one boards most often underweight. The COO is the most common internal route to the chief executive's office, because the seat is where an executive proves they can run the whole machine rather than one part of it. A COO who has carried real operating accountability is, in effect, a CEO candidate already in the building, tested against the actual business. That makes the appointment a succession decision whether the board intends it or not. Hiring a COO with no view on whether the person could become the next CEO is a missed opportunity at best; at worst it sets up a damaging contest two years out. The link between the operating seat and CEO succession is direct, and a board that ignores it is choosing not to use one of the few succession levers it controls.

Why some groups run a COO and some deliberately do not

Not every company should have a COO, and the decision to operate without a COO is often the more deliberate one. Plenty of well-run businesses carry no COO at all; the chief executive holds operations directly, supported by strong functional heads, and the work the role would absorb is distributed across the executive team. The choice between the two models is a structural board decision, not a matter of company size.

A COO earns its place when the operating load on the chief executive has grown past what one person can hold while still doing the strategic and external work only a CEO can do. The signals are concrete: rapid growth, an acquisition the business has to integrate, geographic expansion, or a chief executive whose strengths sit clearly on one side of the company-and-business divide and need complementing on the other. A founder who is strong on vision and indifferent to operations is a textbook case for a COO; so is a business that has outgrown the chief executive's ability to be across every operating decision.

The case against is just as real. A COO inserted without a clear remit blurs accountability, slows decisions, and creates a layer the organisation has to route around. Some chief executives are, in effect, their own COO and lose more than they gain by handing the function to someone else. The discipline for a board is to be honest about which situation it is in, because both running a COO and operating without a COO are defensible. Running one that is badly defined is not.

The group chief operating officer: the seat that holds a diversified group together

Everything above describes the COO inside a single company. The seat changes character when the company is a group. A holding company that owns several operating businesses faces a problem a single business does not: the operating companies each have their own management, their own markets and their own systems, and left alone they drift into a portfolio of unconnected entities that happen to share a shareholder. The group chief operating officer is the seat built to solve that.

A group COO is an integrator across verticals. Where a single-company COO runs one operating machine, the group COO sets the standard by which several machines are run: the operating model, the performance cadence, the shared functions and the governance that let a holding company behave as something more than a financial owner. The role is rarely about running the businesses day to day, because the operating-company chief executives do that. It is about making sure the group as a whole captures the value that justifies holding the businesses together rather than spinning them off. In most groups that carry the seat, the group COO is also the de facto deputy to the group chief executive, the executive who holds the operating reality of the whole portfolio while the group CEO works on capital allocation and strategy.

Figure 01FIG-01

The COO and the group COO: two different seats

Seat	Owns	Reports to	Measured on
Chief operating officer	Execution of strategy and day-to-day operations inside a single business	The chief executive	Whether the company does what its strategy requires
Group chief operating officer	The operating model, performance cadence and governance across multiple operating companies	The group chief executive	Whether the group captures the value of being held together

The distinction matters most in the Gulf, because GCC group holdings are where the seat is being created fastest. The region's large family groups and sovereign-backed platforms have grown into genuine conglomerates, often a dozen or more operating companies across unrelated sectors, and the governance has had to catch up with the scale. A family group that ran on the founder's personal oversight cannot run twenty businesses the same way; at that point the group COO becomes the mechanism by which the centre holds. JOH built three group functional leaders into a diversified Saudi industrial holding of eight operating companies on a thirteen-week timetable, precisely because the group had outgrown the ability of any single principal to integrate it by hand. The same logic recurs across the region's group holdings: as the portfolio grows, the integrator seat moves from optional to structural.

Governance across multiple operating companies is the harder half of the job, and the one boards see least clearly. A group board has to know whether the executive layer inside each operating company is performing to the standard the centre expects, and it has to know this continuously, not once a year at a board offsite. That visibility is part of what the group COO exists to provide upward, and it is where platforms such as Board Pulse are built to give a group chair and a group CEO a continuous read on the executive layer across entities. Adam Malouf, a chief operating officer in the group holdings world and a guest on episode 13 of The Leadership Blueprint, discussed exactly this integrator challenge: holding a cross-border group together as a single operating system rather than a collection of businesses that happen to share an owner.

The COO is the only seat in the C-suite defined by subtraction: it is whatever running the business requires that the chief executive has chosen not to hold. In a single company that makes it the hardest role to scope. In a group it makes the COO the executive who decides whether a holding company is one business or merely several with a shared shareholder.

Chief of staff and COO: not the same seat

A short disambiguation, because the two roles are increasingly confused. The chief of staff vs COO question comes up most in groups professionalising their executive office, and the answer is that they are not the same seat. A COO owns operating accountability: budgets, functions, results. A chief of staff owns the chief executive's effectiveness, the agenda, the flow of decisions and the follow-through across the leadership team. One runs the business; the other runs the office that runs the business. The chief of staff carries no line authority over operations and is measured on whether the chief executive's priorities move, not on operating results. Conflating the two, by handing a chief of staff the COO's accountability without the COO's mandate, or the reverse, is a common and costly error in groups building out executive leadership for the first time.

When to hire one, and how boards get it wrong

The decision to hire a COO, like the decision to create the seat, turns on calibre as much as on need. The most common error boards make is scoping the role around the work to be done rather than the person who has to do it, and then hiring a strong functional operator into what is really a general-management seat. A COO who has only ever run one function will manage that function well and struggle with everything else the role touches. The seat needs someone who has carried profit-and-loss accountability and led across functions, not a senior vice president of operations promoted past their range.

The second error is the mirror of the succession point: hiring a COO with no thought for whether the person is, or could become, the next CEO. In private equity especially, where the operating model depends on senior operators driving value inside portfolio companies, the COO and the operating partner have become adjacent answers to the same question of how to get execution capacity into a business at speed; JOH's reading of the private equity operating partner sits alongside this one. The path to the seat has shifted accordingly. The route to becoming a COO now runs through general-management credibility and proven operating leadership, not through depth in a single discipline, and a board screening for that is also defining what the next generation of operators, and the next generation of chief executives, will need to have done.

The third error is altitude. Boards repeatedly hire a single-company COO into what is actually a group COO problem, or the reverse, and discover the mismatch only after the appointment has failed to land. The two seats are different jobs, as the contrast above makes plain, and the diligence that distinguishes an integrator who can hold a group from an operator who can run a business is precisely the work a board should do before it hires, not after. The cost of getting it wrong is the same pattern that recurs across the senior executive team, and that the sibling question of the chief information officer raises in its own domain: a seat filled at the wrong altitude quietly caps what the organisation can do. The succession stakes mean a board should treat the COO appointment with the same seriousness it gives CEO succession in a GCC family business.

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Key takeaways

• The COO is the most variable seat in the executive team; its remit is defined by what the chief executive does not hold, which is why no single job description fits it.
• The COO and CEO relationship decides whether the seat adds capacity or cost, and the COO is the most common internal route to the chief executive's office, which makes every appointment a succession decision.
• Running a COO and deliberately operating without one are both defensible; a poorly defined COO is not. The choice is a structural board decision, not a function of company size.
• The group chief operating officer is a different job: the integrator who holds a diversified holding company together across its operating companies, and the de facto deputy to the group CEO. In GCC group holdings the seat is moving from optional to structural.
• Boards most often get the hire wrong on altitude and calibre, by scoping a general-management seat as a functional one, or by placing a single-company COO into a group COO problem.

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JOH Partners is an executive search and senior executive recruitment firm advising boards, group holdings and sovereign platforms on chief operating officer, group COO and senior operating leadership mandates across the GCC, the UK and Singapore. For a confidential conversation about creating or filling the operating seat, engage a partner. Group boards governing execution across multiple operating companies can also see how Board Pulse gives continuous visibility of the executive layer.