The appointment was filed, the internal announcement went out, and for the next few months two things are true at once. You have more permission to change how the company works than you will have again, and you have less information about how it currently works than anyone who reports to you.
Over the trailing twelve months, SEC full-text search returns 36 filings announcing the appointment of a new chief operating officer. Those are filings rather than companies, and the population is small enough that each one is a distinct situation rather than a category. What they share is the timing problem: a mandate that is widest at the start, and an understanding of the operation that is thinnest at the same moment.
This article is about how that window is usually spent, and about the one commitment that survives it.
The Window Is Real And It Is Short
The pattern is well described in the research on executive tenure. The seasons of an executive's tenure (Hambrick & Fukutomi, Academy of Management Review, 1991) sets out distinct phases, with the earliest characterized by the widest information search and the greatest willingness to depart from the inherited way of doing things — and with commitment to a fixed approach hardening as tenure continues. The organization also grants more latitude early, because nothing that is currently broken is yet attributed to you.
The role itself gives you less structure than the title suggests. An analysis of the chief operating officer as a structural form (Hambrick & Cannella, Strategic Management Journal, 2004) examined when the arrangement is adopted across a ten-year sample and found that chief executives who lack operational experience, or experience with the firm itself, are relatively more likely to have a chief operating officer. The contingency logic explained the presence of the role far better than it explained its effect on performance — which is a way of saying the title carries no fixed content. What the role is comes from the division of labor agreed with the chief executive. Research on the conditions under which the role works (Marcel, Strategic Management Journal, 2009) found a strong positive relationship between the presence of a chief operating officer and firm performance across 153 firms, and found that relationship to be contingent on the characteristics of the wider executive team.
Read together, those say something practical. Nothing about the job description will tell you what to do first. The choice is yours, it is made with incomplete information, and the window in which it is cheap to make closes quickly.
Your calendar is the binding constraint, not your authority. Measured executive time use (Bandiera, Prat, Hansen & Sadun, Journal of Political Economy, 2020) shows how systematically different allocations of the same hours are, and how strongly they differ between firms.
The Operating Review Produces A List
The standard first move is an operating review, and it is the right move. Within six weeks it produces a set of findings that are almost identical across companies of this size:
- Several processes have no owner who can state their current status without asking someone.
- The same information is entered into two systems by two people, and the two disagree at period end.
- One critical process runs on a spreadsheet maintained by a person who has never taken two consecutive weeks off.
- The enterprise system covers the standard path, and everything unusual is handled beside it by email.
The findings are correct. The problem is what happens to them. They become an initiative list with owners and dates, and roughly a third of the items require software that does not exist. Those items are assigned to the information technology group, which owns the enterprise system, the network and the endpoints, and which does not build new internal applications because that has never been its function. The items then move quarter to quarter until they are quietly merged into whatever the next large system programme is.
That outcome is not a failure of the review. It is a capacity gap that the review is not designed to detect, because a list does not distinguish between an item somebody can do and an item nobody can.
Choose The Workflow You Can Prove
The useful discipline in the first quarter is to reduce the list to one item that can be changed and shown, and to apply four tests to the candidates.
| Test | A good candidate | A poor candidate |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | One executive owns the outcome | Three functions share it |
| Boundary | A defined start and end, inside one quarter | A programme with phases |
| Position | It changes something — an approval, a handoff, a record | It reports on something |
| Visibility | Its current cost is felt weekly by people you can name | Its cost is a modelled estimate |
The third test is the one most often failed, and it is worth being explicit about. Reporting improvements are easy to buy and easy to demonstrate, and they change nothing about how the work is performed. A new dashboard on top of a process that still runs on chasing people gives you a better view of the same delay. The work to choose is in the path where something is committed: the approval that has to happen before the next step, the handoff between two teams, the entry that becomes the record.
If you have arrived after an acquisition, the candidate is usually obvious, because one process now has to span two entities while the systems are scheduled to merge in a later year.
Make The Change Provable, Not Assertable
A change that people feel is not the same as a change you can show the board. The difference is whether the new process produces its own record.
This is a design decision, made before anything is built rather than assembled afterwards. A process that records each item, who handled it, when, against which version of the input, and what exceptions occurred, gives you three things at once: a weekly number for how the operation is performing, evidence for the auditor, and a baseline against which the next change can be measured. A process that does not produce those records leaves you describing an improvement in adjectives.
It also removes the meeting you will otherwise inherit. Most status meetings in a company this size exist because nothing in the process reports its own state, and the meeting is the only place the state can be assembled. Removing the need for that meeting is a visible, unarguable change in the first quarter, and it is small.
First Steps
- Take the review findings and mark each item with who would build it. A name, not a department. Items with no name are not scheduled, whatever date is next to them.
- Apply the four tests to the unnamed items and keep exactly one. One workflow, executive-owned, bounded, in the path where something is committed.
- Write down what record that workflow should produce, before discussing any solution. Who did what, when, against which input, with which exceptions. That page is the specification, and it is short enough to write in an afternoon.
One Workflow, Inside The Window
The reason to act inside the first quarter is not urgency for its own sake. It is that the choice is cheap now, the operating review has just produced the evidence, and the organization currently expects something to change.
A fifteen-minute call — nothing paid, nothing signed — takes one workflow from your list apart: what it does today, what it would do instead, what has to be built, what it costs, and what it will be measured against. If the honest answer is that the workflow is fine and the problem is elsewhere, that is what we will say.
Where something has to be built, that work runs as a monthly engineering partnership, with the targets for each release agreed before it starts, so the commitment is checkable rather than promised. The work runs in a repository we own, and paid-for deliverables transfer to you monthly — full history and documentation. The engagement runs in TopDo, our own system, where you can watch the work happen daily and keep the workspace afterwards. After that, $15,000 a month puts one accountable person on keeping it running, with a written monthly report of what ran and what changed.
References
- Hambrick, D. C., & Fukutomi, G. D. S. The Seasons of a CEO's Tenure. Academy of Management Review, 1991.
- Hambrick, D. C., & Cannella, A. A. CEOs Who Have COOs: Contingency Analysis of an Unexplored Structural Form. Strategic Management Journal, 2004.
- Marcel, J. J. Why Top Management Team Characteristics Matter When Employing a Chief Operating Officer: A Strategic Contingency Perspective. Strategic Management Journal, 2009.
- Bandiera, O., Prat, A., Hansen, S., & Sadun, R. CEO Behavior and Firm Performance. Journal of Political Economy, 2020.
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Form 8-K. Item 5.02 covers the appointment of principal officers.
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EDGAR Full-Text Search. Filing counts cited are from full-text search over the trailing twelve months.
