COO Coaching & Mentoring

COO coaching is one-to-one mentoring on the craft of running operations, from someone who has run them at scale. It is built for three situations: a newly appointed COO facing the first ninety days; an operations director stepping up to an executive remit; and a founder who is, in practice, the company’s COO and wants to stop learning by trial. The sessions work directly on your operating life — the cadence you run, the scorecard you inherit, the decisions that queue on your desk — rather than on general leadership development. Think of it as an experienced operator in your corner, on a fixed rhythm, until the job holds.

Executive coaching develops the person: self-awareness, presence, patterns under pressure. This develops the craft: cadence design, scorecard construction, decision rights, running reviews that decide things, managing the CEO relationship as an operating contract. The formats differ accordingly — a leadership coach mostly asks; I mostly engage, bringing an operator’s read of your actual artefacts and defending it. The two are complementary, and some leaders run both at once without collision. The honest test: if your growth edge is who you are in the room, hire a coach. If it is whether your operating model is any good — and whether you can tell — that is craft, and craft is what I coach.

Ninety minutes, typically fortnightly, on the operating reality in front of you. A session might dissect the review that keeps overrunning, rebuild two scorecard definitions, rehearse a difficult contracting conversation with your CEO, or work a live call you have to make this week — usually some mix. Between sessions you send the real artefacts — the pack, the agenda, the decision log — and I return them marked up the way an operator reviews an operator’s work. There is no curriculum marching regardless of need and no workbook theatre. The syllabus is your quarter; the exam is your operation; the pass mark is visible in your numbers.

Spend the first month on evidence — sit in the reviews as they run, read the numbers as they lie, map where decisions queue — and make exactly one small, certain, visible fix so the organisation learns you act. Spend the second on design: your cadence, your scorecard draft, your decision-rights proposal, socialised before anything is announced. Spend the third installing, with your CEO’s backing secured beforehand. The failure modes are reorganising in week two or observing until the organisation stops expecting change. In the engagement we build your specific version of this plan in the first two sessions, then work it week by week — because the hard part is not the plan, it is week six.

Yes — founders are close to half the intended audience. The title is irrelevant; the job is not. If you are the person delivery, quality and the operating numbers actually route through, you are the COO in every way that matters, and the same craft applies: a cadence that runs without you in every seat, a first scorecard, process ownership that survives being handed over. For founders there is a specific extra payoff: having built the discipline yourself, you will know precisely what the eventual COO hire needs to be — and you will be a dramatically better judge of candidates, because you will have done the job you are hiring for.

The design is six to twelve months with a deliberate taper: fortnightly while the job is new, monthly as your rhythm establishes, then on-call for the moments that genuinely warrant it — a board cycle, a reorganisation, a difficult quarter. The taper is a feature, not a wind-down by neglect: the point of craft coaching is that the craft transfers, and the sessions should be visibly working themselves out of your calendar. I am sceptical of coaching relationships that plateau into permanence. If after two years you still need the sessions to run your operation, the coaching has failed — comfortably, politely and expensively.

Yes, and the contracting is explicit about it. Even when the company pays, the coaching client is you: the sessions are confidential, and what reaches your CEO or board is what you choose to take there. Where a sponsor wants visibility, we agree the boundary up front — typically themes and progress, never content — and I hold that line without exception, because the sessions only work if you can bring the unpolished truth: the metric you suspect is wrong, the relationship that is fraying, the call you got wrong last month. One caveat, stated in advance: I will not be a channel for managing you out, and I decline engagements constructed that way.

Nineteen years running operations and business excellence at scale, most recently as Senior Director, Business Excellence at Publicis Groupe — teams of more than 2,000 people, 500+ clients, and the operating systems behind USD 750 million+ in annual media spend. The specifics matter more than the titles: scorecards and quality measurement that survived scrutiny across 2,000+ campaigns and 450 clients, the cadence and governance that moved quality from 95% to 99%, the discipline behind a billing cycle cut from two months to fifteen days across 75 entities. The coaching is that same discipline, taught — every question you are facing in the seat, I have had to answer with consequences attached.

Apply three filters ruthlessly. First, has the coach actually run operations at meaningful scale — teams, budgets, consequences — or only coached people who have? Ask for the numbers behind their operating claims. Second, will they work on your real artefacts? The best COO coach reviews your actual scorecard and sits on your actual review, rather than staying safely in the abstract. Third, is graduation designed in? A coach whose engagements never end is selling dependency. Sector experience matters far less than people assume — operating craft transfers across industries, and a fresh set of eyes on your metrics is often worth more than familiarity with your market.

In sequence, yes; in parallel, carefully. Coaching a COO while separately advising their CEO, or while running part of the operation as a fractional COO, blurs lines that should stay sharp — so I keep one primary role per company at a time and say plainly when a boundary approaches. The natural sequences work well: a fractional engagement that ends with me coaching the internal successor who takes the model over; or coaching that reveals the operating model itself needs building, at which point we discuss whether that is your project with my support, or a build engagement in its own right. Which side of that line we are on is always stated, never drifted across.