A strong COO is more useful, most of the time, than a charismatic CEO

I have sat across tables from boards that could not articulate what their Chief Operating Officer actually did. The CEO sits on the front row of investor meetings. The COO sits inside the spreadsheet, the policy manual, the incident log. This is not a slight. It is the job. What becomes visible at a company's moment of real pressure is not the founder's vision or the chief executive's network. It is whether the operation can hold. Whether the systems are clean. Whether the people in the middle tiers know their authorities and can move without asking for a sign-off at every gate.

The charisma question is a distraction. It is useful to a CEO at one specific moment: the moment a company is asking for belief in something not yet real. That window is real. It matters for capital raise, for a market pivot, for brand repositioning. But the window closes. Once the operation is live, the meeting that matters is not the one with the investor. It is the one where the Chief Operating Officer is working through why a control failed, what the gap was, and whether the firm has learned the same lesson twice. The CEO who does not know what happened in that meeting is operating on someone else's assessment of the facts.

I have worked with COOs who could walk a board through every fork in a decision tree. They knew where authority ended, where discretion began, and where silence was a policy choice. They could tell you why a compliance rule existed, what behaviour it was meant to prevent, and what behaviour it actually prevented. These are not technical skills. They are the foundation of whether a firm stays sound when the external world changes fast. A change in regulation. A new jurisdiction. A client lawsuit. The person who has already built the mental architecture to think through second-order effects is the one who can move.

The FTSE Women Leaders Review sets a target of 40 percent women on FTSE 350 boards by the end of 2025. Most conversations about that target focus on the CEO chair or the board chair. This matters less than it sounds. The board that has a Chief Operating Officer who is trusted, visible, and operationally sound has already absorbed the lesson that the Women Leaders Review is trying to teach: that talent and competence are distributed in a population, not concentrated at the top. That succession planning begins earlier. That you know whether someone can work at scale before they have the title.

Charisma is individual. It is also fragile. The CEO departs. The board has to explain why the operation did not leave with them. A strong COO has already built the redundancy into the system. The manual exists. The second-line tiers know their decisions. The culture is not a speech the CEO gives. It is a set of behaviours that the operation enforces. This is less romantic. It is also less breakable. When I move between firms, the first person I spend time with is the Chief Operating Officer. Not because they are the most senior. Because they are the only person who can tell me whether what the board says the firm does is what the firm actually does.

The charismatic CEO has a skill that the organisation needs. But the organisation does not need it to run. It needs it to begin. After that, the work is in the middle layers. The COO's work is to make sure those layers can function without constant escalation. Without heroics. Without the assumption that someone clever will solve it at the last moment. The board that recognises this is the board that builds on something solid. The board that confuses confidence on stage with operational competence is the one that discovers its fragility when the stage is dark and the real decisions are happening inside the system.