Common Mistakes When Hiring a COO

A COO appointment that does not work is rarely a surprise afterwards. The causes are usually visible in the brief, the process and the first ninety days — and most of them are entirely within the employer's control.

These are the mistakes we see most often when mid-market and growing businesses appoint their first, or their next, Chief Operating Officer.

1. Hiring before the role is defined

A job description built around 'own operations' and 'drive efficiency' describes an intention, not a role. Without a written statement of which functions, sites and decisions the COO actually owns, that scope gets negotiated informally over the first six months — and usually contested by whoever loses authority in the process.

Fix: write down the five core areas of ownership — delivery, supply chain, quality and safety, systems, and operational cost — and mark explicitly what this business needs the role to own, share or leave alone.

2. Treating sector experience as the primary filter

Sector knowledge shortens the learning curve on suppliers, regulation and customer expectations. It does not create the structural thinking, cost discipline or people-management judgement a COO role actually depends on. Businesses that screen almost entirely on sector background often appoint someone who understands the market well and cannot redesign how the business runs.

Fix: decide explicitly how much sector familiarity is genuinely required — regulated, safety-critical or highly technical operations require more than most — then weight operational leadership capability accordingly rather than defaulting to a like-for-like sector match.

3. Confusing a crisis with a hiring problem

Boards frequently decide to recruit a COO at the exact moment operational performance has already deteriorated badly. Recruitment then takes months, while the crisis continues unmanaged in the meantime, and the eventual permanent appointee inherits a much worse starting position than the brief described.

A live operational crisis needs an interim response now and a permanent decision later. Trying to solve both with a single, slow permanent search usually satisfies neither.

Fix: separate the two decisions. Bring in interim leadership to stabilise the immediate situation while running a proper permanent search in parallel, rather than compressing a serious hiring decision to match the urgency of the crisis.

4. Responsibility without authority

This is the most damaging and most common failure. The COO is held accountable for delivery and cost performance but cannot change supplier relationships, cannot restructure a team, cannot approve reasonable operational investment, and has no direct route to the board on operational risk.

Fix: write down the decisions the role can take alone, the decisions it recommends, and the decisions that remain with the MD or board. Share this with candidates during the process, not after the offer is accepted.

5. No plan for the relationship with the Managing Director

Many COO appointments fail not because the individual is wrong for the role, but because the MD who agreed to appoint them was never genuinely willing to step back from operational decisions. This is rarely dishonest — it is often an MD who has run operations personally for years and has not consciously registered how much they will need to let go.

Fix: test this directly with the MD before the search starts. Ask them to describe, specifically, three operational decisions they will stop making personally once the COO is in place. Vague answers are a warning sign.

6. Underestimating integration after an acquisition

Where a COO is being appointed to integrate an acquisition, a common mistake is appointing the person after the deal has closed rather than during due diligence. Operational leadership brought in late inherits assumptions baked into the deal that were never operationally tested.

7. Underestimating the first ninety days

• No baseline data agreed, so progress is disputed later
• No introduction to key suppliers and site leaders, so relationships stay with the previous incumbent or the MD
• No access to the management information that actually matters, so the diagnosis is built on anecdote
• No agreed review points, so the first structured conversation about performance is a difficult one

Fix: plan onboarding as deliberately as the recruitment itself, with a written 90-day diagnostic plan agreed before the start date.

8. Choosing the wrong engagement model for the problem

Appointing permanently into a role that is really a defined, time-bound mandate — or engaging fractionally where daily crisis management is required — both waste time the business does not have. The model should follow the operational problem: permanent for structural, ongoing complexity; interim for a defined mandate with an end date; fractional for judgement and design without full-time need.

9. Running a process that loses strong candidates

Senior operational leaders with genuine track records are in demand and have options. Processes that drag for months, change the scope of the role midway through, or leave candidates without feedback for weeks lose exactly the calibre of person the role most needs.