If Your COO Is Solving Every Fire, They’re Not Leading the Organization

A COO can look incredibly productive while quietly becoming the next bottleneck in the business. Their phone rings all day. Managers call them with employee problems, customer issues, workflow problems, staffing questions, and exceptions. They move quickly, make good decisions, and keep the stores running. Everyone appreciates them. The owner may even feel relieved because the calls are no longer coming directly to them.

But if every difficult problem now goes to the COO, the organization has not become more scalable. It has simply moved the bottleneck one level down. The second-in-command should absolutely be available for the issues that require their judgment, but their larger job is to improve the quality of leadership beneath them. If the same store manager calls with the same category of problem every week, that is no longer just an operational issue. It is a leadership-development issue or a systems issue.

I like to look at recurring escalations as information. Why did this need the COO? Was the manager missing authority? Were expectations unclear? Did the process fail? Was the manager avoiding a difficult conversation? Did they not understand the financial impact of the decision? The answer tells the COO what capability needs to be built so the next similar situation can be handled closer to the store.

This requires discipline because solving the problem yourself is usually faster. Coaching a manager takes time. Letting someone make a reasonable decision that is different from yours can be uncomfortable. But the COO who always chooses speed over development eventually creates an organization where speed depends on them personally. That is not operational excellence. That is high-quality firefighting.

The best COOs gradually reduce the number of routine issues that need them. They create clear decision rights, strengthen store managers, improve systems, and reserve their own attention for patterns, cross-store problems, leadership gaps, and higher-risk decisions. That is how one leader creates leverage across multiple locations instead of simply becoming very busy across multiple locations.

Do you like this kind of content? At Transformers Institute, we help multi-shop COOs and operations leaders develop the leadership systems needed to stop being the company's senior firefighter and start building stronger leaders beneath them. If your second-in-command is overwhelmed by daily escalations, schedule a discovery call with our team to learn more.