Norsten Collective

Perspective

Last reviewed August 2026

What are you actually trying to solve?

Owners hire a COO for one of two reasons, and only one of them works.

The first reason is capacity. The business has more operational surface area than one person can run, the strategy is clear, decision rights are defined, and you need someone to run a defined scope. That hire tends to succeed.

The second reason is relief. You are the bottleneck, everything routes through you, and you want someone to take it. That hire tends to fail, and it fails for a structural reason rather than a personal one.

Why does the relief hire fail?

Because the new executive inherits the system that created the bottleneck.

Decisions route to you because routing to you works. Nobody else has the context, the authority, or the standard in writing. Hiring a COO does not change any of those three things. It adds a person between you and the decision, so now the decision takes longer and still ends up on your desk.

Six months in, the pattern is familiar. The COO is competent. The COO is frustrated. You are doing your old job and managing an expensive person who cannot do theirs.

How do you know which situation you are in?

One question. If you wrote down every decision that came to you last week, how many of them could someone else have made if they had the information and the authority?

If the answer is most of them, you have a system problem, and the hire will not fix it. If the answer is few of them, you have a capacity problem, and the hire probably will.

What comes first?

The system moves first. Then the hire works.

Define where decisions live and put it in writing. Give the leadership layer the information they would need to decide. Establish the standard so it holds when you are not in the room. Then hire into a role that has actual scope rather than a role defined as everything you no longer want to do.

The order matters more than the candidate.