A COO Maturity Assessment

There's a moment in every leadership meeting that reveals everything.

The CEO asks: “What’s our biggest non-financial risk right now?”

The room goes quiet. Eyes turn to the COO.

What happens next tells you whether you have someone managing tasks or someone who sees the whole system.

The difference isn’t about working harder. It’s about thinking differently.

Over the years, I’ve watched COOs operate across dozens of companies. Some are constantly firefighting. Others can predict the fire before smoke appears. The gap between them isn’t experience or intelligence, it’s maturity in how they integrate strategy, capability, change, and execution.

Most organizations don’t realize they have a choice. They assume their COO is doing fine because things are getting done. But “getting done” isn’t the same as building what comes next.

Here’s what I’ve learned: there are three distinct levels of COO maturity.

At the first level—Reactive—the COO manages activities. They know what’s happening, but they’re always looking backward. Ask about Q3 initiatives, and they need to pull a status report. Ask about operational risk, and they need to check with the team. They’re not bad at their job; they’re just playing it one move at a time.

At the second level—Responsive—the COO tracks patterns. They can tell you what’s off track and why. They see the problems clearly and can articulate them. This feels like progress, and it is. But they’re still primarily diagnosing rather than architecting solutions.

At the third level—Anticipatory—everything changes. This COO sees the system, not just the symptoms. They don’t just report that two initiatives are stalled; they explain the interdependency creating the bottleneck, the capability gap it’s exposing, and how they’re building what’s missing while re-sequencing the work. They’re not managing the present—they’re architecting the future.

The distinction matters because execution complexity is accelerating.

Your strategy is ambitious. Your market is moving faster. Your organization is being asked to deliver more with the same resources. In this environment, a Reactive COO becomes a bottleneck. Even a Responsive one can struggle to keep pace.

But an Anticipatory COO? They create capacity. They don’t just solve today’s problem—they build the capability that prevents tomorrow’s. They see where decision-making is bottlenecked and push authority down while building the judgment to use it well. They notice when top performers are absorbing complexity faster than the organization is building capability, and they rebalance before burnout becomes attrition.

Think of it this way: imagine your organization as a high-performance vehicle.

A Reactive COO checks the dashboard lights after they come on. A Responsive COO monitors the gauges and flags when something’s trending wrong. An Anticipatory COO listens to the engine, feels how the vehicle handles under stress, and adjusts before the warning lights ever appear.

Which one is driving your operations?

I’ve developed a simple assessment that reveals where your COO sits on this maturity spectrum. It’s built around ten questions - the kind that come up in every leadership meeting, and shows you exactly how your COO thinks about strategy, capability, risk, and change. These questions can also apply across your whole management team.

The questions aren’t tricky. They’re the real ones you’re already asking. But the answers will tell you whether you have someone managing tasks, tracking problems, or architecting solutions.

If your COO is Reactive, you now know where to invest development. If they’re Responsive, you can see the edge they need to develop. And if they’re Anticipatory, you’ll recognize it immediately and understand why your organization executes differently than your competitors.

Because in the end, your strategy is only as good as your ability to execute it. And your ability to execute depends on whether your COO sees the whole system or just the next task.

I’m sharing the assessment here. Use it quarterly. Watch how the answers evolve, or do they?

And here’s what I’ve learned about closing the gap.

Moving from Reactive to Responsive, or from Responsive to Anticipatory, isn’t about working harder or attending more training. It’s about building a different operating system - one that integrates strategic thinking, capability development, and execution architecture into daily practice.

That’s why I developed the Capabilities Accelerator System. It’s designed specifically to elevate how management teams see and solve problems - shifting from managing activities to architecting outcomes. The system doesn’t just identify gaps; it builds the thinking patterns, frameworks, and habits that make anticipatory leadership natural rather than forced.

The transformation isn’t immediate, but it is systematic. And it’s built for people who are already capable - they simply need the right architecture to operate at the next level.

If you recognize your COO (or any management) in the Reactive or Responsive levels, and you can see what’s possible at the Anticipatory level, let’s talk. The gap isn’t permanent. It’s just a matter of building the right capabilities in the right sequence.

Because the COO you need tomorrow isn’t the same as the one who got you here. But the one you have today might be closer than you think—with the right system to accelerate their development.

Reach out if you’re ready to explore what’s possible.

Thanks for being part of my community. I appreciate you more than you know.