The 90 days after a COO resigns
A COO resigns. Everyone immediately starts talking about the replacement — how long it will take, who the candidates might be, whether to go external or promote from inside.
Nobody talks about the ninety days in between.
That's the part that actually costs the company something.
In week one, the direct reports start managing sideways instead of up — because there's no one left to make the calls that cross functional lines, so they quietly start negotiating those calls with each other instead.
By week three, a handful of decisions that used to take a day are taking two weeks, because nobody wants to be the one who made the wrong call without a mandate.
By week six, someone senior — a CFO, sometimes the CEO — has absorbed "operations" onto their own plate, on top of the job they already had. They call it temporary. It rarely feels temporary to them.
By week ten, there's a backlog. Not a project backlog — a decision backlog. Things that got parked "until the new COO starts" because they felt too big to make without an owner.
Then the new COO arrives, and their first month isn't spent setting direction. It's spent working through everyone else's parked decisions, most of which have gotten more expensive to resolve the longer they sat.
None of this shows up on an org chart. None of it gets a line item. It just shows up later, as slower decisions, as margin that eroded a little for reasons nobody can quite point to, as a new COO whose first ninety days look worse than they should because they inherited someone else's ninety days first.
I don't think most companies are careless about this. I think they just don't see it, because a vacancy doesn't look like a cost. It looks like a line on an org chart that says "open."
The question worth asking isn't just how fast can we hire. It's who is actually making the decisions that used to sit with this seat, and does that person know they're doing it.
What actually happens in your organization the week a senior operational role goes empty?
Frank Godbersen
#COO #Leadership #Operations #SupplyChain #Procurement #InterimLeadership