A COO's Unnamed Work Type #1: Producer

After about ten interviews, I started thinking about my last job differently.

During that time, if a friend asked what I did, I’d say “I’m COO of Modern Treasury.” And if they asked what that meant, I’d list the functions I was managing at that particular time. For example, in one year that might be, “I’m responsible for the marketing, partnerships, post-sale, and analytics teams right now.”

But the truth is that was only half my job. Or less. The other half was a set of responsibilities that I now think of as unnamed work. I didn’t realize how much of this work I did, or how much others do, until I started my interview project.

Once I had this realization, I started a doc where I made a list of all the types of unnamed work. It was all a single category: “the stuff no one sees.” But over time I’ve come to realize there are different components, and different COOs look after different subsets.Unnamed work is often the job of a COO, but not always. In all my interviews so far, a COO has done between one and three of the four categories.

The first category of unnamed work is fairly logistical. It includes:

• Convening conversations that need to happen

• Hosting or emceeing big public events (eg user conference, customer advisory board, partner summit)

• Planning company offsites or kick offs

• Facilitating executive offsites

• Managing regular company cadences (eg weekly exec meeting or company all hands)

• Spinning up new teams

• Ensuring north star goals or company strategy are properly communicated to the company

I thought for months about what to call this category, and with the nudge of a good friend, I now think the most apt analogy is the role of movie producer.This is an incredible essay on being a leader in TV. In this case, the product is not a film, but the company itself. And the person who does the day-to-day work of making that happen is the Producer, the kind with “p.g.a.” after their name.

I like this analogy because it’s easy to picture making a movie. The Producer is not the creator of the story, nor are they the director.Although of course they sometimes steer or nudge these things in one direction or another.

They pick up the logistical, team, and communication pieces that creators and directors (in our analogy, founders) aren’t well suited to.

“I guess, [the CEO] is like, all vision, very little execution. I am, like, all execution, very little vision,” one COO told me.

Another COO shared with me that she writes a document every week of what each exec should be sharing with their direct reports. She is not in the room for those conversations, and she acknowledged that this is a strange thing to do. But it’s a type of production her company needs so she does it. This is an example of the first item in the list above and an obvious example of unnamed work. If you asked this COO about her job, she would never say “I tell each exec what hard and important conversations they need to have every week so they don’t procrastinate it and we stay on track and grow.” But she does do that, and it takes a lot of her time and effort.

The skills used in this type of unnamed work are: communication, public speaking, one-to-many storytelling, facilitation, influence, and project management (or management of project managers).

One thing that’s nuanced about the unnamed work of production is knowing when to step in and step out of the role. To be a good facilitator, sometimes it’s more effective not to have an opinion, but to elicit quiet voices and guide the conversation toward the thorniest topics. So how do you facilitate and simultaneously get your views represented, without each of those things stepping on each other? One COO-turned-CEO shared with me that she sometimes asks another leader in her company who shares her view to represent them for her, so she can fully be in the facilitation role. Meaning, she explicitly steps into the Producer role for certain meetings, then steps back out of it for another meeting where she’s making a decision.

Every COO does some version of this invisible work, and not one of them leads with it when they describe their job. The unnamed work stays unnamed. But it’s often the work that determines whether a company runs well, or just looks like it does.