What People Leaders See That the COO Misses
You were part of the team that set the strategy. You supported the rollout. You made sure capable people were in the right roles. And when the organization missed its targets — again — the post-mortem pointed at execution.
At which point, most of the Exec shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders and, for want of a more compelling idea, handed you a training budget and a request to fix it.
Which is the wrong answer to the right problem. People leaders who understand this are the ones who end up with the greatest influence at Exec.
The Multiplier Problem
Operations leaders think about execution in terms of process and structure. That’s their lens, and it’s essential but not sufficient.
A good People leader sees clearly what a COO senses: every manager in the organization is either a multiplier or a subtractor. A multiplier takes the talent and energy of their team and amplifies it. A subtractor may well get things done, but doesn’t build capability. Same team, same strategy, same resources — the difference in output between a multiplier and a subtractor running that team can be 30–50%.
The number is soft but the data isn’t. Research on management quality and firm performance is unambiguous: variation in management capability accounts for more of the difference between high-performing and average organisations than strategy, market position, or technology.
In any discussion about execution, the layer of managers between the exec table and the front line is the execution system. They either translate the strategy into daily activity, or they stay buried in BAU.
And People leaders are the only people in the room whose job it is to see the whole layer clearly.
The Question Nobody Asks
Most organizations respond to execution problems with management development programs. Most of those programs fail because nobody wants to think about what happens after the training.
How does new behavior get locked in? What stops people from sliding back into the habits the training was meant to replace? Who is paying attention to whether what was learned has actually moved the needle?
In most organizations, the training event ends, participants return to a work environment that rewards the old way of operating, and behavior reverts within weeks. The research is consistent enough to be embarrassing — organizations waste between 45 and 80 cents in every training dollar on behavior that never transfers.
A People leader who can answer those questions with a sound process has just separated themselves from every HR generalist in the market and taken a seat closer to the COO.
What the Execution System Actually Needs
Closing the gap between a strategy and its results requires three things working simultaneously. People leaders are better positioned than anyone to own all three.
First, make execution visible. People do different things to get different results, and right now you’re sensing that behavior change rather than seeing it. When managers track commitments and progress in real time, you can spot drift before it becomes a crisis. Accountability shifts from quarterly to immediate. Course corrections happen faster, improvement compounds, velocity builds.
Second, build capability over time, not in an event. Managers change behavior through spaced practice, peer accountability, and application in their actual work environment. They need to develop self-awareness before they develop skill — a manager who can’t see their own patterns won’t change them. And the manager’s leader has to reinforce the new behavior, because if the system around the manager stays the same, the system wins.
Third, get support to managers when they’re stuck, not a week later. Right now, the gap between a manager hitting a wall and getting help runs to days or weeks. By then the moment has passed, the decision has been made, the conversation has gone badly, the old habit has settled back in. Development compounds only when support arrives while the problem is still alive.
None of these elements alone close the gap. Training without visibility produces insight that evaporates under pressure. Visibility without capability surfaces problems without solving them. Support without a development foundation gives good advice to managers who lack the context to act on it.
Together, they define an execution system that sits squarely in the People leader’s wheelhouse.
The Seat at the Table
There is a version of the People leader role that is transactional: hire, retain, comply, administer. The business values it in proportion to its cost, which is to say not much.
There is another version. It starts with a different question — not “how do we develop our managers?” but “why is there a gap between our strategic targets and our results, and what would close it?” That question leads to a different set of answers, and a different relationship with the CEO and the operations team.
I’m thinking of a bright, ambitious CPO at a large FMCG firm. When a new CEO arrived with a target the organization had never hit before, she didn’t wait to be asked. She pushed herself into the ops leadership troika and drew a straight line between today’s execution gap and the five-year target. Same gap, compounded annually. She made that number her focus and the focus of the whole organization.
That’s the number worth owning; it always has been. It was just waiting for someone in People to pick it up.