The Invisible COO
When you run your company - without authority, recognition, or salary
Many assistants are already doing elements of a COO’s job. Most organisations just haven’t realised it yet.
Before we go any further
Before you read the rest of this article, pause for a moment and ask yourself whether any of the following situations feel familiar:
You are the person who quietly connects teams that should already be speaking to each other. You remind executives about decisions they have not quite made yet. You notice operational problems long before leadership sees them coming. You keep projects moving that technically belong to other departments. And you often know - sometimes weeks in advance - which initiatives will actually happen and which ones are quietly going to disappear.
None of this appears anywhere in your job description.
But if you stopped doing those things tomorrow, the organisation would begin to wobble. Decisions would slow down, communication would become messier, and projects that once seemed to move effortlessly would suddenly stall.
If that description sounds uncomfortably familiar, there is a good chance you are operating in a role that does not officially exist.
I call it the Invisible COO.
The role no one assigns
A good Chief Operating Officer performs a very specific function inside an organisation. They translate strategy into execution, ensure teams are aligned around shared priorities, and they notice operational risks before those risks become expensive mistakes.
Now think about the best Executive Assistants you know.
They remind executives about decisions that still need to be made, they connect people across departments who need to align with one another, and they notice when projects begin to drift and quietly steer them back on course.
None of those responsibilities appear in a formal job description. Yet if you remove those actions from the system, something interesting happens.
The organisation slows down. Decisions take longer. Communication becomes fragmented, and projects that once seemed straightforward begin to stall.
In other words, someone was quietly doing the work that kept the organisation’s operating system functioning.
Why assistants end up here
This dynamic is not accidental.
Assistants sit in one of the most unusual positions inside a company. You are close enough to leadership to understand strategic priorities, yet you remain connected to teams across the organisation. You see both the executive view of the business and the operational reality on the ground.
Most people inside an organisation only see one slice of the system. Assistants often see the entire map.
You notice when two teams are unknowingly working against one another. You hear the conversations that never make it into official meetings. You see when leadership decisions are likely to create operational friction further down the line.
Over time, you begin connecting the dots - and because someone needs to keep things moving, you step in. Not because it is written anywhere in your role description, but because without that intervention, things quietly break and you likely know what those repercussions look like.
The moment many assistants recognise themselves
At some point in their career, many experienced assistants have a slightly uncomfortable realisation. People come to them (possibly you since you are still reading!) when they want to understand what is actually happening inside the organisation. Not because they are the most senior person in the room, but because they are the person who sees how everything connects.
That is usually when the “ah-ha” moment lands. You are the glue that holds things together, and the cog that keeps things running.
The problem with invisible influence
The difficulty is that this influence is almost always informal.
You may be coordinating work across multiple teams, but you rarely have formal authority to direct anyone. You may be shaping executive decisions, but you are seldom recognised as part of the leadership structure. Your role expands, but the recognition rarely does.
Assistants end up carrying genuine operational responsibility without the title, authority, or compensation normally associated with leadership roles.
In effect, they are doing elements of a COO’s job while still being treated as administrative support, and because so much of this work happens behind the scenes, organisations often underestimate how much stability it actually provides.
The real question
Whenever I discuss this idea with assistants, the same question comes up: “How do you know whether this is actually happening in your role?”
Sometimes it simply feels like you are busy. Sometimes it feels like you are constantly firefighting.
But those two things are not necessarily the same as operating at a strategic level inside the organisation. That is why I built a simple framework to help assistants answer that question in a practical way.
I call it the Invisible COO Diagnostic (I know, catchy!).
🔒 Paid subscribers can access the full diagnostic below.
The worksheet allows you to calculate your Invisible COO Score based on five dimensions: strategic access, decision influence, cross-team coordination, operational foresight, and executive dependency.
Most assistants who complete it discover something surprising: they are already operating at a much higher level than their job description suggests. You’ll likely already know this, but being able to see it on paper can be a real help.
If you’ve not already used your single-use free article yet, you can use it here!
