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Why delivery leaders get stuck

The skills that make someone effective in a delivery leadership role (attention to detail, project control, client management) are exactly the skills that can limit them at the executive level.

Delivery leaders are trained to go deep. To know exactly what's happening on their project at any given moment. That instinct is valuable, but breadth of sight matters more than depth of focus when you're operating as a COO.

As Joanna Moore put it:

"Part of my job is about seeing where are the weak signals that might be slightly amber flashing... you can only really do that when you're on the balcony, and you can see all the pieces moving below you."

The COO's job is to connect dots across the business. A people score dipping in three separate teams, a sector quietly softening, a pattern forming across what look like unrelated signals…

Knowing when to be on the balcony, and when to step down to the dance floor, is one of the hardest things to learn, and one of the most important things to get right.

What skills do you need to become a COO in consulting?

The most important shift is developing genuine commercial control - the ability to understand how operational decisions affect revenue, margin, and the financial health of the firm, and to act on that understanding in real time.

A common example: a client wants two people for free for three months. It feels like a small gesture to win a big engagement. But when you work through the actual impact on margin, you often find that the entire team will be unprofitable for a quarter to fund that concession. That's not obvious to most delivery leaders in the moment, and it's exactly the kind of gap that costs firms money they don't notice losing.

The other dimension is opportunity cost. Every resource committed to one client is a resource unavailable for the next piece of work that comes in the door. Strong COOs build flex into how capacity is deployed, not just how it's allocated today. Every ‘yes’ to one client is quietly a ‘no’ to something else - and that tradeoff needs to be visible before it's made, not after. Having real-time resourcing visibility is what makes this possible.

Beyond commercial control, the skills that matter most are:

Cross-functional breadth.

The COO role tends to accumulate whatever the rest of the leadership team doesn't own: finance, people, technology, operations, strategy. That's a problem if you've only ever developed depth in one area. Effective COOs can ask the right questions across domains, spot when something needs attention, and know who to bring in. You don't need to be the expert in every area, but you do need to understand which levers connect to which outcomes.

Resourcing and pipeline accuracy.

Sales teams are optimistic by nature; delivery teams can swing the other way. The COO sits in the middle, producing an accurate picture from both. A pipeline that looks like it needs 35 hires in two weeks often resolves to five once you work through what's actually contracted, confirmed, and ready to start. Getting that number right and having it accepted is one of the most commercially significant things a COO does.

Execution focus.

In a fast-growing firm, the bottleneck is rarely ideas. The COO takes a long list of things the business wants to do and brings it back to what it can actually execute well, with the people and capacity it has right now. Piling change on top of change (new systems, new hires, new processes all at once) is one of the most common failure modes. The COO's job is to sequence and pace, not just prioritize.

How to move from delivery leadership into an executive ops role

The clearest piece of advice for delivery leaders thinking about the COO career path: stop waiting until you feel ready. You won't. The experience that prepares you for an executive role comes from taking things on before you're fully qualified. Running a pilot, raising your hand for something outside your lane, owning a problem that wasn't formally yours to solve.

Get exposure to the commercial side of the business early. Understand your firm's value proposition well enough to articulate it and test it against what clients actually say. That fluency (built through business development, proposals, and client conversations) is what separates delivery leaders who stay in delivery from the ones who make the jump.

Reading a P&L is a baseline. The harder capability to develop is the intuition to know what it's actually telling you, and what to do about it.

Breadth matters more than depth of expertise.

The COO role tends to accumulate whatever the rest of the leadership team doesn't own. Finance, people, technology, operations, strategy — the portfolio is broad almost by definition. That's a problem if you've only ever developed expertise in one area.

The most effective COOs have a wide enough base that they can ask the right questions across domains, spot when something needs attention, and know who to bring in. They don't need to be the expert in every area they're responsible for, but they do need to understand the business well enough to know which levers connect to which outcomes.

This also applies to AI. Thinking about it as a technology problem that sits in a tech silo misses most of what it actually is: a commercial, cultural, and operational question that cuts across the entire firm. The COOs who handle it well are the ones who already think that way about everything.

Reading a P&L is a baseline. The harder capability to develop is the operational and commercial intuition that tells you what the P&L is actually showing you, and what to do about it.

How ready are you to make the move?

If you're thinking seriously about the move from delivery leadership into a more commercially credible executive role, a good first step is knowing where your gaps actually are.

The Ops Leader to COO Scorecard is a self-assessment tool that gives you a clear read across six dimensions:

• commercial control,
• forward visibility and forecasting,
• resourcing maturity,
• operating discipline,
• finance operations,
• and executive influence.

It takes a few minutes and gives you a concrete picture of where you're strong, where the ceiling is, and where to focus next.

Take the assessment →

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