A Different Kind of Leadership

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I did not fully appreciate how much of my identity was tied to being the numbers person until I became something else. 

When I moved from Chief Financial Officer to Chief Operating Officer, I expected the hard part to be the workload — the increased capacity, the new departments, the operational complexity I hadn’t managed before. What I didn’t expect was the identity shift. I had spent years building credibility through precision. Clean audits. Balanced budgets. The ability to walk into any room and defend any number on any page. That was my value. I was good at it, and almost none of it transferred the way I thought it would. 

The COO role is not a bigger version of the CFO role. It is a different kind of leadership entirely — one where your effectiveness depends far less on what you know and far more on whether people trust you enough to tell you the truth. 

This article is for two audiences: CFOs who are considering or moving into an operations role, and the CEOs who are managing that transition. Both groups need to understand what is actually happening beneath the title change, because if they don’t, the transition is likely to fail quietly, in ways that are hard to diagnose until real damage is done. 

The trust problem you didn’t know existed 

When a CFO steps into the COO role, they inherit a trust deficit they didn’t create. Operations staff — customer service reps, shipping clerks, procurement specialists, HR and IT professionals — have often experienced finance leadership as the people who say ‘no’. Who comes through their department looking for cuts. Those who measure their work in budget variances rather than in the actual difficulty of what they do every day. 

You can have the best intentions in the world and still be met with skepticism when you walk through the door. People may be rude at first. Some will be polite. They will answer your questions. And, they will wait to see whether you are actually different before they give you anything meaningful. 

The mistake most financially-oriented leaders make in this situation is trying to solve it the way they solve other problems — with data. They schedule listening tours. They send surveys. They build data systems to track operational performance. None of that is wrong, exactly. Yet it misses what people are actually watching for. 

What operations staff want to know is whether you see them as people or as cost centers. You answer that question not through your initiatives but through your behavior in ordinary moments. Whether you remember someone’s name the second time you meet them. Whether you follow up on something small that someone mentioned in passing. Whether you show up somewhere you didn’t have to. Those moments accumulate slowly, and they matter more than any formal data-driven strategy. 

My honest advice: get out of your office more than feels comfortable in the first year. Walk the facilities. Ride-along on a service call. Have lunch with the assembly line crew. Not as a leadership exercise — just as a human being who is trying to understand work you have never done. You will learn things that no report would ever surface. And, people will notice that you showed up. 

What changes internally? 

The external adjustment — learning new departments, building new relationships — is real but manageable. The harder adjustment is internal, and it takes longer to recognize. 

As CFO, success was primarily within my control. I could produce a clean audit. I could close the books accurately. I could build a budget and defend it. The quality of my work reflected directly on me, and I knew how to measure it. 

As COO, my success is entirely dependent on other people. The transportation department runs well, or it doesn’t. HR processes are timely, or they aren’t. Facilities are maintained, or they fall behind. None of that is in my hands directly. My job is to build the environment — the staffing, the systems, the culture, the support — that allows other people to do their jobs well. All of that can’t be quantified on a spreadsheet. 

That shift is confusing for leaders who have built their professional identity around individual expertise. There will be days, especially early on, when you feel like you’re not checking anything off your to-do list. You spent three hours in a conversation that didn’t have a clear outcome. You handled a personnel situation that no one will ever know about. You talked someone through a problem that was more emotional than operational. It’s not the work you’re used to, but it is the work. 

What I got wrong early 

There are things I would have done differently in the first six months. 

I moved too fast on operational changes I didn’t fully understand yet. When you come from finance, you are trained to identify inefficiency and fix it. That instinct is useful, yet it can be dangerous in a new operational context, because inefficiencies often exist for reasons that aren’t visible in the data. I made a few early decisions that I had to walk back; not because I was wrong about the problem, but because I hadn’t earned the credibility to lead the solution. The staff who lived with those decisions every day knew things I didn’t. I should have spent more time asking before I started changing. 

I also underestimated how much my communication style needed to adjust. Finance communication is precise and direct because ambiguity in financial reporting is dangerous. Operations communication is different. The same directness that reads as competent in a budget meeting can read as cold in a conversation about staffing challenges or workplace culture. I had to learn to slow down, acknowledge complexity, and resist the urge to arrive at conclusions before the person I was talking to was finished telling me what was actually going on. 

Neither of these is a fatal mistake. But they cost time and trust that I then had to rebuild. The leaders I’ve seen navigate this transition most successfully are the ones who approach the first year as “The Year of Curiosity”. 

For the CEOs  

If you are a CEO supporting this transition, there are two things I would ask you to consider. 

First, be explicit about what you are asking the person to become. A CFO moving into the COO role is not simply taking on new responsibilities — they are being asked to change who they are as a leader. That is a significant request. It deserves acknowledgment, support, and realistic expectations about the timeline. The first year should be treated as a genuine transition, not a performance review. 

Second, resist the pressure to pull the new COO back into finance work when things get complicated. It will happen. A difficult budget conversation arises, and someone says, “Well, you know the numbers better than anyone”. And they do. But every time that happens, it reinforces the old identity and delays the new one. If the transition is worth making, it is worth protecting. 

A thought partner matters here — a coach, a mentor, or a peer COO in another organization who has made a similar move. The identity shift I’ve been describing is real, and it is largely invisible to the people around you. Having someone you can talk to honestly about what’s changing, what’s hard, and what you’re learning is not a luxury. For most people in this transition, it is necessary. 

When it’s working, it’s a beautiful thing… 

About six months into my COO role, a department manager I’d been working closely with said something that stuck with me. She said she was leery when she heard the organization’s CFO was filling the COO role. She’d expected me to run everything like a budget line. What she found instead, she said, was someone who actually asked what she needed and listened to her challenges. 

That’s not a high bar. But it was the right bar for where I was in my transition. 

The financial background does not go away, and you do not want it to. Budget discipline, analytical rigor, attention to compliance – these things matter enormously in an operations role, and leaders who come from finance bring a perspective that operations-only leaders sometimes lack. The goal is not to stop being a financial thinker – it is to stop leading exclusively as one. 

The leaders who navigate this transition well are the ones who figure out that the skills they built in finance are most valuable when they are used as part of something broader: a team that trusts them, an organization that runs well, and staff who believe their COO actually understands what their job is like. 

Getting there takes longer than people expect, and it requires more self-awareness than most leaders are used to practicing. But it is the work, and for those who are willing to do it, it is some of the most meaningful leadership they will ever experience.