How will Meta’s CEO-COO relationship change now Sheryl Sandberg has stepped down?

When Sheryl Sand­berg resigned as COO of Meta – the par­ent com­pa­ny of Face­book, What­sApp and oth­ers – in ear­ly June, the pub­lic state­ments didn’t always match what was report­ed as the on-the-ground real­i­ty. 

She was praised by Mark Zucker­berg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, as an “amaz­ing per­son, leader, part­ner and friend”. But press reports sug­gest­ed that the rela­tion­ship had rup­tured. (Meta did not respond to a request to com­ment for this sto­ry.)

Sandberg’s stint last­ed far longer than the five years she signed on for: she was the yin to Zuckerberg’s yang for 14 years. Her replace­ment, 44-year-old Javier Oli­van, is entire­ly dif­fer­ent to his pre­de­ces­sor. And in both COOs’ ways of work­ing, you can see how the CEO-COO rela­tion­ship can play out.

“The COO is a rel­a­tive­ly mod­ern phe­nom­e­non that has grown a lot more in the last 20 years,” says Ste­fan Stern, vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at Bayes Busi­ness School (for­mer­ly Cass) at City, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don. “It’s a recog­ni­tion that one super­hero boss can’t do every­thing.” CEOs who install a COO are those who have come to the under­stand­ing that they’re not vain­glo­ri­ous and need help run­ning their busi­ness.

Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg’s differing duties

For com­pa­nies like Meta – for­mer­ly Face­book – split­ting respon­si­bil­i­ties for a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar busi­ness makes sense. Stern even believes it’s a vital role for medi­um-sized busi­ness­es, though respon­si­bil­i­ties will be dif­fer­ent. “The hier­ar­chy is pret­ty flat between them,” he says. “If peo­ple are talk­ing to the COO, they think they’re get­ting through to the CEO as well because they work so close­ly togeth­er.”

“There are a lot of inter­est­ing lens­es on the dynam­ic of these rela­tion­ships,” says Cory Munch­bach, COO of Blue­Con­ic, a cus­tomer data plat­form with bases in the US and Europe. Munch­bach became COO at the com­pa­ny after grad­u­at­ing up the ranks. “I was employ­ee num­ber 17,” she says. For her, the rea­son her rela­tion­ship with CEO and com­pa­ny co-founder Bart Heil­bron works is the lev­el of trust between the two. 

Munch­bach hasn’t escaped the real­i­sa­tion that she, like Sand­berg and Claire Hugh­es John­son, who until April 2021 was COO at tech giant Stripe, are all women answer­ing to male CEOs. “You can look at this in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent ways,” she says. “On the one hand, you have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be in the room where it hap­pens. But we’re still not see­ing enough women get into the top seat.”

“They need to have a good work­ing rela­tion­ship but if it’s too close, there can be dif­fi­cul­ties with that,” cau­tions Sir Cary Coop­er, pro­fes­sor of organ­i­sa­tion­al psy­chol­o­gy at Alliance Man­ches­ter Busi­ness School. “If the COO is in the pock­ets of the CEO, then you don’t get as effec­tive man­age­ment.” 

A good COO should be able to give unen­cum­bered feed­back, rather than slav­ish­ly, syco­phan­ti­cal­ly sup­port­ive words, Coop­er believes, point­ing to a polit­i­cal, rather than busi­ness-based, exam­ple of a dys­func­tion­al rela­tion­ship. “When we saw Boris John­son and Dominic Raab going on the air­waves all the time, he was a COO in some sense,” he says. “Some­one need­ed to let this man know his behav­iour was not appro­pri­ate.”

For Munch­bach, the abil­i­ty to speak truth to pow­er is cru­cial. “At the end of the day, we can have a very strong dis­agree­ment, but know­ing we’re approach­ing it from a com­pa­ny-first per­spec­tive,” she says. 

The importance of the CEO-COO relationship

Divi­sion of labour is also impor­tant in the CEO-COO rela­tion­ship. The strongest COOs are inde­pen­dent and able to put their own mark on a com­pa­ny, while not con­tra­dict­ing the CEO’s out­put. 

They’re often seen as a chief of staff, or giv­en a spe­cif­ic respon­si­bil­i­ty – in Sandberg’s case, she was tasked with keep­ing the gov­ern­ments and politi­cians reg­u­lar­ly mon­i­tor­ing Meta onside. “They need to give feed­back on how the oper­a­tions are actu­al­ly going,” says Coop­er. “If one role is more strate­gic, and the oth­er is more oper­a­tional, there have to be clear lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the two, and unen­cum­bered feed­back.”

While every CEO-COO rela­tion­ship is dif­fer­ent, Coop­er believes the strongest ones place their CEO at the crux of exter­nal engage­ment, while the COO is more focused on inter­nal oper­a­tions. “As a CEO, you’re deal­ing with all the stake­hold­ers, but you have to know what’s going on and trust your oper­a­tions per­son that they will deliv­er, and are deliv­er­ing, to enable you to do strate­gic stuff with the board, or be an exter­nal rela­tions per­son,” he says.

And COOs need a high emo­tion­al IQ to be able to han­dle tricky inter­nal oper­a­tions – and to rein in the CEO on occa­sion, or to tell them no. “You need to be val­ued and trust­ed on your own lev­el of com­pe­tence, to the extent the CEO is pre­pared to take feed­back from you,” says Coop­er. 

Yet COOs also have to check their ego at the door. While it’s inevitable that any­one hold­ing a job start­ing with a “C” will want to be in the C‑suite, and even­tu­al­ly lead it one day, they need to recog­nise who is in charge. Sandberg’s high media pro­file, and her will­ing­ness to speak on sub­jects that Zucker­berg tried to shy away from, might have caused ten­sion between the two. 

“Good lead­er­ship teams are often dou­ble acts,” says Stern. And in see­ing how one duo broke up, oth­er exec­u­tives can avoid the same pit­falls. In terms of mod­els to fol­low, Munch­bach rec­om­mends a three-pronged approach: CEOs need to think about why they’re bring­ing in a COO, and there­fore be aware of their short­com­ings. They need to trust that per­son. And they need to under­stand it’s a part­ner­ship. “When the rub­ber hits the road, it is the two of you in the room fig­ur­ing out ‘what are we going to do about a reces­sion?’,” she says. “The hard choic­es are made between us.”