In a growing church or nonprofit, there is usually one person who becomes the place where everything meets.
Questions come to that person. Problems wait for that person. Departments communicate through that person. When something falls between the cracks, that person catches it. When no one is sure who should make a decision, everyone looks in that person’s direction.
In many organizations, that person is the senior leader.
At first, this arrangement may work. The organization is small, communication is informal, and the leader is close enough to the work to keep everything moving. But as the mission grows, the number of people, programs, decisions, and responsibilities grows with it.
Eventually, the senior leader becomes both the leader of the organization and its central traffic controller.
That is usually when the organization begins to feel stuck.
The problem may not be that the leader is incapable. The organization may be missing a leadership function that someone needs to provide.
It may need the function of a chief operating officer, even if it cannot hire one.
The Work Someone Must Do
When we hear the title “chief operating officer,” we may picture a large corporation with executive offices and a substantial payroll. Most churches and nonprofits will never employ someone with that title.
But every growing organization eventually needs someone to perform at least some of that work.
A Bridgespan study involving 165 nonprofit COOs identified three important roles these leaders frequently play. They serve as an organizational first responder, a copilot to the chief executive, and a connector across the organization.
Those responsibilities exist whether or not someone has been formally assigned to carry them.
Someone must help resolve the unexpected problems that interrupt the organization’s work. Someone must help the senior leader think through decisions and translate direction into action. Someone must connect people and departments that naturally drift into separate areas of responsibility.
If no one is assigned those functions, they usually fall back on the senior leader.
That is how capable leaders become overloaded. They are not only setting direction, protecting the mission, developing people, and representing the organization. They are also settling scheduling conflicts, checking whether assignments were completed, connecting departments, and responding to the latest operational surprise.
The leader is doing two jobs, even though the organization may only recognize one of them.
The Organizational First Responder
Every organization has unexpected problems.
A staff member calls in sick. A vendor misses a deadline. A facility problem interrupts the day. Two departments make conflicting plans. A process that worked six months ago suddenly stops working.
Someone has to respond.
Bridgespan found that nonprofit COOs spent approximately one-quarter of their time reacting to urgent organizational issues. That tells us something important. Even in well-led organizations, a significant amount of operational leadership involves handling the unexpected.
In smaller organizations, the senior leader often becomes the automatic first responder.
This creates two problems. First, it repeatedly pulls the leader away from work that only the leader can do. Second, it teaches everyone else that unexpected problems should move upward rather than being resolved at the appropriate level.
A healthier organization establishes clear decision boundaries. Team members know what they can solve, what requires consultation, and what truly needs the senior leader’s involvement.
The goal is not to prevent the leader from knowing what is happening. The goal is to keep every issue from requiring the leader’s direct intervention.
The Executive Copilot
Senior leadership can be surprisingly lonely.
Leaders are expected to make good decisions, anticipate consequences, maintain confidence, and provide direction. Yet they may have very few people with whom they can openly work through the complexities behind those decisions.
Every senior leader needs someone who can serve as a trusted thinking partner.
A good copilot does more than agree with the leader. This person asks questions, notices gaps, tests assumptions, and helps convert vision into practical next steps. The copilot understands both where the organization is going and what it will take to get there.
For some organizations, this may be an executive pastor, operations director, associate director, chief of staff, or senior administrator. In a smaller organization, it might be a capable staff member whose role has been expanded or a trusted board officer who understands the difference between support and interference.
The title matters less than the function.
The senior leader needs someone who can help answer two questions: “Are we making the right decision?” and “Can our organization actually carry it out?”
Vision without operational understanding creates frustration. Operational activity without vision creates drift. The copilot helps hold the two together.
The Connector Across the Organization
As organizations grow, communication becomes more difficult.
People become focused on their own areas. Staff members may assume someone else has passed along important information. One department makes a decision without realizing how it affects another. Everyone can be working hard while the organization slowly becomes disconnected.
This is how silos form.
Silos are not always created by selfishness or poor attitudes. They often develop because no one has been given responsibility for connecting the work.
Someone needs to see across the organization. Someone must notice when one team’s plans affect another team, when two projects are competing for the same resources, or when a decision has not reached everyone who needs to act on it.
In many smaller organizations, the senior leader fills this role by carrying the entire organization in his or her head.
That may work temporarily, but it creates dangerous dependence. If the senior leader must personally connect every part of the organization, communication will eventually slow down and important details will be missed.
Connection needs to become part of the system.
That may happen through a weekly leadership meeting, shared planning tools, written decisions, clearly assigned responsibilities, or a designated person who coordinates cross-functional work. Usually, it requires some combination of people and rhythm.
You May Not Need the Position, but You Need the Function
The answer is not necessarily to hire a COO.
For many churches and nonprofits, that would be unrealistic. The organization may not have the budget, workload, or complexity to justify another executive position.
The better question is this:
Who is currently performing these functions?
Who responds when an operational issue crosses departmental lines? Who helps the senior leader think through complex decisions? Who connects priorities across the organization? Who makes sure a decision becomes action?
If the answer to every question is the senior leader, the organization has identified an important weakness.
The functions can be distributed. One person may coordinate operations while another serves as the leader’s strategic thinking partner. A leadership team may share responsibility for cross-functional communication. A dependable operating rhythm may handle some of the work that currently depends on individual follow-up.
But the functions must be made visible.
If they remain unnamed, they will continue returning to the person who cares enough to catch them.
Leadership Is Not Carrying Everything
We sometimes confuse leadership with personal responsibility for everything that happens.
Strong leaders do accept responsibility for the organization, but that does not mean they must personally carry every operational burden. One of the leader’s most important responsibilities is building an organization in which responsibility can be shared.
That requires trust, clarity, and the willingness to let other people lead.
It also requires us to recognize that an overloaded senior leader is not always a sign of a personal time-management problem. It may be evidence that the organization has failed to assign essential leadership functions.
Your church or nonprofit may never employ a chief operating officer. It may never need the title, the office, or the executive salary.
But as the mission grows, someone must help respond to organizational problems, serve as a copilot to the senior leader, and connect the work across the organization.
The question is not whether those functions exist.
The question is whether you will assign them intentionally or continue allowing them to accumulate on the shoulders of one leader.
Research informing this article: How COOs Keep Their Nonprofits Running Smoothly, Bridgespan.