Ask ten business leaders what their COO actually does, and you'll get ten different
answers. At one company, the COO carries the factory on their back. At another, they
play the role of strategic partner. At a third, they drive a turnaround. The COO role is
the least standardised position in the entire leadership team, because its content is
always shaped by the CEO's personality and whatever stage of growth the company
happens to be in. Where a CFO's or CTO's remit builds around a relatively well-
defined professional discipline, whoever takes the COO chair has their job
description rewritten from scratch at every company. That same flexibility is exactly
what makes the role so hard to pin down for anyone trying to understand it from the
outside, from a job interview or an org chart alone.

Seven faces, one job title

According to a classic Harvard Business Review study by Nathan Bennett and
Stephen Miles, the COO is essentially the organisation's second-in-command, whose
scope for action flows directly from the CEO's strategic intent. The same research
identifies seven distinct archetypes: the Executor, who takes on the burden of day-to-
day operations; the Change Agent, who leads the company through a turnaround;
the Mentor, who fills the gap in organisational experience beside a young founder;
the Other Half, who complements the CEO's personality; the Partner, who acts as an
equal co-leader; the Heir Apparent, being groomed for the future CEO role; and the
MVP, promoted specifically to keep them from leaving.
Anyone who knows which archetype they've been hired for also knows what's really
expected of them in the first hundred days.

COO, managing director, or project manager?

In practice, the roles of COO, managing director, project manager and operations
manager are often blurred together, even though their decision-making horizons
couldn't be more different. The CEO owns the whole company on a three-to-ten-year
horizon; the COO, by comparison, focuses on one-to-three-year operational delivery,
with cross-functional authority. A project manager is given a mandate for a single,
clearly bounded task, while an operations manager is responsible for the day-to-day
safety of the physical infrastructure. The chief of staff, meanwhile, exists to speed up
the CEO's decision-making. All four roles are easy to conflate on an org chart, but in
day-to-day practice, it's precisely the difference in decision-making authority and
accountability that determines who can touch what in the middle of a crisis. If a
growing company puts someone in the COO chair too early, before the supporting
structures are mature enough, the role gets devalued and the person's time gets
swallowed up by daily firefighting.

A different weight in an SME than in a multinational

At a company with 50 to 250 employees, the COO exercises direct, tactical control:
they oversee bottlenecks, review performance metrics weekly, and take charge of
ERP or CRM rollouts. In this kind of environment, they often act as the bridge
between the founder-owner's vision and day-to-day execution.
In an organisation of more than 250 people, the role becomes far more matrixed: the
COO is responsible for keeping the senior leadership team in sync, and at a strategic
level, for reshaping the operating model during acquisitions. Here, they're no longer
personally solving the bottleneck, they're building the system that lets functional
directors solve it in their place.

Where good COOs come from

The role demands strategic vision, cross-functional agility and strong emotional
intelligence all at once, since the COO needs to work in close symbiosis with the
CEO. An engineering, economics or finance degree is the most common starting
point, often paired with an MBA and a Lean Six Sigma qualification. Careers tend to
arrive at this point from one of three directions: supply chain and manufacturing,
strategy consulting, or finance. In Hungary, there's an added obstacle in the form of
the middle-management trap: according to the Central Statistical Office, a middle
manager spends 6.8 years in a role on average, simply because senior positions
rarely become vacant. Plenty of professionals in their mid-thirties to forties get stuck
as team leaders on a gross salary of HUF 1.2–1.8 million, while owner-directors aged
50 to 65 sit in their posts for decades, and the ladder simply never opens up above
them.

You can only manage what you measure

Where the CEO is judged by the market and by shareholders, the COO's
performance is measured by the stability of internal processes and how well the
operation scales. Modern measurement systems are built on balanced scorecards,
grouping data into four main categories: operational efficiency, financial discipline,
organisational metrics, and digital transformation. A COO who chases pure cost-
cutting can make the spreadsheet look great in the short term, but risks undermining
supply security and innovation over the long run — which is why modern
expectations now build in customer experience and employee satisfaction as well.

When AI, hybrid work and fragile supply chains all hit at once

The role has been thoroughly rewritten over the past three to five years. Generative
AI has made it the COO's job to embed data-driven decision-making and roll out
predictive maintenance on the production floor. According to Cameron Herold,
founder of the COO Alliance, for dispersed teams the operating leader's most
important mission is breaking down organisational silos and preserving unity at the
top, without resorting to micromanagement. Meanwhile, "just-in-time" logic has given
way in many places to a "just-in-case" mindset, where building in a buffer now takes
priority over pure cost minimisation, and Hungarian and Central European COOs are increasingly working on nearshoring strategies, outsourcing operations to nearby
countries instead of further afield.

What a COO earns today

On the Hungarian market, an SME-level Operations Manager earns a gross monthly
salary of HUF 1.2–1.8 million, equivalent to roughly HUF 18 million a year. At a mid-
sized or large company, an Operations Director or COO already earns a monthly
salary above HUF 2–3.8 million, or around HUF 35 million a year. At regional level,
the median for a C-level COO sits at roughly €91,000 a year, while in Western
Europe, Luxembourg or the DACH region, annual salaries typically range from
€90,000 to €150,000. High inflation has put real wages under pressure for Hungary's
middle-management tier, which is fuelling a growing willingness to move abroad.

When there's only days to spare: enter the interim COO

Four situations tend to recur: the sudden departure of an existing COO, when
leadership needs to change hands within days; the rapid turnaround of a loss-
making, underperforming plant; ramping up new production capacity or a new
market; and post-acquisition integration, when two operating models need to be
brought together. In every one of these situations, hiring a permanent COO would
simply be too slow: an interim COO can be deployed within 24 to 72 hours, compared
with the four-to-six-month recruitment process for a permanent hire. The engagement
typically unfolds in three phases: the first 1 to 30 days cover assessment and
stabilisation, days 31 to 90 focus on executing structural programmes, and after day
90 comes knowledge transfer and succession planning. Fees are charged on a day-
rate basis, in exchange for which the client saves on recruitment costs, long-term
salary overheads, and severance risk. It's worth running the numbers.

The COO role and interim management are ultimately built on the same foundation:
both reward the ability to size up a complicated operation quickly and act on it
straight away. That kind of practical judgement is honed over years, across many
different organisations, it's rarely something you can pick up in a single role. If your
company has just lost its COO, or you're looking for an experienced professional to
lead a transformation, the team at Interim Kft. brings exactly this kind of ready-to-
deploy expertise into the organisation.

Frequently asked questions

What's the main job of a chief operating officer (COO) at a company?
The COO is responsible for coordinating day-to-day operations and putting the
CEO's strategic intent into practice through cross-functional leadership. The exact job
varies by company: sometimes they run manufacturing, sometimes they manage a
crisis, and sometimes they act as a strategic partner making decisions alongside the
CEO. The precise content is always shaped by the company's stage of development
and the CEO's personality.

How does the COO's role differ from a project manager's?

The COO works on a one-to-three-year operational horizon and oversees the running
of the entire organisation with cross-functional authority. A project manager, by
contrast, is given a mandate for a single, clearly bounded task, with a narrower scope
of decision-making. The two are easily conflated on an org chart, but their areas of
accountability are fundamentally different. This becomes clear during a post-
acquisition integration: the COO leads the whole thing, while the project manager
only owns a slice of it.

What archetypes exist within the COO role?

Research by Nathan Bennett and Stephen Miles identifies seven COO archetypes:
the Executor, the Change Agent, the Mentor, the Other Half, the Partner, the Heir
Apparent, and the MVP. Each comes with different expectations and a different
mandate, which is why it needs to be clear within the first hundred days which of
these roles a leader has actually been hired to fill.

How much does a COO earn in Hungary?

An SME-level Operations Manager earns a gross monthly salary of HUF 1.2–1.8
million, while a COO at a large company earns upwards of HUF 2–3.8 million a
month. At regional level, the median for a C-level COO is roughly €91,000 a year,
while salaries in Western Europe typically range from €90,000 to €150,000.

When is it worth hiring an interim COO?

An interim COO typically helps in four recurring situations: the sudden departure of
an existing leader, the rapid turnaround of an underperforming plant, ramping up new
capacity, and post-acquisition integration. An interim specialist can be deployed
within 24 to 72 hours, while hiring a permanent COO takes a four-to-six-month
recruitment process, too slow a solution in a crisis.