The expendables: Is the COO position becoming redundant in India? | Company News

What does this say about the COO’s position? Does India Inc think it is becoming redundant?

Not entirely, and not in every sector, though the COO position is being reassessed as organisational structures and leadership roles get recalibrated.

“The current thinking among leaders and members of boards is to keep an organisation flat and nimble to make decisions faster and be more agile than ever before,” says Aditya Narayan Mishra, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, CIEL HR, a recruitment agency.

According to CIEL HR, there are currently more than 8,000 openings for chief experience officer (CXO) across companies in sectors such as consulting, telecommunications, manufacturing, IT, and healthcare. Of these, barely 12 per cent are for the COO’s role. (CXO encompasses several C-suite positions such as COO, chief financial officer or CFO, chief technology officer or CTO, and chief accounting officer or CAO.)

“Rather, specialised CXO roles are being created to connote the new order of expertise,” says Mishra. The specialised CXO roles would be chief information security officer (CISO), chief data officer (CDO) and chief innovation officer (CIO), besides the usual CFO, CTO, chief marketing officer (CMO), chief human resources officer (CHRO), or heads of supply chain, administration, and sales. 

Sometimes, the COO’s role gets merged with or elevated to the CEO’s position as a strategic move, says Rajesh P, Vice President and head of HR at Chennai-headquartered consumer goods firm, CavinKare. “Thanks to analytics and management dashboards, CEOs today have ready and better insights into the business. Also, more organisations are embracing flatter structures, eliminating multiple layers,” he says. 

Focused functions

Younger companies, says Mishra, tend to have their CXOs in the age group of 30 to 40. “For this cohort, COO is not an appealing title anymore.” Therefore, companies want to be specific in defining the roles, rather than combining a few functions, regions or lines of business under one person.

Among traditional conglomerates, too, there are those that created an overarching COO position, sometimes temporarily, and then went for a more focused approach. ITC is a case in point.

Sanjiv Puri, ITC’s first COO, held the position between 2016 and 2017, when succession planning was in the works. He became Managing Director in 2018 and Chairman in May 2019. The conglomerate has not had a COO since.

However, in the last three to four years, ITC has formed market-aligned clusters in the foods business: Biscuits and cakes, dairy and beverage, staples and adjacencies, snacks, chocolates, coffee, and confectionery. Each of these clusters is led by a COO.

To write off or not?

There are firms that discontinued the COO’s position, only to revive it later. 

Wipro, for instance, did not have a COO for more than a year after BM Bhanumurthy retired in July 2021. But in November 2022, the Bengaluru-headquartered IT firm appointed Amit Choudhary to the position amid reorganisation under Thierry Delaporte, who was CEO until his resignation this April.

In 2022, as part of its top management restructuring, HCLTech appointed Rahul Singh as COO-corporate functions, putting him in charge of people, IT, marketing, risk and compliance, and administration. And in 2023, Tech Mahindra appointed Atul Soneja as COO amid a leadership change that put Mohit Joshi, an Infosys veteran, at the helm.

The IT industry has used the role of COO fluidly. “Most of the time, the role, as the designation…