Trust is key when
selecting ‘second banana’
for your business

A friend of mine owns a business, a very successful retail operation operating mainly through mail order and Web site sales.

His distribution center is located right on the route I use for my exercise routine, so we often have the chance to talk about the economy, about marketing and business structure, and sometimes (gulp), even politics.

I haven’t seen him in a few months. But I have seen his car. It has been in the parking lot outside his office every day, Monday through Sunday, while he has been inside working.

Most people who run smaller businesses have had this kind of experience. When they had to, they worked nights, weekends — whatever it took.

Still, we humans are, well, only human, and we cannot take this kind of mental and physical punishment forever. When a business requires that kind of effort, with no end in sight, it is almost always telling us that we need some help.

Help can come in a variety of ways, depending on the size and nature of the business. In smaller businesses, sometimes family and friends can pitch in, at least for a while. And part-time or temporary hires and even consultants can sometimes help get things back under control.

Temporary fixes are fine, but there are very few businesses that will not benefit mightily from having a full-time “go to” player, someone to share the boss’s workload. Every business, small or large, needs someone to make some or all of the day-to-day decisions so that the business manager can work on other stuff — or just get some needed rest and recuperation.

There are a lot of different titles used to describe this kind of person. The U.S. Navy calls them executive officers. Police and firefighters have watch commanders. “Second banana,” my personal favorite, is a still-used show business term left over from the days of vaudeville and burlesque. It means the supporting player or straight man in an act, the person that makes it possible for the headliner, or top banana, to be a star. And that really defines the job in a business setting, too.

Today’s large corporations are increasingly finding it necessary to identify a top executive as chief operating officer, or COO. He or she is the go-to person who runs the day-to-day operations while the chief executive officer (CEO) sets the company’s course and makes the strategic decisions.

Like any good second banana, the COO has to remember that it is the CEO who is the star. That is just one of the necessary qualifications for a good COO. A book scheduled to be published later this year, “Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO,” provides a portrait of the successful second banana and lists the virtues and characteristics needed for the job.

It wasn’t easy compiling such a list. The authors, Nathan Bennett of the Georgia Tech School of Business and Stephen A. Miles of the Heidrick & Struggles consulting firm, interviewed a large number of corporate COOs and summarized their findings in an article in the May edition of the Harvard Business Review.

What they found was that “when you start to examine COOs as a class, one thing immediately becomes clear: There are almost no constants.” Each company defines and structures the COO position to suit its needs, and often, the work is further shaped by the skills and strengths of the person taking on the job.

The authors eventually identified seven kinds of COO: executor, change agent, mentor, complement, partner, heir apparent and MVP. These categories provide valuable insight into management structure in any business organization, but are probably more relevant to larger corporations. Smaller companies should probably concentrate on one crucial characteristic: trust. According to the authors, “The single element most critical to the success of a CEO-COO pairing, we quickly saw, is the level of trust between the two individuals.”

When a smaller business needs to select a person to share some of the CEO’s workload, the same level of trust has to be there. Because the boss in a smaller business is so often dealing with inexperienced people, though, the nature of that trust has to be defined.

A good place to start is to make it clear that honesty is valued more highly than a mistake-free record. The next step is to help the person standing in for the manager learn to recognize when he is in over his head, defer a decision if at all possible and communicate the problem accurately to the boss.

With those steps, and some patience, you will eventually develop a second banana who can help you find your way to stardom, or at least allow you to get a life.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.