Building the COO Pipeline: How India's Best Operators Develop the Skills to Lead at Scale

There is a story that circulates, in slightly different versions, among the operations leadership community in India. A large Indian conglomerate — the details vary depending on who is telling the story — decided to appoint an outsider as COO of one of its core manufacturing businesses. The candidate had impeccable credentials: an IIT degree, a top-tier MBA, a decade at a global management consultancy advising manufacturers, and a stint running operations at a mid-sized industrial business. The board was delighted with the hire.

Eighteen months later, the appointment had quietly unravelled. Not because the executive lacked intelligence or commitment. But because the specific combination of capabilities that the role required — a deep understanding of how shop-floor culture actually works, built from years of personal presence on the factory floor; the ability to command the respect of experienced plant managers who had been operating these facilities for decades; the intuition for when a production problem requires immediate escalation and when it can be solved at the line level — these things cannot be acquired in a consulting career, however distinguished. They are built only through sustained operational experience.

The story illustrates a truth that is not fashionable to state but that every serious student of operations leadership acknowledges: the COO role is, more than almost any other C-suite position, a function of accumulated experience. You cannot shortcut the journey. You can accelerate it, structure it better, supplement it with formal education and mentorship — but the core of the development process involves doing operations at progressively higher levels of complexity and scale, and learning from the inevitable difficulties that entails.

India's industrial companies face a serious challenge in this respect. The pipeline of executives with the depth of operational experience required to lead complex manufacturing and supply chain operations at scale is thin. It is getting thinner, not thicker, as alternative career paths in technology, financial services and consulting pull talented graduates away from manufacturing operations careers. And the demands being placed on the COO role are growing at exactly the moment when the pipeline is most stretched.

The Making of an Operations Leader: The Formative Years

In conversations with India's most admired COOs — executives at Tata Steel, L&T, Mahindra, Bajaj Auto, JSW, Asian Paints and others — a set of formative experiences emerges with striking consistency. These are not the kind of experiences that appear as bullet points on a CV. They are the moments and challenges that shaped how these executives understand operations, organisations and leadership.

Deep functional apprenticeship. Almost without exception, India's best operations leaders spent formative years — typically three to seven, sometimes more — deeply embedded in a single functional domain: production engineering, quality management, supply chain or maintenance. This depth, built before the career path turns toward general management, creates the domain credibility that makes it possible to lead technical specialists as a COO. The executive who has personally analysed a quality failure in a stamping line, or traced the root cause of a logistics delay through three tiers of suppliers, has a fundamentally different credibility with their operations team than the one who has not.

Exposure to operational difficulty. The COOs who describe their most formative experiences rarely mention smooth successes. They recall plant turnarounds where productivity had collapsed and morale was worse. They describe supply chain crises — a key supplier going bankrupt, a port closure, a sudden demand spike — that had to be managed without the support structures that come with a stable environment. Difficulty, when survived and learned from, builds the operational judgment that no classroom can provide.

Cross-functional and cross-geographical rotation. The operations leader who has spent an entire career in a single factory has deep knowledge of that factory and limited ability to generalise. The executives who develop into COOs are almost always those who rotated across multiple facilities, multiple supply chain roles, and in the best cases multiple geographies. This breadth creates the system-level thinking that distinguishes a COO from a plant manager.

"Every operations leader I admire deeply has a story about a time they faced a situation they had never faced before, had no playbook for, and had to figure out in real time. That experience — of operating without a net — is irreplaceable. The companies that develop great COOs are the ones that put promising people in positions where they have to stretch like that." — Group COO, Indian engineering conglomerate, Gladwin International Leadership Dialogue, October 2025.

The Role of Formal Education in Operations Leadership

The relationship between formal education and operations leadership effectiveness in India is more complex than either the academic establishment or the shop-floor traditionalists would like to acknowledge. On one hand, the analytical and conceptual frameworks provided by high-quality management education — supply chain design, operations research, financial management, organisational behaviour — are genuinely useful for operations leaders operating at the COO level. On the other hand, the operations discipline has a practical, empirical character that resists pure academisation.

India's IIMs and IITs have produced many of the country's best operations leaders, providing rigorous analytical foundations that inform their operational decision-making. The Indian Institutes of Management's operations management faculty — at IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta in particular — includes researchers who engage seriously with practical operational challenges and who have built meaningful relationships with the industrial community.

The gap that formal education leaves: What India's management education system has historically been less good at is providing deep exposure to operational reality. Case studies and simulations are useful learning tools, but they cannot replicate the sensory and social complexity of managing a real manufacturing operation. Several of India's forward-thinking industrial companies have responded to this gap by building partnerships with educational institutions that include immersive factory-floor placements — giving students direct experience of operational management before they graduate and before the career pressure to choose the most prestigious and lucrative option takes hold.

Specialised executive education: For mid-career operations leaders, the question is less about foundational education and more about targeted capability development in areas where their experience base has gaps. Programmes offered by the Manufacturing Leadership Institute at IIM Ahmedabad, the Advanced Operations Management programme at ISB Hyderabad, and international programmes at MIT's Leaders for Global Operations, Cambridge's Manufacturing Leadership programme and INSEAD's Operations Management series are increasingly sought by ambitious Indian operations leaders and by companies investing in their development.

The Competencies That Separate COOs from Plant Managers

The transition from plant manager to COO-level executive requires the development of several competencies that are not automatically developed through operational experience, however rich. Understanding what these competencies are — and actively developing them — is essential for operations leaders who aspire to the top operational roles.

Commercial and financial literacy. The plant manager's world is defined by production metrics: throughput, quality, yield, cost per unit. The COO's world requires understanding how operational decisions affect P&L performance, balance sheet strength, cash flow and competitive positioning. This means understanding pricing dynamics, customer economics, working capital management and investment evaluation — domains that operational experience alone does not deliver. COO candidates who can speak fluently about how operational improvement translates into shareholder value creation are consistently more compelling to boards than those who cannot.

Strategic communications and stakeholder management. The COO operates at the intersection of the executive committee, the board, major customers, key suppliers and a large and diverse workforce. The ability to communicate operational complexity clearly and persuasively to audiences with varying levels of technical knowledge — to translate shop-floor reality for the board, and board-level strategic intent for the shop floor — is a skill that requires deliberate development. Operations leaders who struggle to communicate beyond their own functional community often stall below the COO level regardless of their operational capability.

People development and succession. The mark of a great COO is not only what they personally deliver — it is the talent they develop beneath them. The best operations leaders build deep benches: operations managers who are capable of stepping into larger roles, shift supervisors who can become plant managers, young engineers who can become the COOs of the next decade. This requires an investment of time and attention in coaching, feedback, assignment design and career advocacy that does not come naturally to executives who rose through the ranks primarily as individual contributors.

Digital and technology fluency. As detailed elsewhere in this series, the deployment of AI, IoT and advanced analytics in manufacturing operations is now a core component of the COO mandate. Operations leaders who have not made a personal investment in understanding these technologies — not at an engineering level, but at the level of operational application and business value — are at a growing disadvantage. The good news is that digital fluency is a competency that can be developed relatively quickly with the right exposure and intent.

How India's Best Industrial Companies Are Building the Pipeline

Several of India's leading industrial companies have recognised the COO pipeline challenge and are taking deliberate steps to address it. Their approaches offer a model for the broader industrial community.

Tata Steel's Graduate Engineer Trainee programme is one of India's oldest and most respected industrial talent development systems, placing hundreds of engineering graduates each year into structured rotational assignments across steelmaking, rolling, utilities, maintenance and supply chain. The programme is explicitly designed to build the breadth of exposure that distinguishes future leaders from functional specialists — and a significant proportion of Tata Steel's current senior operations leadership came through this pipeline.

Mahindra's Leadership Development programme identifies high-potential operations managers at the M4-M5 level (roughly General Manager to Senior Vice President) and provides them with a structured eighteen-month development experience that combines a business school residential module, a cross-functional project, an international operations visit and formal mentorship from a senior executive. The programme has a direct connection to succession planning, with most of its alumni advancing to the next level within three years.

L&T's Operations Leadership Academy focuses specifically on building the transition capabilities that operations experts need as they move toward enterprise leadership — commercial acumen, financial literacy, strategic communication and board-level engagement skills. It recognises that the technical depth that characterises L&T's engineering talent base needs to be supplemented with a different kind of capability to produce COO-calibre leaders.

Bajaj Auto's international benchmarking programme sends promising operations managers to Japan, Germany and the US to spend time observing and learning from world-class manufacturing operations. These visits are structured as learning assignments, not tourism — participants return with a specific analytical project to complete that applies global insights to a Bajaj operational challenge. The programme has been credited with introducing the Toyota Production System insights that have underpinned Bajaj's lean manufacturing journey.

The Individual's Role in Their Own Development

Company development programmes are necessary but not sufficient. The operations leaders who develop into COOs are almost always those who take personal responsibility for their own development — who seek out difficult assignments rather than comfortable ones, who invest in self-education beyond what their employer funds, who build relationships with peers and mentors who challenge and extend their thinking.

The most consistent advice that Gladwin International receives from India's successful COOs when we ask what made the difference in their development is some version of: seek out the hard problems. The assignments that carry the greatest development value are rarely the most comfortable or prestigious. They are the turnarounds, the start-ups, the crises — the operational challenges that require you to reach beyond your current capability.

India's industrial moment demands a generation of COOs with capabilities that are genuinely rare and genuinely needed. Building that generation — through deliberate company investment, through the right formal education, and through individual commitment to development that goes beyond the comfortable — is not merely a talent management exercise. It is one of the most important investments that India's industrial community can make in its own future.