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In this episode of the Modern Business Operations podcast, Steve Hufford, Managing Director and COO at Raymond James Investment Banking, sits down with host Briana Okyere to discuss the importance of having mentors, as well as AI’s potential for replacing managerial roles.
What should you do when you find yourself in a management position, with no training on how to manage people? It’s a common dilemma; people who stand out as individual contributors often get promoted into a role where their job suddenly requires a new set of skills.
Steve Hufford, Managing Director and COO at Raymond James Investment Banking, found himself in such a position. For him, though, it was an organic and gradual transition. As a lawyer working on M&A projects, he increasingly had to work with and manage multiple teams of people. “I've sort of migrated from being a doer of deals, to being an organizer of deals, to being kind of a manager of deals, to being a manager of people who do deals,” he told Briana Okyere, Tonkean’s community lead and co-host of the Modern Business Operations podcast.
In addition to his own learned experience, Hufford gleaned a great deal about management by absorbing strong mentorship. And he came to an overarching principle—that it’s important to be relational with people when you’re in a management role. He says you need to show that you care about the decisions you make that affect people and be willing to follow up and change course if need be.
Steve says that a lot of what he does involves resource allocation. It’s a tough place to be, because often there are two parties, A and B, who want the same thing, and you have to be the heavy. Here are several simple rules he uses to guide those decisions:
Steve and Brianna get more specific by talking about the role of the COO, specifically.
Steve believes a major role of the COO is to provide a counterbalance to the CEO, especially in entrepreneurial companies. Where CEOs in those kinds of companies are often full of passion and possess strong vision, that passion can result in a lot of movement, and the resulting energy may be frenetic. The COO can bring complementary patience and discipline to an organization.
They’re also often a sort of emissary between the CEO and the rest of the organization, so they need to have trusting and trustful relationships with both.
Plus, at a time of increasing volatility in the world writ large and also within the tech sector, strong COOs can provide “ballast” in the form of wisdom and discernment.
To the question of how AI might usurp managerial roles: Steve parses machine tasks from human tasks. "I'm sure [AI] has lots of applications for maybe some of the more rote tasks that get done in the business world day after day," he says. "But my gut also tells me that at least it'll be a long time before it incorporates wisdom and discernment."
Hear all the details of this conversation by listening to the whole episode!
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