Early in my time at Lyra, our CEO came to me with a vision: a high school diploma endorsement that would recognize climate literacy. Something that had never existed anywhere in the country.

The vision was clear. The path was not.

There was no legislation. No brand. No partner network. No microgrant infrastructure. No student recognition process. No playbook. Just a compelling idea and a startup-sized team.

My job in that moment wasn't to execute the vision. It was to translate it. To take something that lived in the realm of possibility and convert it into workstreams, owners, timelines, and decisions that real people could actually act on.

Execution is doing the thing. Translation is figuring out what the thing actually is.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

I've spent nearly 20 years in operations and finance roles across nonprofit, government, and social enterprise. The most underrated skill in the COO seat isn't project management or financial modeling or even stakeholder management, as important as all of those are.

It's the ability to sit with a CEO's ambition — which is often half-formed and ahead of what the organization can currently hold — and translate it into something the team can build toward without losing the essence of what made the idea worth pursuing in the first place.

That requires a specific set of moves:

  1. Ask the question the CEO hasn't asked yet. What does success look like in 18 months, specifically? What has to be true for this to work? What are we assuming that we haven't tested? The COO's job is to pressure-test the vision before the organization commits resources to it. Not to poke holes, but to make the idea structurally sound.
  2. Name the workstreams before you assign them. One of the most disorienting things about early-stage work is that everything feels urgent and nothing feels bounded. Part of translation is simply naming the discrete threads of work so the team can see what they're holding and make conscious choices about sequencing and ownership.
  3. Hold the original intent when things get complicated. Execution inevitably generates noise: obstacles, pivots, competing priorities, stakeholder feedback pulling in different directions. The COO has to keep asking: are we still building the thing we set out to build? If not, was that a good decision or drift?

Back to the Seal of Climate Literacy.

Three years after that first conversation, Colorado graduated its first 425 Seal recipients — one year following legislation. Young people who now carry a credential that signals scientific and civic readiness for the challenges of their generation.

That's not the end of the story. With policy and operational infrastructure in place, Colorado is on track to triple that number. The work has a foundation built for long-term execution, not just a promising pilot.

And it's spreading. The Seal is now being considered legislatively and through departments of education in four other states, with the promise of many more. What started as one compelling idea in one state is becoming a national movement.

That's the point. Movement building doesn't happen because someone had a great idea. It happens because someone did the unglamorous work of turning that idea into infrastructure: legislation, policy, partner networks, measurement systems, funding mechanisms that can sustain and replicate long after the original energy of the launch has faded.

That's the COO's real job. Translation. And then building something durable enough that the translation keeps happening without you.