What A Chief Of Staff Actually Does

The chief of staff has become a standard appointment in growing companies, borrowed from government and the military. It is also the role most likely to be created without anyone writing down what it is for.

What the role is

At its most useful, a chief of staff extends an executive's capacity to attend to things. They run the operating rhythm — the meetings, the planning cycle, the follow-through — and they take on the problems that cross several functions and therefore belong to none of them.

The defining characteristic is that the work is the principal's work. A chief of staff does not own a function. They own whatever the principal cannot get to.

What it is not

It is not an executive assistant with a better title. Scheduling and inbox management are a different job, and conflating them wastes both.

It is not a deputy. A chief of staff generally has no independent authority over the executives whose work they coordinate, which is precisely the tension that makes the role difficult.

Why it fails

The common failure is ambiguity. Functional leaders cannot tell whether an instruction relayed by the chief of staff carries the principal's authority or the chief of staff's opinion. Resentment follows quickly.

The fix is explicit: the executive states publicly what the chief of staff is empowered to decide and what they are merely coordinating, and then honours that distinction rather than undercutting it in private conversations.

The second failure

The role can become permanent bottleneck. If everything routes through the chief of staff, the executive's access narrows to a single channel and the organization learns to work the channel rather than the problem.

How to structure it

Give it a term — two years is common — with a defined next step. Write down the decisions it may take. Review it after six months, because the role that was needed at the start is rarely the role that is needed later.