“Chief Of Staff” Deep Dive: The Person To Solve It All

First, let's get a few formal characteristics out of the way. While those are important to consider when designing the role, it is worth keeping in mind that all of them only matter in a certain context. More on this—below.

• The level and seniority. Not all chiefs of staff must be able to advise the kings. Sometimes a chief of staff can be more junior when the organization is well established and/or the role is better defined. On the other hand, when the role entails more ambiguity, requires strategic lenses, or calls for external presence (e.g. communication with the press or regulation authorities), you might have to look for a more senior person with the appropriate level of experience and powerful executive presence.
• The background is yet another variable that only carries weight in the context. For some companies the industry knowledge is a must, for others—it’s all about the soft skills, such as emotional intelligence (EQ), ability to connect with people, superb communication skills, or being politically savvy. Often a chief of staff is hired to compliment the strengths and offset the weaknesses of the leader they support. For this reason, they can come from project management, HR (if the role’s emphasis is on people and talent management), public relations, marketing, sales, legal, finance, or administration. This “contextual” emphasis of the chief of staff background explains why many successful chiefs of staff found their path to corporate from their government and military careers.
• Finally, the title also largely depends on the size of your organization, its needs, the industry standard, and the emphasis of the role. Sometimes the role is actually called a Chief of Staff but more often than not it is something else (Business Operations Manager, Strategy Planning & Operations Manager, Technical Assistant, Director of Special Projects, Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Integration Officer—just to name a few). In some companies, a skilled Executive Admin Assistant (EA) performs most if not all of the essential chief of staff duties.

In his Chief of Staff book, Tyler Parris points out is that the title matters only to an extent but admits that sometimes you need a good title to be taken seriously. For instance, a good EA might be well qualified to be chief of staff but it will be harder for them to make their voice heard in the C-suite office without the appropriate title.

"Choosing a focus can help you craft a meaningful job description and choose an appropriate title.”—Chief of Staff

Universal Competencies

"You need a chief of staff with multiple competencies for the role to succeed, and the difference between a CEO’s needs and a department/function head’s needs lies in the emphasis and focus of these competencies.”—Chief of Staff

From his interviews, Parris identified the following competencies that seem to be largely applicable to the most successful chiefs of staff regardless of the context they need to operate in. We will review some of them below:

• Results orientation and anticipation. A good chief of staff needs to have a reputation for “getting stuff done.” Parris quotes Miranda Priestley from Devil Wears Prada (2006) who gave her executive assistants often insane tasks that they needed to translate, anticipate, and complete. And while in reality, most leaders are not as unreasonable in the details, they still need and require strong results and willingness to anticipate their requests, as well as the needs of their teams and organizations.

• Systems and process thinking. Seeing all the seemingly disjointed dots and organizational elements as a system and understanding how this system works is what makes a chief of staff an efficient funnel and filter that he or she is supposed to become.
• Political savvy. Organizations are comprised of individuals with different interests and authority levels. A chief of staff should be capable to navigate formal and informal power dynamics to advance leadership vision, translate and interpret it, collect feedback, all while ensuring that the goals are met.
• Coaching. A chief of staff should be able to help others through changes, guide and explain, listen and ask the right questions, challenge assumptions and the status quo.
• Managed ego or servant leadership. Regardless the title, a chief of staff is close to the leader and is representing him or her to the broader organization. This position can be tricky. Due to their proximity to the leader, a chief of staff might have a lot of power which they can exercise in good faith by acting as an advisor and a thought partner, representing the leader when the leader is not in the room, and helping to drive their vision to completion by establishing connections and bridges across the organization. On the other hand, there is a temptation to “impersonate” the leader and let personal biases influence the quality of advice and information being channeled to the leader for the final decision making. Focus on servant leadership can be a remedy to this temptation keeping the chief of staff unbiased and helping him or her to act in the best interests of the teams they serve.

Servant leadership comes last but just as uncertainty and volatility set the overall context in which the chief of staff role gets created, servant leadership defines whether a person will succeed in this role or not.

The title, qualification, background, hard skills, and soft skills vary across the board. You can learn and figure out the aspects of the job you are not yet good at. But one thing is clear—you cannot realize your full potential as a chief of staff without setting your ego aside and bringing the best foot forward for those who need you most—your leader and their organization.

Which brings me to a few unfortunate examples of when a chief of staff role failed.

When-It-Goes-Wrong Spectrum

The reasons why someone can succeed or fail in the chief of staff role sheds some light on the intricate interdependency between a chief of staff and the leader this chief of staff is supporting.

As we established in the previous sections of this article, the requirements to the chief of staff role derive from the context (organizational size, industry requirements, problems to be solved, etc.) and are often dependent on the leader’s personality (a more technical leader might choose a more people-oriented chief of staff, a visionary leader might look for a highly organized program manager, etc.).

At the end of the day, shaping this role is a shared responsibility between the person in the job (the chief of staff) and the person who creates the job (the leader).

But this is not all to it.

In Chief of Staff, Parris makes a note that a leader needs to allow their chief of staff to establish trust, make mistakes (it’s a steep learning curve), and take time to build relationships. To support the chief of staff, the leader needs to position him or her correctly within the organization and within the leadership team, clearly outlining their role and responsibilities. Without the leader’s ability to delegate, position the chief of staff, and bond with them, even the most competent individual will not make a good character match for the role.

Then, of course, sometimes a chief of staff is just not competent for the role.

This is why I see this as a spectrum. On the one side, a chief of staff fails because of his or her own fault, on the other—because of the leader’s fault. Most cases fall somewhere in between. Below are a few examples I witnessed in my career.

Example # 1. Chief of staff as a roadblock and a fog machine

A chief of staff can be well positioned by the leader but still fail to establish good relationships with his or her peers across the board and the rest of the leadership team. In my experience, this usually happens when a chief of staff fails to keep his or her ego in check. As discussed earlier, obtaining power by representing a powerful leader requires a lot of self-awareness and constant focus on servant leadership. Without both an individual in such omnipresent role as chief of staff risks to equate themselves with the leader they represent and start making unjustified demands and demonstrating defiant behavior. This doesn’t help to build trust capital across the organization jeopardizing the influence a chief of staff should exhibit. As a result, this individual will rely more on the authority of his or her title, resort to political games, manipulation, and intimidation.

Metaphorically speaking, instead of being a funnel, filter, and a bridge, this chief of staff will become a roadblock and a fog machine for the leader and their organization.

Example #2. Chief of staff as an overqualified PowerPoint creator

On the opposite side of the “spectrum”, we find a leader who is not ready to have a chief of staff, thus failing to set him or her for success and underutilizing his or her qualifications.

This can happen for many reasons. For instance, a leader might not have the right lenses to look through when deciding to hire a chief of staff (by the way, this is why Tyler Parris decided to write his Chief of Staff book). Or a new leader might “inherit” a chief of staff when stepping into a new role and is still figuring out what they are capable of doing. Finally, the leader might be on the learning curve about themselves—their own personality (what strengths they need to compliment and how, weaknesses to offset, etc.) or the role (how strategic vs. operational it is, what and how they should delegate, what emphases to put in, etc.).

"The executive’s unwillingness to delegate was the number-one reason that HR executives said they saw the chief of staff role fail to be effective.”—Chief of Staff

Whatever the reason, on this side of the “spectrum” the leader has a false idea or no idea at all on what to do with their chief of staff. Often this translates into using a highly proficient chief of staff as an overly qualified and significantly overpaid creator of the executive slide decks in MS PowerPoint.

Example #3. Duel of the Fates

"It seems obvious that your chief of staff would need to build trust to be successful in this role. What might not be so obvious is your role in supporting him or her—and your direct reports—in that transition.”—Chief of Staff

In this case, a qualified chief of staff, who has the best intentions at heart and who knows exactly what their organization needs, cannot get through to the leader who for whatever reason refuses to support some or most of their proposals.

I witnessed a few such examples in my career, and every time the struggle to connect, communicate, and establish trust was coming from both sides. While the leader failed to some extent to support the chief of staff, grant them the necessary power, and educate their leadership team on the chief of staff role, the chief of staff, in turn, approached the communication issues with insufficient political savvy and willingness to listen and understand. They worked from the ideas they had in mind (granted, those were actually really helpful for their organizations) instead of having a dialogue with their leader establishing what the leader wanted to do and why.

Depending on the EQ level of each side, this might transform into a duel of some sort. Both the chief of staff and the leader are trying to do what they think is best for the organization but cannot create rapport and establish a partnership so they end up failing each other.

So, Who Is The Person To Solve It All?

And here comes the promised twist.

A chief of staff can solve many problems but not all of them. Many problems must be addressed by the leader directly. At the same time, one of the reasons the chief of staff role exists is to ensure that the leader is aware of the important problems they would have otherwise missed. A good chief of staff anticipates problems, supports leader's decision making, and facilitates problem-solving by funneling the necessary information to the leader, filtering out the noise, and building bridges inside the organization.

But it takes two individuals for the chief of staff to succeed.

"The decision to use a chief of staff, and subsequent decisions about the emphasis or emphases needed in a chief of staff, is partly driven by the leader’s leadership style, strengths and gaps, and his or her position relative to other organization and market dynamics.”—Chief of Staff

If a leader does not understand their own role, its strategic focus, and context, if they don’t understand their organization and themselves, they might not design the chief of staff role well, select the right person for this role, and/or position the person in this role for success within the organization.

It looks like the person who can solve it all is the leader, who has the appropriate support from their chief of staff, who, in turn, is appropriately supported by the leader.

It truly comes back to the importance of servant leadership, which means prioritizing the needs of the organization and its people over one's own ego and ambitions.

After all, the person to solve it all would never be able to do it alone.

This article concludes my deep dives of Parris’ Chief of Staff. Next week I will provide my usual at-a-glance review before moving to a bit more personal deep dive / review of Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, MD. Don’t forget to come back soon!

(1) The title image is by Shelley Evans from Pixabay

(2) Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay