Chief of Staffing Your Personal Life

If you’re going to be a successful CoS, you’ll need a very full personal life. That’s just table stakes. The successful CoS needs to guard her personal life and time zealously. It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s very true. You need friends who work in different industries, confidants who work at different companies, and interests that keep your eager business mind occupied. You can’t CoS a company if you can’t CoS your personal life. That’s just a fact.

So how do you CoS your personal life? How do you apply the same standards of excellence and prioritization to what fills you back up?

Be personable, without getting too personal.

A CoS should always be friendly and approachable. But an emotionally intelligent CoS will know where the boundary lines fall. Finding the right balance of being personable without being too personal is important. What you say and what you don’t say, what you share and what you don’t share, sends a message.

It’s completely appropriate to share important milestones in your life such as a move, an important celebration, accomplishments achieved, etc. It’s not okay to divulge more information than your audience can handle. You also don’t want to pry into the personal lives of your coworkers. When you’re a CoS, the impact of your actions will always overshadow the intention of your actions. You can “mean well,” and still “do harm”.

“When,” not “if,” you offend someone, sincerely apologize immediately. Don’t start off with explanations to eschew blame. Say something like, “I can see how my words/actions could have made you feel [insert emotion]. Thank you for sharing your feelings with me. I need to hear feedback like that so that I can continue to grow as a leader. I will do [insert action] in the future to avoid making the same mistake. I’m human, so I will make mistakes, but I will also make efforts to not repeat the same ones.”

Selectively share on social media.

Social media is the way of the world now. It’s a helpful tool that connects you with people who you may have lost contact with. As a CoS, make your accounts private unless you plan to only post on completely benign topics like puppies, ice cream, and cartoons. Don’t follow people in your company unless they proactively invite you to do so. Remember, it could feel like an intrusion into people’s personal lives if you follow them on social media. You have access to very important people in your organization. It can make people very uneasy if they think that the CoS is “following” their personal lives. As a CoS, it’s more about how they feel than about how you feel. That’s the “S” in “CoS”.

While treading the social media waters carefully, don’t completely abandon the tool. If you interact with colleagues on social media, it can be a powerful way to humanize yourself. Share your food pics and your fun times. Share your local community involvement and participation in local events. Share encouraging memes. Be the account that people want to follow. Be the CoS that people want to be friends with.

Protect your emotional energy.

Protecting your emotional energy is the most fundamental survival skill of any executive, and especially for the CoS. This may seem like a trite piece of advice, but it’s true, nonetheless. The CoS role is demanding. Prioritize your self-care and your down time. You need quite time alone to refuel and to gather your thoughts. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Schedule your personal time to include chunks of time alone, being absolutely absorbed in what brings you peace.

My self-care regime includes the daily practice of my faith, physical fitness, and binge-watching Netflix and Hulu. Judge me if you want, but it works. I love watching television depictions of the CoS role in shows like Billions and Scandal. But here I am breaking my own rule…working while I’m watching. But there are inescapable truths to being a CoS, and a consistent hankering for learning and self-improvement is one of them. So, what if you CoS on the weekends too…No one else has to know but you.

Chief of Staffing your personal life could be an entire series in and of itself. I barely scratched the surface here. The world is watching the CoS. Once you become a CoS, you’re suddenly a person of interest. And a person of interest is under increased scrutiny. Control the narrative. Show up enough so that you aren’t hiding important parts of your experience and perspective that form your value proposition. Save enough for yourself that you aren’t depleting your energy. It's all about finding the right balance. Once you take great care of you, you can take excellent care of others, and that is the ultimate mark of victory for the CoS.

Please find previous articles that I wrote below:

?What It Means to be a Chief of Staff

The Path to the Chief of Staff

The Challenges of the Chief of Staff

If You Think You Need a Chief of Staff

Welcoming Gen One to Corporate

How Not To Network in 2022