Introducing “Chief Of Staff”: How The Chief Of Staff Role Reflects The Core Shift In Management And Leadership

Who’s a Chief of Staff?

Interestingly, the chief of staff role can be traced back to the king advisors. Some of them were shrewd and wise, they helped the kings to be better leaders, others—cunning and traitorous, those cared about no one but themselves and their lineage. At some point, king advisors became chiefs of staff in the military and government, and only in recent 30 years or so started transitioning to the corporate business.

"A chief of staff is a catch-all role, filled by someone with exceptional organizational and people skills, who handles all manner of tasks not covered by an existing member of an executive’s leadership team or administrative staff.” – Chief of Staff

Chief of Staff As a Reflection of Strategic Shifts In Management

The author of Chief of Staff Tyler Parris (here’s his LinkedIn page and company website) is a former chief of staff himself. He wrote this book to summarize the core ideas and assumptions behind the role to help leaders (mostly C-suite executives) determine whether their organizations would benefit from one.

In doing so, he outlines certain “pivots”, or angles, under which a leader can assess the need for a chief of staff. It’s in looking at those pivots that we can notice the pattern that reflects the dramatic changes modern management has been going through.

High Volatility And Uncertainty

Don’t you remember those ol’ days when life was more certain and predictable?

It seems like an exaggeration, a sweet nostalgia for the days that never were, but let me remind you that half a century ago the most prevalent school of strategic thought was that of planning. The future was so predictable, that the big corporations would hire a separate department to elaborate the multi-level plans that all other departments were supposed to carry out to a T.

Long gone are those days.

In some industries (especially in tech), tomorrow might look very different not only from what you thought it would look like a year ago but from what you think it will look like today. If there is anything the global pandemic taught us all it is that the world can dramatically change overnight and to survive in the new context you need to be able to adapt constantly.

In this context, a chief of staff is someone who keeps his or her hand on the pulse of the changing environment. He or she looks out for the blind spots of their leader who can now focus more on steering the organization (company, its division, or functional department) in the right direction.

"A chief of staff must always have the context in mind. This can mean the general business environment in which the company operates or the knowledge that a change in one area can have ripple effects throughout the organization.”—Chief of Staff

And while the book puts the growing complexity (see below) as the primary reason behind the chief of staff role, I prefer to start with uncertainty and volatility specifically because they set up the overall context in which leaders have to embrace complexity these days.

Running a business has always been complex. But now we have an additional challenge—this complexity needs to be addressed in haste. All balls are in the air as we are juggling on the top of a train running through a dark tunnel (not my best metaphor but you get the idea).

Growing Complexity

If you search for the chief of staff job openings on LinkedIn, you will notice that most of those are posted by startups looking to scale. When a company is just founded, it is a 24/7 job for its founders but at least they can manage it with a relatively small team.

But as the organization begins to grow, it becomes harder to keep track of all its complexities. To make matters worse, all the processes (and the absence thereof) that used to bring only?some?inefficiencies, now amplify them, leaving holes in the organization which used to run smoothly at the 10 or 15 people mark but cannot seem to function beyond 50.

It doesn’t get better in a big organization—it just becomes different. We no longer talk about the number of people as much as we do about the number of departments, their budgets, overlapping processes, unclear responsibilities, and increasing cost of production.

"The chief of staff must excel at connecting the dots between efforts in multiple departments or between seemingly unrelated work streams.”—Chief of Staff

What used to be managed by a simple directive from above, now becomes a subject of many meetings, steering committees, improvement initiatives, and tiger teams. Communication becomes a double-edged sword: you can quickly find yourself drowned in information and knowing nothing about where the organization is going and who is making the decision.

Add to this growing complexities in the regulation of different markets and regions, cultural differences of different geographies and even organizations (if you consider a partnership, merger, or acquisition)—it’s nearly impossible to have nobody within the organization tying this all together vertically and laterally, back to the leader, their vision, organizational culture, organizational purpose, and its goals.

Need In Transformation

Strategy Safari concluded with the configuration school of strategy that highlighted the increasing appetite for transformation in modern organizations. According to this school, each organization goes through its lifecycle adapting to the new context and level of complexity, using different strategic and organizational configurations (More on this – here).

With this in mind, there is no surprise that more than half of the chief of staff job postings mention “a rapidly growing organization”, “newly acquired business unit”, or “bringing the organization to the next level.” It is also no surprise that the full name of the book we are discussing today is Chief of Staff: The Strategic Partner Who Will Revolutionize Your Organization.

The range of opinions on size and growth indicate that the chief of staff can be helpful in many stages of a company’s evolution, but with different emphasis, or emphases in each stage.”—Chief of Staff

Need In Business Continuity

Ironically, while?transformation?and?organizational revolution?are the buzzwords these days, organizations truly and deeply long for business continuity.

In a world where most CEOs are given a 3-year test to pass, a constant adaptability to the ever-changing environment requires some sort of certainty and predictability. We don’t want to lose sight of what we have gained, what we have learned, or what our people believe in. We want to infuse in new blood when needed but we don’t want to go through the annual dialysis.

A good chief of staff can provide such continuity in many ways: bringing people together, facilitating the onboarding of a new leader and their team, and keeping the business going when the leader is on an extended business trip or has to travel between several headquarters.

Servant Leadership

The final shift I see is in leadership. The admiration for a strong charismatic leader is ceding a way to an authentic servant leader whose focus is on empowering his or her people.

Leadership becomes more about coaching, mentoring, creating a supportive inclusive culture, removing roadblocks (including systemic inefficiencies), and listening more than talking.

No leader can be everywhere all at once. Yet to support the entire organization, a good leader needs to be well aware of everything that is going on there. While the direct reports (the executive team or functional leaders) can filter and massage information (with the best intentions too!), there is nevertheless a real need to get information from the bottom while not drowning in informational overload and being capable of deducing the important conclusions.

A chief of staff can become this person who serves as both—a funnel and a filter—allowing the information to flow to the leader but only that one that is relevant to the current context.

This goes both ways. Depending on the size of the organization, leadership communication can travel through dozens of interpreters (line managers, supervisors, committees, etc.) before reaching all the corners of the organization. A chief of staff can help to fill the gaps, clarify, explain, and translate executive messages to the different levels, and put the processes in place to smooth the communication flow vertically and horizontally.

In Conclusion

A chief of staff is supporting the leader in their quest to identify and remove roadblocks, he or she can act both as a funnel and a filter for the information that the leader should know and act upon as fast as they can given the high level of uncertainty and risk. Like a true strategic advisor, a chief of staff will have the big picture in mind and the higher purpose at heart.

In a way, a good chief of staff is the servant leadership personified with the emphasis on servant because, for most of the time, he or she will be completely in the shadows, gluing organization together, connecting the dots, explaining, clarifying, fixing, pacifying, establishing connections, building bridges, listening, and making the right things happen—all while acting in the best interests of the organization.

Truly, if a chief of staff role didn’t exist, it should have been invented!

Or, as Parris puts it in his book—

"The exercise of thinking through the chief of staff role can lead you to better decisions about the overall structure of your organization or leadership team, even if you never hire a chief of staff.”—Chief of Staff

Next week we will talk more in depth what traits should a good chief of staff possess and what it looks like when a chief of staff fails to be the bridge, funnel, and glue he or she is supposed to be. Stay tuned!

(1) Title image is by Muhammad Abdullah from Pixabay

(2) Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

(3) Image by oki andri sandjaya from Pixabay