The Chief of Staff: Enabling productivity while thriving in ambiguity
Pranav Mulgund
The Chief of Staff title can be confusing and ambiguous. But, in general, a Chief of Staff can greatly change the tone and productivity of an organization. A great Chief of Staff can be a gamechanger for an organization and a leader. So, what is a Chief of Staff? In the past few months I’ve talked to dozens of Chiefs of Staff to better understand what a Chief of Staff does and how that role changes based on the organization they are in. Dan Ciampa’s Harvard Business Review article, “The Case for a Chief of Staff,” talks about Chiefs of Staff largely fitting into three levels of responsibility varying from a hyper-focus on organizing the CEO’s (or senior leader’s) office to leading strategic change and managing departments. Ciampa then goes on to outline in a chart the different capabilities, reporting relationships, managerial duties, etc, that those levels correspond to.
After talking to so many Chiefs of Staff across a wide variety of industries and company sizes, I’ve learned that the truth is much murkier. The delineation between Ciampa’s different levels is more like a dotted line. Any given Chief of Staff can have duties that span across all levels. In fact, sometimes a Chief of Staff’s responsibilities might overlap with what would traditionally be handled by other executives e.g. the COO. A Chief of Staff of a publicly traded software company told me that at one point they led the HR organization while the company was searching for a new HR leader. The article also spends time correlating the business challenge that a leader is experiencing with what their Chief of Staff would work on; for instance, a leader focused on maximizing efficiency with minimal change would want a Chief of Staff who operates more like an EA/project manager. I think a better correlation would be to what responsibilities or tasks does a leader or CEO want to hand off so they can better focus their energies on the highest-priority items. The best Chiefs of Staff are adaptive to their environment and can isolate the work they should be taking on to streamline their leader’s workflows and their organization’s productivity. For instance, Hannah Koch, former Chief of Staff at Instabase, ended up leading pricing and various GTM strategy initiatives. That’s something that obviously wasn’t in the job description but it was an organizational need and she stepped up to take on the work. The best Chiefs of Staff can also understand their leader’s style, tone, institutional position, and personal context. Based on that they are able to both offer insightful recommendations, make less critical decisions on their leader’s behalf, and better prioritize and route inbound requests. As an example of how this skillset can practically manifest: both Tiger Li, the Chief of Staff at Rivian, and the Chief of Staff at a top-tier VC firm spend some of their time triaging the email inbox of the partner they report to. Based on most of the requirements outlined by Ciampa – role, capabilities, reporting relationship, status, time with leader, and advice to the CEO – both of them could either be a Level 2 or 3 Chief of Staff. But based on the article, triaging an email inbox would most likely be considered either the duty of a Level 1 or an EA. But these Chiefs of Staff are performing an exceptional value-add to their leader’s lives. Sorting through an inbox with a high volume of inbounds would ordinarily be an unnecessary time drain. Actually, it’s such a high value-add that 51% of Chiefs of Staff report handling this sort of task. These Chiefs of Staff have apportioned a small part of their day to enable a massive productivity gain for the leaders they support. McKinsey’s article, “Seeing around corners: How to excel as a chief of staff,” drives this approach home with the insight that, “the role’s raison d’être is always to enable the principal […] to execute their mission”. This is a role focused on ensuring leaders have the capacity to get the highest priority items for the organization done.
My point is, the Chief of Staff title is not a “one size fits all”. It’s not even a “three sizes fits all”. As Raphael Casteau, Chief of Staff to the Chairman of Capgemini, mentioned to me, “The Chief of Staff role has no template”. To borrow a property rights analogy, it’s more like a bundle of sticks with each stick representing a potential area of work a Chief of Staff might have under their purview. There is a core bundle defined by the leader the Chief of Staff is reporting to, and as the job progresses the Chief of Staff will add or take away sticks depending on the needs of the leader and the organization. Interestingly, in practice, there was one stick that consistently fell under the responsibility of the Chiefs of Staff I talked to: project managing the executive office. Across the board, the baseline responsibility for a Chief of Staff seems to be to make sure their leader is prepared for any meetings and is responsible for setting meeting agendas, following up on tasks assigned, and holding people accountable for those tasks. All other sticks are determined by some union of two sets. One set is what the leader believes their Chief of Staff should be working on to enable them and the organization, and the other set is what the Chief of Staff believes they should be working on to enable their leader and the organization. From the Chiefs of Staff I’ve talked to, some examples of these sticks include leading strategic initiatives, managing the relationship between the leader and their direct reports, being the quality control for any material presented to the leader, interpersonal conflict resolution, managing the company OKR process, drafting comms, and just generally filling any gaps where they exist.
It’s clear that an adaptive, industrious Chief of Staff can be a versatile and supremely beneficial addition to an organization. However, the Chief of Staff title is one generally reserved for the business elite, government, and a select group of smaller corporate or nonprofit organizations. But imagine if you could personally have a Chief of Staff in your life. Imagine having someone to whom you could offload tasks, enabling greater productivity both at work and in your personal life. That’s exactly what we want to do at Mindy. Our team is laser focused on building software that can help get you the same sort of productivity gains that a Chief of Staff can do for a Fortune 500 CEO. We want to unleash this power for everyone.
Pranav Mulgund
