How well do you know the Chief of Staff at your company? Do you recognize their responsibilities like the back of your hand? Are you familiar with all the individuals they interact with on a day-to-day basis? Can you list off their accomplishments without missing a beat?
You can probably answer these questions for your own role, but you might not be as familiar with your Chief of Staff’s. Luckily, Prime is.
In fact, Prime knows a lot about the COS role—substantiated by over a decade’s worth of insights, analysis, and expertise. That’s why we’re here to share three things we learned about Chiefs of Staff in our years of business, helping you and your executive office become more empowered, informed, and engaged.
Continue reading to learn in 10 minutes what we’ve learned in the last 10 years.
1. Chiefs of Staff Are a Critical Hire
Chiefs of Staff aren’t simply another seat to be filled at the boardroom table—they are force multipliers, thought partners, and strategic drivers. No other role has such close proximity to both the team and the principal, making the COS a key touch-point within the organization.
The position demands an individual who is highly agreeable yet tactfully argumentative, someone who is incredibly adaptable yet always self-assured. They must be capable of challenging the ideas formed by the executives around them, optimizing them for company-wide adoption and disseminating them to the workforce at large.
It’s a difficult balancing act that makes it hard to find the right person. However, the impact they can generate is greater than the sum of their requirements. Prime has witnessed time and time again how well-placed Chiefs of Staff can amplify and accelerate the objectives of their principals, contributing to a higher performing and more effective executive office.
2. Chiefs of Staff Often Spend Their Time Fighting Fires
While your first instinct might be to call 911, anyone in the executive office knows that putting out fires is a never-ending chore—one that typically falls on the COS. Especially in the first year of their role, Chiefs of Staff constantly have to fight fires and prevent new ones from igniting out of antiquated processes and inefficient systems.
Prime knows that new Chiefs of Staff want to live up to the lofty expectations of their role (“There’s my reliable partner and strategic mastermind!”), but all too often they get pulled into the weeds of reality and bogged down by work that shouldn’t fall solely on them (“Here’s a hose—start blasting!”). This leads to frustration on two fronts:
- The COS becomes disillusioned with a misleading role, growing tired of dealing with a job they didn’t sign up for.
- The principal becomes upset with a COS whose time is consumed elsewhere, leading to an overall lack of movement, decisions, and communication.
If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, that’s because it is.
3. Chiefs of Staff Tenure Is Less Than 4 Years (Closer to 2!)
So what happens when this problem goes unaddressed for days, months, or even years? Unlike the fires they’re valiantly fighting, the Chief of Staff inevitably burns out.
At Prime, we’ve found that the average tenure for the COS role is less than four years, sometimes dwindling even lower than two. This unsustainable level of turnover is detrimental to the efficacy of the executive office; executives feel like they’re stuck in a time loop, hiring, re-acclimating, and losing Chiefs of Staff over and over again. Moreover, how can anything of value be accomplished when a new Chief of Staff barely has enough time to settle into their role before they start fleeing towards the fire escape? And what message does this send to prospective new hires about the expectations and aspirations of their position?
Conclusions and Closing Thoughts
Thankfully, there’s actually one more thing that we learned over the years: how to prevent this revolving door of rehiring and rehashing from spinning out of control in the first place.
First, it’s important to understand the “how and why” behind the COS role. Hiring a new Chief of Staff is often something born of sheer frustration, and we totally get it—finding someone to help you solve problems is exactly why you hire someone. However, if the organization as a whole is ineffective, the COS will be, too. Instead of rushing to hire someone new without an intentional strategy, you and your team must commit to making significant changes alongside them.
Second, understand that when you hire a COS and they’re ceaselessly chasing urgent issues, they don’t have the bandwidth for high-level strategy at the same time. You have to center your expectations around where the role is currently at and where your company is headed. A Chief of Staff—like you—is just one person, and while their impact can be immense in the right circumstances, they need to be treated as such.
Only after these crucial first steps can you bring in a Chief of Staff and expect them to succeed. As a role that requires plentiful experience, exceptional versatility, outside-the-box thinking, and a high-level of emotional intelligence, a COS can take ages to find but only moments to lose. So do yourself a favor by doing the critical thinking up front; set your Chief up for success, so they can set you up for success.
By placing more emphasis on the systems surrounding the COS role, you can enable your Chief to make the most impact possible, feel more centered in their role, and experience less burnout from their daily to-do list. This is what Prime has learned over the last 10 years, and it’s what we continue to build upon as we expand our executive office solutions to encompass advisory, coaching, placement and more.
Contact us today to inquire about our services and discover how rethinking your executive office can reshape your company’s future.
