Chief Of Staff

The Strategic Partner Who Will Revolutionize Your Organization

Tyler Parris

• Publisher: Tyler Parris Coaching, LLC
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780996867917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

How would you know if a chief of staff can benefit you or your organization? If you already have one, how can you thoughtfully evolve the role over time? To answer these and other questions, author and former corporate chief of staff Tyler Parris studied the role in depth and conducted scores of interviews with other chiefs of staff and with C-suite and HR executives globally and in different industries. Chief of Staff: The Strategic Partner Who Will Revolutionize Your Organization presents the results of his research in a clear and practical way. To help business leaders explore the value that a chief of staff offers as a trusted advisor and “chief get-it-done officer, ” Parris presents three “pivots” to consider:

• Organization dynamics
• Most commonly reported benefits of the role (for leaders, chiefs of staff, and organizations)
• Deliverables that chiefs of staff most commonly manage for leaders

He also explores the history and current context for the role, provides guidelines for how to find and hire the right candidate, suggests ways to make the most of the first 90–100 days, and offers advice on how to develop the role over time.

As several of the CEOs Parris interviewed point out, even if you never hire a chief of staff, the thought process that goes into considering the possibility can be a useful exercise in finding strengths and gaps in your current team or approach—and can help you lead more effectively.

Section I

So, You Think
You Need A
Chief of Staff?

1

Definition, History, and
Corporate Context of
the Chief of Staff Role

Frequently, senior leaders of companies hear from their peer network about how a chief of staff can be helpful in managing their affairs, or they read one of the several articles online about how a chief of staff is helping a prominent senior leader at another organization. I have interviewed more than 60 chiefs of staff, C-suite executives, and HR executives in various industries and around the globe on the chief of staff role in business. One thing is clear: the decision to create a chief of staff role is not to be taken lightly. If the role is carelessly crafted and executed, the chief of staff can be seen as a wedge between you and your organization, an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, and a complete waste of resources.

About a quarter of respondents said that when the chief of staff role was created in their organizations, the supported executives knew that they needed help but weren’t quite sure how to articulate the nature of that help. In many situations, they were responding to gaps in their top leadership structure or talent that led to underperformance. So these executives created a chief of staff role and hired someone into it that they thought could help them figure out precisely what they needed. In most situations, this approach even seemed to work. Yet I spoke to a few executives who followed this approach and determined that the need did not match the current chief of staff’s skills, experience, and passion. They had to swap out chiefs of staff at the precise time that person should have been running full steam ahead. A few others expressed the view that this approach led to frustration for both the executive and the chief of staff as a result of mismatched expectations. For example, the chief of staff thought he or she would own and drive more projects, but in reality the need was for someone to facilitate other groups who owned the projects. In a few instances, the chiefs of staff simply became disengaged and burned out because although they had a can-do attitude, they were in over their heads in terms of the financial or technical knowledge that was actually required. What I’ve learned is that you can’t force-fit a chief of staff role into an organization.

I submit that a better approach is to understand the specific conditions in your organization that point to a chief of staff and to figure out the emphasis your ideal chief of staff needs so that you can then hire the best fit for the job. In fact, I hope that when you are done reading this book you will have a framework to make informed decisions about each of these steps. In Section 1, I focus on a number of “pivots” that you can analyze to make your best decision about whether to create (or keep, if it’s already established) the role. If you decide to use a chief of staff, I have written Section 2 to help you explore the various emphases that might best fit your business needs and to help you understand your role in guiding your HR or other thought partners in the creation (or evolution) of the role. I also discuss some of the nuances of sourcing and interviewing the right chief of staff candidates in Section 2. To bolster this information, I have included callouts, throughout the body of the book, that provide insights from CEOs, chiefs of staff, and HR executives on the competencies that are universal to chiefs of staff. Once you’ve hired someone, you should set realistic expectations for the first 90 to 100 days and be able to strategically evolve the role three to five years from now, for your own benefit, and help the incumbent chief of staff land well in the organization after serving you and your office—topics that are covered in Section 3. Finally, I conclude Section 3, and the main body of this book, by exploring some of the common issues related to evolving the role over time.

What Is a Chief of Staff?

The short answer to “What is a chief of staff” is that 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. Before I provide you a more comprehensive, and useful, answer, it’s worth noting why the role is not well understood or self-explanatory.

Nearly everyone I talked to agreed that the chief of staff role is poorly understood in business. For starters, every instance of the role in business is unique, depending on a number of factors ranging from the size, complexity, and geographic dispersion of the company to the executive’s temperament, leadership style, and specific business needs. I begin to cover these dynamics later in this chapter, but, as mentioned earlier, I also cover the many pivots that you can use to think about the role in later chapters. People who are sometimes working behind the scenes often perform the role without the words “chief of staff” in their title. For example, roles like “business manager,” “manager of strategy and planning,” or “vice president of operations” are essentially chief of staff roles—but not always. To add to the confusion, the title often—but not always—depends on whether the person in the role serves a C-suite executive, a department or function head, or leaders further from the top. I cover titles in more detail in Chapter 5, “Finding and Hiring the Right Candidates.” Finally, the chief of staff title is given to people with varying degrees of experience and day-to-day responsibilities, from executive assistants to vice presidents, with a majority falling somewhere in between. Because of this variety, HR executives in my interviews reported having a hard time benchmarking the role.

Still, there are some core characteristics that tend to define a chief of staff. A chief of staff is someone who does the following:

• Uses organization skills to manage a portfolio of projects for the CEO.
• Helps the staff and their teams interpret, understand, and carry out the CEO’s vision and strategic intent.
• Helps a CEO prioritize projects and business impacts so that the CEO and his or her direct reports are moving forward with only the most important work.
• Exercises exceptional discretion with confidential informa-
  tion to keep the CEO apprised of what’s going on in the organization and, where possible, to keep the organization informed of what’s going on at the top.
• Manages business rhythms such as recurrent leadership meetings and governance processes on behalf of the CEO.
• Provides analysis, recommendations, and options to the CEO regarding decisions to be made or problems to be solved in internal or external meetings.
• Attends and facilitates complex, cross-departmental discussions to ensure that good decisions are reached (versus so-called yes-people simply agreeing with the CEO) and that decisions are carried out.
• Acts as proxy and information funnel, filter, and facilitator for the CEO, dealing with as many issues as possible before they reach the CEO’s desk, representing the CEO’s point of view, and making decisions, as needed, in the executive’s absence.
• Serves as thought partner and coach to the CEO, influencing the overall agenda for the organization, offering the CEO and his or her direct reports perspectives they might not see, uncovering or helping the team uncover new possibilities, and challenging ideas before they are committed to action.
• Manages risk by bridging interdepartmental gaps, by connecting the executive to what is really going on in the organization, by keeping shop while the executive is away, by maintaining continuity during leadership changes, and, in early-stage companies, by being the negative feedback loop for behaviors that don’t meet long-term growth objectives.
• Manages a strategic planning and budgetin...