An effective chief of staff can do wonders for organizational efficiency.
When you hear “Chief of Staff,” many of us think of politics. But this role — which can vary greatly in responsibilities, level, and tenure depending on the needs of the executive and organization they support — has become an increasingly popular one in the tech industry in recent years. But because the job description can look so different, there are often questions around what exactly a chief of staff (CoS) does and whether the role is an important one for a given organization to fill.
Ultimately, in a world where businesses are refocusing on driving efficiency and effectiveness, a CoS can be a key player to drive alignment and cross-functional collaboration within your organization – when you leverage the role correctly, and find the right person to fill it.
A CoS typically has a general business background, providing them with cross-departmental knowledge and enabling them to put frameworks in place for goal-setting across the organization. If this sounds like the work of a People team, you’re not wrong — which is why it’s so critical for a company’s chief people officer (CPO) and CoS to align. Where the People team should own organization design and structure as well as culture, the CoS can help support by driving goal-setting and executive level processes. When aligned, these complementary roles can be hugely impactful to an organization’s success.
To better understand this role, I spoke to someone who has personally taught me a lot about what a successful CoS looks like: Emily Smith, chief of staff for the office of the CEO at Lattice. In our conversation, we discuss different iterations of what the CoS role can look like, how individuals in the role can achieve success by tailoring their responsibilities to their skillsets, how the role impacts an organization more broadly, and how chiefs of staff can work successfully with chief people officers (and why that relationship matters).
First off: Emily, can you talk a bit about your background and career to-date? How did you come to the Chief of Staff role here at Lattice?
Emily: The role actually found me! I had been moving around from team to team and department to department at Lattice and found myself really enjoying the learning that took place in the first 6-12 months of a new role, but would quickly get bored after that. And because I had worked in so many different departments, I started to realize I had a unique perspective for seeing how the business runs and how all of the pieces fit together. That, paired with my program management experience, made me a strong candidate for a chief of staff role.
It was a lucky situation where the business needs aligned with my career goals and skillset. I didn’t know much about what a chief of staff did when [Lattice’s CEO] Jack and I first started talking about it, but I met with a bunch of chiefs of staff and quickly got excited about the idea of being in a generalist role with the possibility of infinite career growth.
What’s interesting to me is that a lot of individuals I speak to aren’t entirely familiar with what a chief of staff is in the context of a tech company, and what opportunities the role offers. Why do you think that is – and how has the position evolved over time?
Emily: For a long time, the chief of staff role was either uncommon or it was seen simply as a stepping stone to other roles – a stop-over for employees looking to transition into another team or department.
As the role has become more widespread recently and the impact a CoS can have is better understood, I’ve seen a real shift within the networks I’m a part of where more and more people are treating the role as a career-long pursuit. The truth is it can be a great career and a great transitional role, but from my perspective, the people who get the most out of being a CoS will be the ones who look at it as an invaluable role in its own right. It gives you not just the chance to acquire new skills but the opportunity to gain direct access to and understanding of big organizational milestones you won’t get the same visibility into from other roles.
I think people can get into trouble when they think of the CoS role just as a track into a higher-level executive role. It can certainly be that! But I like to think about it from the perspective of what skills I want to master and what company milestones I want to hit while in the role. When people ask me about my own professional timeline, I talk them through where Lattice is in its journey, what milestones are coming up for the organization, and the visibility I’ll get into these moments that I wouldn’t necessarily get in other roles. This role provides me with a very different vantage point where I’m able to connect the dots in a different way than someone who is really specialized often isn’t able to do.
As companies get larger and more complex, or even as they stay small and people stay super specialized, there is a real need for the connective tissue that a chief of staff can provide. That is someone who can be thinking around corners and reminding team members that their needs, outputs, and processes connect to other teams and departments at the company. Like business partner roles, a CoS has cross-company visibility and can pull people together at the right times while allowing them to focus on the right things.
You’ve talked about how one of the biggest things that drew you personally to the CoS role was the ability to build on and grow your skillset. What are some of the most important skills required to be an effective CoS?
Emily: First, it’s really important to be a generalist, not a specialist. A huge part of your job will be seeing the bigger picture, and drawing the lines between the work specialists are doing within your organizations.
Next, you need a really strong communication skillset at all levels. From communicating with executives to individual contributors, to crafting company-wide communications that will hit the right audiences with the right message – so much of your job will come down to communicating clearly and effectively. Personally, I came from a educational background in journalism that set me up well for all the writing this role requires of me.
You will also need to get comfortable with ambiguity. Your responsibilities, scope, and priorities will vary from company to company and executive to executive – even while you’re in the same role. This also means you’ll need to become a subject matter expert really quickly. You might go into a finance project and know nothing about it at the start! But you’ll have to make calls on it on behalf of the executive you support, so being able to think and learn on your feet is critical.
In terms of the exact skillset required, it depends on the unique needs of the executive and organization. There’s a spectrum in this role between minimal project work and lots of project work, as well as between working autonomously versus as an executive’s proxy. My current role was designed as one in which I do lots of project work while working mostly autonomously.
What kind of expectations can and should you set with a CEO and senior leadership teams around the impact and focus of a CoS?
Emily: There are so many different roles a CoS can step into, from acting as a proxy for an executive – giving opinions, making decisions on their behalf — to taking work off their plate that shouldn’t be on their plate to begin with, but they care deeply about it and want to be involved. A CoS may also work on projects that are important but should never be on the executive’s desk, and help an executive prioritize their time. Other ongoing work like driving all-hands meetings and internal communications often falls under the CoS role because these things should originate with the CEO.
Because there are so many interpretations of what this role can be, there can be confusion when leadership and the CoS are not aligned on whether the CoS should be more in the weeds or strategic. Any type of CoS can be successful, but you need alignment from the executive’s broader team regarding what the relationship should look like and how the CoS should interact with that team. For example, when I kick off a new project, I’ll ask my executive to provide air cover for me by addressing exactly why he’s putting me into that project. This sets expectations with the broader team as to how to interact with me.
What are the limitations of the CoS role? What is hard about the job?
Emily: Realistically, the only limitations come from the limits we place on ourselves. If you have really strong relationships with your executives and their teams, and are openly communicative about what you want to bring to the role, there’s no limit to what you can work on.
You can also limit yourself by placing a time limit on the role; if you say you’ll only do it for 18 months, this will limit the projects for which you’re responsible. For example, one of my projects is over two years long. The benefit here is that I get to see it through from idea stage to launch.
Finally you can really limit yourself in this kind of role by not building relationships. My CEO may not always have something for me to work on all the time, but other executives will almost always say yes to some extra help.
What should a company that is looking to establish someone in this role focus on in their job search?
Emily: Focus on candidates with really strong communication and relationship building skills. The ability to become a subject matter expert quickly is also very important, as are leadership skills, empathy, and a business-first mindset. Finally make sure you’re bringing candidates into the pipeline that are comfortable with uncertainty, as things in this role are always going to change.
Once a company finds a great candidate for a CoS role, what advice do you have for CPOs who might be learning to work with someone in that role for the first time?
Emily: A chief of staff and CPO should have a strong partnership from the beginning. One thing that will be critical on the CoS side will be to have a pulse on how things are running within the organization from a people standpoint, especially if part of their role involves owning internal communications, and that will start and end with the CPO. The CPO should also consider the CoS a resource to understand the sentiment of the organization from their unique perspective – having access across departments, teams, and projects will give them a lens into how people across the organization collaborate, a critical piece of an overall company’s health as a business and culture.
In a successful partnership, a CoS can be a strong champion for the programs a CPO owns. This can be especially true in situations where the lines between the roles and responsibilities of a CoS and a CPO are a bit blurry – for example, if you look at goal setting. Often a CoS will own operational goal setting for a company, and the CPO will own the goal cycle alignment with performance management and personal development. If the CoS and the CPO can work together to build one strong and robust goal setting program for the whole company with clear roles, responsibilities, and expectations, they will see much more success from and participation in any company-level goals program.
What advice to have for individuals who might be looking for a CoS role?
Emily: Honestly, my main bit of advice would be: Go for it! I would just make sure you are excited about the company you’re working for and the executive you are supporting.
Take some time to catalog your skillset and look for an executive that needs that skillset to complement their own. This creates a relationship where the CoS can learn new skills from their executive and the executive can lean on their CoS to fill gaps in their day to day. From there, make sure you build a network of thought partners throughout the organization and beyond that you can talk shop with.
When you’re interviewing, make clear goals for what you want to learn from or experience in a chief of staff role and communicate those with the executive as early as the interview process to make sure you are aligned on what the role is and what is not. That will help ensure you’re getting the most out of that experience – and taking that career-long perspective – whether the CoS role is one you want to use to get to something else or somewhere you see yourself staying, and growing in, for a long time.
