Issue 38: Defining your Role as Chief of Staff
In a role where you could potentially work on everything and anything, how do you get clear on what it means to be successful?
Welcome back, aspiring and current Chiefs of Staff 👋🏼
Coming to you with a huge announcement this issue… 🥁🥁🥁
📣 Announcing our first ever: 3️⃣ Day Ask a Chief of Staff Summit!
We’re so excited to be hosting a 3️⃣ day retreat for Chiefs of Staff in the beautiful wine country of Sonoma, California. You’ll spend the days brainstorming with other Chiefs of Staff, enjoying a wine tasting at a vineyard, and most important, sharing thoughts with like minded peers and equals!
Dates: August 7th-9th, 2024
Space is limited to 1️⃣ 5️⃣ Chiefs of Staff (with half the tickets already sold to Ask a Chief of Staff Community Members), so if you’re interested in joining us for our inaugural summit, sign up today!
🎟️ What's Included in the Ticket Price:
🏨 Lodging for 3️⃣ days and 2️⃣ nights at the fabulous Flamingo Resort
3️⃣ Workshops focused around Culture, Operations, and Strategy led by current and former Chiefs of Staff
🥘 All meals ( 2️⃣ breakfasts, 2️⃣ dinners, 1️⃣ wine tasting + picnic)
🧘🏻♀️ Optional morning yoga for anyone who wants to get a morning stretch in
🛍️ Swag bag filled with fun surprises from our sponsors
3️⃣ Days of networking, mixing, and mingling with your fellow Chiefs of Staff!
Questions? Hit reply to this email and we’ll get back to you right away! You can also request a tentative schedule as well.
This week’s issue is guest authored by Eric Nehrlich. Eric is an executive coach at Too Many Trees who helps leaders have more impact by drawing on his 25 years of experience in the tech industry. He loves to identify and challenge mindsets and habits that hold people back from their next level of leadership. Before becoming a coach, Eric spent ten years as an engineer and product manager across several startups before joining Google, eventually leading business strategy and operations for the Google Search Ads team for six years as Chief of Staff. He published his first book in 2023, You Have A Choice: Beyond Hard Work to Meaningful Impact, which he wrote to share with a wider audience the principles and mindsets that have helped him and his clients.
How can a Chief of Staff better define their role to set both themselves and their principals up for success?
Being a Chief of Staff can be an amazing strategic role where you get to be in “the room where it happens” and learn so much. In my six years as the Chief of Staff to the Search Ads team at Google, I got to work closely with great leaders on strategic projects that helped to change the trajectory of the company. I became a trusted voice for my principal because I had no agenda of my own beyond helping him and the company succeed. I could be the objective perspective he needed on what was most important because my whole job was to understand what the organization needed to do, and help it develop those capabilities.
But Chief of Staff roles can also be a quick road to burnout and overwhelm if you don’t manage expectations. Without a clear vision and mandate, it can quickly turn into a vicious circle of ineffectiveness as you get buried in low-impact work, which leaves no time or energy for more important work, which means you lose credibility and people stop listening to you.
Below I share a few insights that helped me and the Chiefs of Staff I have coached to be more effective in the role.
🤷🏻♂️ Start with Why
“Why do you want to be a Chief of Staff?” This question is important because “Chief of Staff” is an incredibly vague title, one that can mean anything from an operational executor to somebody who acts as the “power behind the throne”, converting their principal’s intentions into reality. For you to succeed in the Chief of Staff role means aligning expectations with your principal: “What does outrageous success in this role look like?”
“Knowing what your intentions are will help you bring about your goals; you can’t reach your goals if you don’t know what they are.” – Arlan Hamilton
So what’s your answer? What does success as a Chief of Staff mean to you?
For what it’s worth, people that want attention are generally not a good fit as Chief of Staff, because it is a support role where the spotlight will always go to the principal or the team - they are the ones delivering results directly. This is not the job for you if you want or need regular positive feedback because so much of the work is indirect influence; it’s not like being a marketer or engineer where you can measure or see the results of your work. Instead, you hope that your nudges create greater alignment and productivity over the coming months. But you’ll never know for sure - there’s no way to run the experiment of what would happen if you weren’t there. So you have to be internally secure in the value you offer, because you will not be getting consistent external validation.
Once you are clear on the value you want to deliver in the role, you can share that vision with your principal and the team.
To avoid this trap, I encourage new Chiefs of Staff to be thoughtful about any responsibilities they take on in the early months of the role. These are often “can do” people who never back down from a challenge, and that can quickly lead to overwhelm. My successor as Chief of Staff was sharing how overworked they were with their VP, and asked the VP how I handled all these responsibilities. His response: “Eric wasn’t doing half of what you are doing!” In their desire to be helpful, they had done what I did in my first year, and said yes to too much.
One question that can help is asking yourself “Do I want to be doing this in a year?” If the answer is no, then communicate that up front, and work with others to find somebody else to take on that responsibility going forward.
🗣️ Communicate Communicate Communicate
The most important skill for a Chief of Staff is clear communication and expectation setting. There will always be more work than you can do. There will always be tasks you don’t get to. So defining your success as “getting everything done” will mean perpetual disappointment.
Another Chief of Staff phrased it as “A quick no is better than a lingering maybe”. If you’re not sure you’re going to be able to deliver on a commitment, it’s better to say no quickly so the requester can make other arrangements like finding somebody else to do it, reprioritizing other work so they can wait for you, etc. If you say yes or maybe, they are waiting for you to deliver or decide, which means they are stuck in limbo; if you don’t come through, they won’t have time to adjust. It’s better to take on fewer commitments and consistently deliver on them, than to overcommit yourself and be undependable.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” – Steve Jobs
This means constantly setting expectations around your top priorities. Every Monday morning, I would send a quick note to my principal with my top 3 priorities of the week, and he would respond if we weren’t aligned. This alignment meant that I was very clear on what I needed to deliver each week, so I didn’t get as distracted by the endless stream of requests coming in via email and chat, or by doing what was easy instead of what was important. It also meant that when something new came in, I could ping him and ask “Is this new thing more important than what I’m working on?” and if so, he could reprioritize by telling me what could get delayed.
Similarly, a critical part of the Chief of Staff role is aligning the organization on top priorities. If people on the team are going in different directions, there can be a lot of wasted effort and frustration. Creating even 10% greater alignment across a bigger team will improve productivity far more than any individual work you could be doing instead.
That means setting clear expectations on the top results needed from each team. If you set 10 priorities or OKRs, then it’s easy for teams to start with the easy tasks, and end up with no time to do the more important but ambiguous work. If you set 1 to 3 top priorities for the quarter, you have to make tough choices, but those tough choices lead to greater momentum.
It’s also important to share why those are the priorities. As the Chief of Staff, you can’t and shouldn’t tell teams how to do their jobs; they are the experts. But you also have context they don’t, which may affect how they approach an objective. I once experienced this when my desk happened to be near the analytics team of PhD statisticians at Google. I heard them discussing an analysis, and interrupted to tell them they were doing it wrong. They looked at me in shock - who was I to question their skills? But I had been in the room when the strategy was being discussed, and I knew the question that was driving the request for the analysis. Once I shared that context, they realized that what they had planned to do wasn’t going to address the question and changed their approach.
Lastly, over-communication is part of communication. When I first started as Chief of Staff, I could see several strategic challenges ahead for the team, but when I brought them up, people didn’t care and quickly moved on. I assumed that I had been heard, and that my concerns were not important. But I kept seeing those challenges appear in my first year, and I realized that people weren’t seeing what I was seeing. So I started a campaign where I led every single meeting with the key observations and my talking points. It took six months, but I knew I had finally gotten through when an engineering director complained “Eric, do you have to start every single meeting by depressing us?”
Julie Zhuo makes a similar point in her book, The Making of a Manager: "Assume that for the message to stick, it should be heard ten different times and said in ten different ways.” If you want your message to break through the noise, you have to repeat it consistently because half the time people aren’t paying attention or are distracted, and half the time they do hear it, they miss the point. You will be sick of your message long before it gets through, because you are repeating it so many times to so many different people. Stick with it until it fully lands before starting on a new message, or you will confuse people.
🙋🏻♀️ Influence without Authority
Another key Chief of Staff skill is developing influence without authority. Since you have limited bandwidth and can’t do everything, that means finding ways to get others to do things. While you can lean on your principal’s authority (“The boss says you have to do this!”), that will only work a few times. So I suggest using the principles that Dr. Robert Cialdini shares in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Reciprocity is the first principle: people do things for you if you do things for them. What can you do to make people’s lives easier? In my case, I transitioned into the Chief of Staff role from the finance team, so I told all the engineers and product managers in the org that I would now be the point person for all finance and sales requests. This immediately earned me good will, as I saved them time and annoyance by answering most of the questions myself, and only asking them specific and clear questions when needed. If you can quickly solve a pain point for the team, you will have more influence later.
Scarcity is the second principle: people are more likely to do things if they get access to a scarce resource. In my case, the scarce resource I could offer was the attention of my principal and the other organization leaders. If I shared how a task would be strategically critical, people would line up to do it so that they could get more time in front of the leaders.
Likability is another principle: people say yes more to people they like. I found that offering praise was a great way to build influence, because everybody feels under-appreciated at work. When people learned that I would enthusiastically offer them positive feedback if they did something for me, they were more likely to respond positively to future requests.
“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.” – Dolly Parton
While Chief of Staff is a support role, you also have to make it work for you. Because it’s such a flexible role, you can shape the job to lean into your unique and valuable strengths so you can have greater impact. That requires getting clear for yourself on what you want from the role, and then communicating those expectations to your principal and team. The role itself requires building the skills of communication and influence, which are also critical skills for any executive role, setting you up for more possibilities later in your career. I hope that you can take these insights and apply them to be more successful as a Chief of Staff.
🎥 Upcoming Events and Workshops:
March 21st: Generative AI 101
March 28th: Strategic Networking: Crafting Connections for Career Growth
March 29th: Chief of Staff Virtual Coffee Mixer #2 hosted by Ask a Chief of Staff, Nova Chief of Staff, Ambient [FREE for all to attend]
August 7th-9th: First Ever Ask a Chief of Staff Summit 📣 📣 📣
As a reminder, events and workshops are free or heavily discounted for all Ask a Chief of Staff community members.
Additional Chief of Staff Related Reads:
Understanding The Chief Of Staff Role
Surviving layoffs and building career resilience through mentorship
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