Chief Of Staff Job Description – It seems like every founder has a chief of staff these days, but do you need one? Is it time to hire one? And how to find a good one? These are not easy questions.
Chief of Staff could be your best salary ever, giving you great leverage on your time and the extra hands you’ve been needing as a founder/CEO. Or they can be a huge waste of time, creating more work for you and burning money that you could use for other important work.
Chief Of Staff Job Description
Before getting down to business, there’s one important thing to understand: a chief of staff is different from an executive assistant. EA can be incredibly useful. EA’s job is to make you more productive, typically through administrative tasks like managing your calendar, answering emails, and booking travel.
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The chief of staff, on the other hand, typically focuses on increasing the productivity of the entire company and taking on higher-level responsibilities that leave the CEO more time to do what he does best. This has two important benefits: 1.) A focused CEO often translates into a faster and more focused team 2.) CoS can amplify your efforts to create change in the team as the eyes, ears and voice of the CEO.
Before you start creating your job description, it’s important to know if it’s the right time for you to bring in a CoS. Try to answer the following questions – if you stumble upon some of them or find it difficult to answer, you may not be ready yet:
Are you ready to bring someone into your circle and let them see what you see? Are you looking for someone to reinforce your strengths, compensate for your weaknesses, or both? How do you work best and can you express that to someone else? Are you willing to invest the necessary time in this person’s success or are you waiting to get in the deep end and watch them sink or swim?
Warning: Often the best CoS hire is done internally. Valuable employees with strong internal relationships, institutional knowledge and high ambition are your first candidates. They can come from existing cross-functional roles (eg Biz Ops / People Ops) or join from more administrative roles (eg Executive Assistant). Give these employees the opportunity to interview for the role while you conduct an external search at the same time.
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The best CoSs can handle large amounts of ambiguity across multiple teams/projects at once. They are typically excellent communicators, well organized and able to apply strategic thinking to all aspects of your business. You’re probably looking for someone who can be ~80% effective at any given challenge. This role is often structured as an 18-24 month tour before the CoS can move on to other executive or founding roles. Finding a career CoS or even a recurring CoS is rare. Sometimes we see CoS working in early stage companies take their experience and jump to larger growth stage companies in a new CoS role.
Candidates with a background in management consulting, business at another startup, and sometimes investment banking are likely to have the right skills to be successful as a CoS. However, don’t immediately rule out applicants who don’t have these experiences – sometimes they can be the most entrepreneurial and motivated. For simplicity, we focus on the chiefs of staff who report to the CEO. CoSs who report to other senior management team members (e.g. marketing, product, legal, etc.) typically have more direct experience in these functional areas.
2-4 years of experience in leading consulting companies (Bain, McKinsey, BCG, etc.) provides applicants with strong analytical skills, experience working in a fast-paced environment, and extensive exposure to various business functions. These candidates can be the most versatile. They can be useful for very young startups, where they can play a general role, sometimes in incubation, or lead departments before they really exist. They can also be useful for more mature startup companies (Post Series B/C), where internal communication, management of the management team, and board and investor relations become even more important to the CEO.
One disadvantage of management consultant candidates is a possible lack of ownership. Their consulting projects all had end dates and they didn’t necessarily have the experience to see the results of the recommendations.
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Candidates with business experience in any high-growth startup (product-market fit) know first-hand what is needed in high-growth organizations. A candidate for business options is comfortable leaving ambiguous challenges, prefers relationships between teams and owns projects with little ego. In particular, companies that have teams that manage all aspects of the business in a city or region (think Airbnb or Uber) make great CoS candidates for Biz ops roles. Although supported by their parent company, the challenges local teams face are often unique to their markets. This promotes ownership thinking and a sense of urgency with limited resources. Candidates with experience in operations, sales, growth, and even products may have similar skills.
Investment bankers are often hardworking, intelligent, and have a clear view of the financial drivers of a company’s performance. Plus, many of them are used to working 80+ hour weeks, so the sheer stamina needed to build an early-stage startup isn’t a problem. However, keep in mind that CoS duties go far beyond the standard presentation editing and model building routine of a junior investment banker. You’re looking for people who can tackle complex operational challenges without the support of an established corporate infrastructure. Funding candidates who work closely with, for example, target companies (for example in a PE environment) are usually exposed to this.
Let’s dive into some of the key elements you’ll want to address in your job description to ensure you’re attracting the right candidates.
Professional experience is only part of the equation for finding a great CoS. At CoS Tech Network, the quality we see most consistently among community members is a high level of empathy. A CoS’s ability to connect with other team members and understand their motivations is critical to success. A good CoS must navigate complex relationships with each team member, especially those senior to him.
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He is able to stay personally organized while managing his manager’s priorities. Improve the availability of information comprehensively throughout the company.
It’s a known fact – companies slow down as they grow. The CoS should act as an additional entrepreneurial spirit that contributes to the speed of the team.
CoS helps build a networked organization – it breaks down walls so teams can communicate better and keep a constant eye on team emotions.
One of the first conversations every chief of staff should have with their CEO is about their “commute.” This is a critical point that most CEOs and hiring managers overlook. While career growth can be huge, not having a plan for how your CoS will grow inside or outside the company will set them up for failure. With an 18-24 month commute, it also means that the last 6-12 months are much less productive as the CoS start to think about what their next song will be. This does not need to be coded. It should be a smooth conversation that you’re comfortable with from day one, so I suggest including some lines about your vision for the role in the job description. Let applicants know you care about their career development.
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One of the most misunderstood parts of this position is the approximate level at which the CoS will work and the growth areas they can work on to continue leveling up.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff Network conducted research with dozens of current and former CoSs to create a 5-level framework for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The framework can be easily adapted to your own recruitment plan, adding skills depending on the task, the company’s values or the expected result after the service shift.
The stage/size of the company is also a key reason why the CoS role takes very different forms. Our framework for the Chief of Staff level generally assumes that as the size of the organization increases, so does the complexity of the role. Therefore, a level 2 chief of staff in an organization size 3 (250-1000 employees) can roughly correspond to a level 3 chief of staff in an organization size 2 organization (50-250 employees).
There is no correct way to set JD for CoS. The person you ultimately hire will vary based on the skills and personality that complement you best. This can also vary greatly between small startups and scaled-up companies. One of the best job descriptions we’ve seen is from Michael Karnjanaprakorn, who previously held several CoS positions at Skillshare and now at Otis. Fragments of the description are
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