Not a deputy, not an assistant, not a project manager. What the role is for, and when it goes wrong.
The role is badly named. "Chief of staff" suggests either a military deputy or an executive assistant with a better title, and in organisations that have not thought about it carefully, it becomes one or the other within a year.
It is neither. A chief of staff exists because of a specific and common failure: an executive's span of attention is smaller than the number of things that require their attention, and the gap fills with work that is too important to drop and too small to delegate to a function.
Running the operating rhythm. Somebody has to own the calendar of reviews, the papers that feed them, the actions that come out of them and whether those actions happened. In most organisations this is nobody's job and it shows: meetings that repeat themselves, decisions that are taken twice, actions that reappear on a list for four months.
Being the place information converges. An executive gets filtered reporting from each function, each with an interest in its own framing. A chief of staff sees all of it and notices the contradiction — finance reporting managed services ahead of plan while the delivery team reports the same contract at risk. Nobody lied. Nobody was looking across.
Carrying the things that fall between functions. The cross-functional problem nobody owns, the initiative that needs three directors to agree, the question that has been bouncing for six weeks. These are the highest-value part of the role and the hardest to write into a job description, because by definition they are whatever is currently falling down.
Preparing decisions. Not making them — preparing them. Making sure that when a decision reaches the executive, the options are real, the analysis is done, the objections have been heard, and the recommendation is written down. The difference between a two-hour discussion and a ten-minute decision is almost always work done beforehand.
It becomes an executive assistant role. Diary management, travel, inbox. This happens when the executive has never had one and defaults to delegating what is most obviously delegable. It is a waste of a senior salary, and it is very hard to reverse once established.
It becomes a shadow decision-maker. The chief of staff starts saying no on the executive's behalf, and an unaccountable layer appears between the executive and their directs. Directors begin routing round it, and the information convergence that justified the role stops working because nobody tells it anything.
It becomes a project manager. Given a large programme to run, the role stops doing the four things above — which are the things nobody else can do — to do a job a delivery lead could do better. It is the most seductive failure because it feels productive and is easy to measure.
The common thread: all three are the role acquiring a clear remit. The discomfort of the job is that its remit is genuinely "whatever is falling down", and both the executive and the post-holder find that uncomfortable enough to fix.
Not by output volume. A busy chief of staff may be a badly used one.
Better tests:
The first thing to build is not a strategy. It is the boring infrastructure that makes everything else possible: what the meetings are, what feeds them, where actions and decisions are written down, and who owns what.
It is unglamorous and it is the entire foundation. An organisation where decisions are recorded and actions close is a different organisation from one where they are not, and nothing more sophisticated works until that is true.
[The Chief of Staff Toolkit](/products/the-chief-of-staff-toolkit.html) is that infrastructure: thirteen templates covering the cadence, the packs, the action and decision registers, governance and strategic priorities. £149, against £391 bought separately.