My former boss used to give this advice to students and young people regularly: “Be indispensable.”
It sounds like the ultimate compliment. For a Chief of Staff, it often is.
They know what the executive is thinking before anyone else does. They remember the context behind decisions made six months ago. They know which stakeholder needs a phone call, which issue needs escalation, and which “quick question” is anything but quick.
When something falls between organizational cracks, they catch it. When information isn’t flowing, they move it. When ownership is unclear, they step in.
Eventually, people begin saying some version of: I don’t know what we’d do without them.
That’s usually meant as praise, but it should also make us a little nervous…
The best Chiefs of Staff become connective tissue
The nature of the Chief of Staff role makes dependency particularly easy to create.
Chiefs of Staff often sit at the intersection of the executive, leadership team, board, employees, and external stakeholders. They see information others don’t see. They participate in conversations others don’t participate in. They accumulate enormous amounts of context.
And because good Chiefs of Staff are problem solvers, they naturally begin filling gaps.
A process doesn’t work? They create a workaround. Two leaders aren’t communicating? They become the intermediary. Nobody knows who owns something? They make sure it gets done. The executive isn’t getting the right information? They go find it.
This is enormously valuable. But over time, something subtle can happen: The Chief of Staff stops supporting the system and starts becoming the system.
Heroics can hide organizational problems
This is one of the paradoxes of exceptional executive support.
The better someone is at compensating for organizational friction, the less visible that friction becomes.
If the Chief of Staff always remembers the follow-up, there’s less urgency to build a reliable follow-up process.
If they always know where information lives, there’s less pressure to create better knowledge management.
If they can resolve confusion about who owns what, unclear accountability becomes tolerable.
If they can get the right people into a room whenever a decision stalls, nobody has to fix the decision-making process.
Everything keeps moving. So the organization concludes that the system works. But, in reality, the system doesn’t work.
The real test comes when someone leaves
The risk becomes apparent when the Chief of Staff goes on vacation, changes roles, or leaves the organization. Suddenly, questions emerge: Where does that information live? Who owns this process? Why do we have this meeting? Who has the relationship with that stakeholder? How does the CEO want this handled?
The answers may exist almost entirely in one person’s head. That’s not unusual. Chiefs of Staff accumulate an extraordinary amount of tacit knowledge precisely because of where they sit in an organization.
But an effective Executive Office should be asking: What knowledge needs to belong to the organization rather than the individual?
Leverage without dependency
None of this means a Chief of Staff shouldn’t be exceptionally valuable.
The distinction is between value and dependency.
A great Chief of Staff should create enormous leverage for an executive. But over time, some of that leverage should become institutionalized. A recurring process shouldn’t require the Chief of Staff to remember every step. Important decisions shouldn’t disappear into their notebook. Critical stakeholder context shouldn’t exist only in their head. Routine coordination shouldn’t depend on their personal intervention.
The goal isn’t to systematize everything. Much of what makes an exceptional Chief of Staff valuable is inherently human: judgment, trust, discretion, intuition, influence, and the ability to understand context.
Those things are difficult, and likely impossible, to turn into a process. But that’s exactly why we should systematize the things we can.
Systems preserve the Chief of Staff’s capacity for the work that actually requires a Chief of Staff.
Build the Executive Office, not just the Chief of Staff
This is another reason Prime has moved beyond thinking about the Chief of Staff as an isolated role.
The better unit of design is the Executive Office.
The executive may have a Chief of Staff, one or several Executive Assistants, and other support around them. There are also processes, meeting rhythms, communication channels, technology, and information systems that determine how effectively that group operates.
When those elements are intentionally designed together, knowledge can be shared. Coverage becomes easier. Responsibilities become clearer. Processes survive personnel changes. And the Chief of Staff can operate at the level the role was actually intended to operate.
When they’re not, the Chief of Staff often becomes the person holding everything together.
That can feel like success, but it isn’t.
A different definition of a great Chief of Staff
Maybe we need to rethink what “indispensable” means.
The best Chief of Staff isn’t necessarily the person without whom everything stops working.
Perhaps it’s the person who leaves the executive, the Executive Office, and even the broader organization more capable because they were there.
They build systems. They create clarity. They improve how information moves. They strengthen relationships that don’t depend solely on them. They make good ways of working repeatable.
And when they eventually move on, as most Chiefs of Staff will, the organization doesn’t suddenly discover how much of its operating infrastructure walked out the door with them.
The goal isn’t to build an organization that can’t function without an exceptional Chief of Staff. It’s to have an exceptional Chief of Staff help build an organization that can.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev
