There has been a lot of attention recently on the continued growth of the Chief of Staff role. In fact, our CEO and company have been mentioned in a few recent articles from Bloomberg and The New York Times. 

The number of openings continues to grow, the role is showing up across industries, and a position that was once relatively uncommon outside of politics and government has become a familiar part of the corporate landscape. 

So, naturally, people are asking: What’s up with the Chief of Staff role? Why are so many organizations hiring one? 

After more than a decade working with Chiefs of Staff and the executives they support, we see the growth of the role as encouraging. It signals something we’ve believed for a long time: executives need leverage, and organizations are increasingly recognizing that supporting an executive effectively requires more than administrative assistance. 

But the growth of the role also raises a more important question: 

Are organizations getting better at designing the Chief of Staff role, or are they simply hiring more Chiefs of Staff? 

Those are two very different things. 

Demand is telling us something 

The continued demand for Chiefs of Staff reflects a real organizational need. 

Executives have more information coming at them, more stakeholders to manage, more decisions to make, and increasingly complex organizations to lead. They need leverage. They need someone who can connect dots, move priorities forward, improve information flow, and help translate their intentions into organizational action. 

A Chief of Staff can provide all those things. 

But the existence of the need doesn’t automatically validate one particular solution. 

At Prime, we’ve long believed there is a fundamental problem with the way organizations think about the Chief of Staff role: they start with the position instead of the problem. 

An executive is overwhelmed. Priorities aren’t moving. The leadership team isn’t aligned. The executive is spending too much time in the weeds. 

Someone says: We need a Chief of Staff. 

Maybe. 

But why? 

A Chief of Staff is not a strategy 

Organizations frequently hire a Chief of Staff without first defining what they need the role to accomplish. 

That’s one reason the position remains so difficult to define. If you simply do a quick google search of what a chief of staff does, you’ll see an endless list of potential responsibilities. And we see many organizations expect one person to somehow perform all of them. 

The result is what Prime calls the “Expectation Gap”: the distance between what an executive expects from a Chief of Staff and what the Chief of Staff understands themselves to be responsible for. 

This gap can be very expensive. 

A talented person enters a role with enormous potential but little clarity. The executive expects leverage. The Chief of Staff waits for direction. Or the Chief of Staff believes they own strategic initiatives while the executive primarily wants help managing information and priorities. 

Neither person is necessarily wrong. The role was simply never designed. 

Start with executive effectiveness, not the job description 

Prime’s point of view is that organizations should reverse the process. Don’t start by asking: What should our Chief of Staff do? 

Start by asking: What is preventing this executive (or executive team) from being as effective as they need to be? 

That distinction matters. 

Two executives can exhibit the exact same symptoms: too many meetings, missed follow-ups, slow decisions, lack of strategic time, and yet, require completely different solutions. 

And increasingly, the answer may involve some combination of people, process, and technology rather than another individual operating heroically beside the executive. 

That’s why Prime thinks about the Executive Office, not simply the Chief of Staff. 

The Chief of Staff is part of a system 

The most effective Chiefs of Staff don’t operate in isolation. 

They operate within a system that includes the executive, Executive Assistants, other executive support roles, leadership teams, processes, information flows, technology, and organizational norms. 

When that system is poorly designed, the Chief of Staff often becomes the workaround. 

They remember what everyone else forgets. They chase the follow-up. They connect information that lives in five places. They compensate for unclear decision rights. They step into whatever gap appears next. 

And because talented Chiefs of Staff are remarkably good at doing this, the system can appear to work. Until they leave. 

While a great Chief of Staff can compensate for a poorly designed Executive Office, that doesn’t mean the Executive Office is effective. 

So, is the Chief of Staff role a success? 

The growth of the role is worth celebrating. It reflects a growing recognition that executive effectiveness requires infrastructure and support. 

But the next phase of the profession shouldn’t simply be about creating more Chief of Staff positions. 

It should be about designing better environments for them to succeed. 

That means defining why the role exists. Aligning expectations between the executive and Chief of Staff. Understanding what work belongs with the Chief of Staff, and what doesn’t. Designing the broader Executive Office around the needs of the executive. And creating systems that don’t depend entirely on one exceptional person to hold everything together. 

The number of Chief of Staff openings tells us the market believes executives need more leverage. 

We agree. The opportunity now is to get much more sophisticated about how that leverage is created. 

Photo by Tim Mossholder