A great chief of staff makes your job smaller, not bigger. They check their ego, earn trust before spending it, own the strategic rhythm, and build systems that make themselves obsolete. The coordination half of the role is now being absorbed by AI. What you’re really hiring for is judgement.
A great chief of staff makes your job smaller, not bigger. That sounds obvious. It isn’t.
I’ve coached more than 200 founder-CEOs through the scaling journey from 30 to 250 team members. The ones who get this hire right describe the same thing: breathing room. For the first time in years, they can think past next Tuesday.
The ones who get it wrong describe managing a second version of themselves. One with half the context and twice the opinions.
The difference isn’t skills on a CV. It’s a handful of traits that are hard to hire for and harder to fake. And the job itself is shifting underneath you.
What does a chief of staff actually do?
A chief of staff is a senior operator who works directly for the CEO, turning decisions into execution across the leadership team. They hold executive-level authority and act in the CEO’s name, without owning a function of their own.
A chief of staff is your force multiplier. They sit between you and the leadership team, turning what you decided on Monday into something that has actually happened by Friday. They own the strategic rhythm, build the reporting that tells you what’s actually happening, and hold the leadership team to account.
They’re not an executive assistant. They operate at executive level, making calls you’d otherwise have to make yourself. Dan Ciampa made the case for the role in Harvard Business Review back in 2020, and it’s gone from a Fortune 500 curiosity to a standard scale-up appointment since. McKinsey’s Andrew Goodman, who spent 18 months in the seat himself, reckons almost half the companies they see now have some form of chief of staff working with the CEO.
The role becomes essential somewhere in the middle of the journey from 30 to 250 team members. Before that, you can hold the whole business in your head. After that, you can’t, and the quality of your decisions decays without you noticing.
The job is splitting in two
Here’s what almost nobody hiring for this role has caught up with.
The chief of staff job has always been two jobs bolted together. Coordination: notes, follow-ups, meeting rhythm, chasing actions, keeping one version of the truth. And judgement: reading the room, knowing which battle to pick, telling you the thing you don’t want to hear.
The coordination half is being absorbed by software, fast. The Chief of Staff Network found that 86% of chiefs of staff now use AI tools daily, and 70% have used AI for board decks or executive briefings. The work that used to justify the headcount is increasingly done by a subscription.
So the question isn’t “should I hire a chief of staff”. It’s this: which half am I hiring for, and does that half need a person?
If it’s the coordination half, buy the tools first and see what’s left standing. Our free Founder-CEO Decision Rights Framework includes a prompt that opens with “You’re acting as my chief of staff”. Point it at your own calendar and decision log for a fortnight. Whatever’s still broken afterwards is the actual job description.
If it’s the judgement half, you’re hiring for something no tool provides. Political capital inside your business, and the nerve to spend it.
Do you actually need one yet?
Be honest about why you want this hire.
You genuinely need a chief of staff when everything goes through you:
- Decisions queue behind your calendar, and the queue is growing.
- The leadership team waits on context only you hold.
- You spend more time coordinating than deciding.
You don’t need one because a founder you admire has one, or because the title looks good on the org chart, or because you want a buffer from conversations you’d rather have less of.
That’s a vanity hire. It fails expensively, because the person arrives with no real problem to solve and starts inventing work to justify the seat. If a decent operations manager or a rebuilt meeting rhythm would fix it, do that first.
And mind the opposite failure: hiring too early. Every early hire is a choice, and a chief of staff is a generalist bought at the expense of the specialist your product or sales function is screaming for. MMC Ventures puts the sweet spot between Seed and Series B for venture-backed firms. In revenue terms, below £3m the job barely exists.
How does the role change at £3m, £20m and £50m?
At £3m the job barely exists as a full-time role. You need a fractional or hybrid version, part EA, part project manager, and buying the tools first usually beats hiring. At £20m it’s the classic appointment: strategic rhythm, executive dashboard, accountability across a leadership team you’ve only just built. At £50m the role narrows again, because you now have functional executives who own their domains. The chief of staff becomes your integrator and your succession bench, not your extra pair of hands.
Budget for what the seat costs. UK base salaries run £70k to £100k at startup stage, rising to £120k to £175k in large organisations (Movemeon), with London agency bands around £100k to £125k (Bain & Gray). If that number makes you wince, good. This is an executive hire or it’s nothing. And weigh it against what your own hours cost, because your hours are what it’s buying back.
Chief of staff vs executive assistant vs COO
Two comparisons come up in every conversation I have about this hire. Here are the short versions.
Is a chief of staff a glorified assistant?
No. An assistant manages your logistics. A chief of staff carries your authority into rooms you’re not in. If the person you’re imagining would wait to be told what to do, you’re imagining an assistant.
| Executive assistant | Chief of staff | |
|---|---|---|
| Owns | Your calendar and admin | Your effectiveness |
| Authority | Arranges the meeting | Decides if the meeting should happen |
| Operates | From your desk, backstopping you | In your name, across the leadership team |
Read the full chief of staff vs executive assistant breakdown, including whether an EA can move into the role.
| COO | Chief of staff | |
|---|---|---|
| Solves | Operational ownership | Leverage around you |
| Authority | Formal, with direct reports | Informal, with proximity |
| Hire when | The operating model is repeatable | You’re the constraint |
Read the four reasons to hire a chief of staff before a COO if that’s the decision in front of you.
What traits separate a great chief of staff from a good one?
These are the traits I look for when I’m advising you on this hire. Not the ones in a consultancy whitepaper. The ones that predict whether the appointment still works in 18 months.
The interview red flags are the mirror image: they want the spotlight, they need formal authority to feel safe, or ambiguity makes them twitchy. Any one of those and you’re reading the CV of a future line executive, not a chief of staff.
1. They check their ego at the door
This is the single biggest predictor. In client meetings I watch the best chiefs of staff work from the sidelines. They take meticulous notes. They listen to what’s said and, more importantly, to what isn’t. They’re enormously influential and completely uninterested in being seen to be.
Someone who wants this role for glory or control will wreck the relationships they’re meant to be strengthening.
2. They earn trust before they spend it
Trust works like a three-legged stool: care, competence, character. The model comes from a study of US officers in Afghanistan: wherever soldiers trusted their leader, all three legs were present. Do they genuinely care about the company rather than the role? Can they actually do the job, not just look busy? Is their say-do ratio close to 100%? Remove one leg and the stool falls over, and communication is the first casualty.
Building it feels painfully slow. You need to trust them enough to delegate, and they need delegated authority to prove they can be trusted. The great ones are patient with that. They bank small wins and say the difficult thing when it needs saying.
3. They own the strategic rhythm, not just the to-do list
A great chief of staff owns the strategic process itself. They schedule the quarterly reviews, drive the annual planning cycle, and make sure objectives and key results cascade properly.
If yours isn’t the architect of your strategic cadence, you’ve hired an expensive project manager. And you’ll be disappointed.
4. They become the single source of truth
The single most useful thing they can build is the executive team dashboard. Define the health KPIs. Create reporting where functions are no longer marking their own homework.
Arguments about what’s actually happening, rather than what each department claims is happening, burn hours of leadership time every week. I see it most often in headcount decisions. Demand always exceeds budget, and someone who sits across every function and reports to nobody but you is perfectly placed to arbitrate. That’s an executive judgement call, not project management.
5. They communicate like a diplomat, not a bureaucrat
Get this wrong and they become your mouthpiece rather than your multiplier. People will smile at them in meetings and ignore every word the moment they leave the room.
The very best practise transparent authority. They’re open about acting on your behalf instead of passing the directive off as their own idea.
6. They embrace being the bad cop when necessary
A chief of staff has enough authority to build a culture of accountability, and the great ones use it. They make sure commitments between executive team members are explicit and tracked. The sharpest version I’ve seen is a visible say-do scoreboard in the weekly exec meeting: who promised what, and did it happen. It’s brutal, and it works.
The best are neither pushover nor bully. Direct, fair, consistent, and clear that behavioural feedback belongs in the open, in the leadership room. Otherwise you’re the sole enforcer, and that doesn’t scale.
7. They build systems that make themselves obsolete
The best ones know the role has a natural lifespan. Their job is to build a rhythm that runs whether they’re in the room or not: the quarterly review happens, the dashboard updates, the actions get chased, with no hand on any of it.
Or the shadow version. If your chief of staff is hoarding context and making themselves the thing everything runs through, they aren’t great. They’re building job security at your expense.
“I scaled Rackspace UK from 4 to 150 people and Peer 1 Hosting from 0 to 120, taking both to £30m ARR. In every one of those growth phases, the moment a capable chief of staff was in place, everything moved faster. When the hire was wrong, I spent more time managing the chief of staff than running the business.”
Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company, coach to 200+ founder-CEOs
Everyone says you need a chief of staff. Find out if you actually do.
Why do chiefs of staff fail in the first six months?
Almost all the advice on this topic describes what great looks like. Far less of it explains why talented people fail. Here’s what I see repeatedly.
Nobody warned them about the emotional load
The role is a solo act. No team of their own, no peers inside the business, and a career path nobody can quite describe. And they absorb the tension between you and the leadership team, in both directions, with nowhere to put it down. Even McKinsey, hardly given to sentiment, calls it “almost by its nature, a little bit of a lonely role”. Say that out loud before they sign. The ones who discover it by accident rarely stay.
The role demands contradictory traits
Independent yet highly collaborative. A broad thinker who handles granular detail. Assertive enough to challenge senior leaders, willing to stay invisible when the work goes well. These pull in opposite directions, which is what makes this hire so bloody difficult. Candidates are usually strong on one side of each pair and weak on the other.
Authority ambiguity kills quietly
They have enormous informal authority and very little formal authority. They act in your name, but they aren’t you. When the leadership team pushes back, they have to handle it without escalating every time.
Get this wrong and they become either an escalation queue or a rogue agent overstepping without mandate. Your job is to set clear guardrails on what they can decide alone. Without those, the appointment fails before it starts.
McKinsey has run forums for chiefs of staff for five years, more than 200 of them, and their advice to every new one starts in exactly the same place: agree decision rights up front, and have the CEO announce the mandate so nobody on the leadership team has to guess. Their term for what the role runs on is halo authority. Borrowed from you, and real only while everyone knows you granted it.
Imposter syndrome is rampant and unspoken
They sit in every meeting, see every number, hear every disagreement at board level. Many, particularly in a first chief of staff role, feel like they’re bluffing. The great ones acknowledge that and keep moving. The ones who fail let it paralyse them, or hide behind process instead of deciding.
Ask them in the interview how they handle being out of their depth. The answer matters more than anything on the CV.
They confuse availability with indispensability
The first six months are overwhelming. Everything’s discovery, priorities shift weekly, and the temptation is to say yes to everything and prove value through sheer volume. The ones who burn out, and they do burn out, mistook being always available for being indispensable.
They take the feedback loop personally
Expect meticulous, sometimes blunt feedback, even on work they laboured over. You aren’t being harsh. You’re being precise, and you need them to match that precision without needing reassurance every time. The best treat feedback the way a surgeon treats a complication. Note it, fix it, move on.
How do you know if a chief of staff hire is working?
When I’m coaching a CEO who’s just made this hire, I watch for three signals in the first 90 days.
First: does your calendar start to clear? Not because meetings get cancelled, but because the preparation, follow-up and context-switching that used to eat your time is being absorbed. If you’re doing all the same work and now also briefing someone on it, the hire is creating work rather than removing it. That’s the acid test.
Second: is the leadership team engaging with them directly, or routing everything through you? If after three months the team still treats them as your secretary, the role was positioned badly. That’s usually your fault, not theirs.
Third: have they found one broken thing and fixed it without being asked? Not a vanity project. Something operational that was genuinely causing friction. The best spot these in the first fortnight. That single act of initiative builds more trust than six months of reliable execution.
Treat the role as a rotation, not a permanent crutch
The businesses that get the most out of this role don’t treat it as a job. They treat it as a lap of the track.
McKinsey studied roughly 250 chiefs of staff and found a median tenure of 2.3 years, against 4.8 years for the average large-company CEO. Read that as failure and you’ll keep hiring anxiously. Read it as designed succession and it changes what you’re building. Nearly two thirds are appointed from inside the business, and two thirds get promoted afterwards.
So pick your next general manager and give them eighteen months beside you. They learn the whole business at executive altitude, you get leverage, and at the end you have a leader who’s watched every real decision get made from the inside.
Which leaves you one honest question. Are you building a pipeline, or hiring a crutch?
Frequently asked questions
What does a chief of staff do day to day?
A chief of staff is your force multiplier. They manage the strategic rhythm, own the quarterly planning cycle, build the executive dashboard, and make sure what you decided actually happens across the leadership team. In scaling companies of 30 to 250 team members, they absorb the operational complexity that would otherwise eat your time.
How is a chief of staff different from an executive assistant?
An executive assistant manages your calendar and administration. A chief of staff manages your effectiveness. They challenge priorities, redesign processes, and make executive-level calls on resource allocation. The distinction is decision-making authority: an EA arranges a meeting, a chief of staff decides whether the meeting should happen at all.
When should a CEO hire a chief of staff?
The role becomes essential as you scale through 30 to 250 team members. The clearest trigger is when coordination, not strategy, eats most of your week. Other signs: misaligned leadership, stalled initiatives, and direct reports competing for headcount with no neutral arbiter.
Will AI replace the chief of staff role?
It’s replacing half of it. The coordination work, notes, follow-ups, briefing packs and meeting rhythm, is increasingly automated, and 86% of chiefs of staff now use AI daily. What survives is judgement, political capital, and the willingness to tell you something you don’t want to hear. Hire for that half.
How long should a chief of staff stay in the role?
Median tenure is 2.3 years, and that’s by design rather than failure. The best build rhythms the business sustains without them, then move into line leadership. If someone’s been in the role three years and the company can’t function without them, the position has become a crutch.
How much does a chief of staff cost in the UK?
UK base salaries run £70k to £100k at startup stage, and £120k to £175k in large organisations, with London agency bands around £100k to £125k. Price it like the executive hire it is, and if the budget isn’t there, fix the meeting rhythm first.
What should you do next?
If this post has annoyed you slightly, good. The issue is probably not effort. It is design. The business is asking you to carry decisions, standards and exceptions that should now belong inside the team.
The goal is not to disappear. The goal is to build a company where your best work is not dragged back into every operational tangle.
That is the point. Scaling is not adding more people around the same bottleneck. It is rebuilding the business so the bottleneck is removed.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If growth is now making the company slower, heavier or more dependent on you, I can help you decide whether the constraint is people, strategy, execution, cash or your role as founder. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers these principles in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch the £30m scaling video. Start there if you want the founder-level version of these principles, using Rackspace and Peer 1 as the proof base.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room.
Your move. Open Slack, Teams or your inbox. Find the decision that should not have come to you this week. That is where the scaling work starts.