What Does a Chief of Staff Do, and When Does Your Company Need One?

By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT

I called my chief of staff about a task I had forgotten. She had already handled it.

That is the whole job in one phone call. Most answers to "what does a chief of staff do" are written for the person who wants the title: duties, skills, career path. This page is written for the other chair. You run the company, the calendar is full, decisions queue outside your door, and someone has told you a chief of staff would fix it.

Sometimes it will. Sometimes it is the most expensive way to avoid a harder change. Below is what the role actually does, where its authority starts and stops, and the order of operations I give CEOs before they post the job.

What is a chief of staff in a company?

A chief of staff is a senior operator who extends the CEO's reach by owning follow-through on the CEO's priorities, with delegated authority over small and mid-sized decisions.

The simplest version I give clients: an executive assistant does administrative work. A chief of staff has "the decision authority of smaller and mid sized things, but not the big things. And then it's lockstep with me every single day."

That last part matters more than the task list. The chief of staff sits in your meetings, knows what you decided and why, and carries it into the rooms you are not in. They are given the responsibility, not the authority. When it works, people stop routing every question to you, because they know the answer they get from your chief of staff is the answer they would have got from you.

The role is common at the top of large companies. McKinsey analyzed about 250 chiefs of staff and found that roughly three quarters of them support CEOs, with the rest serving other C-suite executives, regional leaders or board chairs (McKinsey, "Chief of staff: Anatomy of the role in eight charts", 2024). For a chief of staff to the CEO of a scaling company, the question is narrower: is your time the thing slowing the company down?

What does a chief of staff do day to day?

The day-to-day chief of staff role sorts into four buckets. Job boards list twenty chief of staff responsibilities; almost all of them fit here.

1. Run the operating rhythm. Prepare the weekly leadership team meeting, track what was committed, chase what slipped, and make sure the one-on-ones between you and your leaders have what they need.
2. Turn decisions into follow-through. You decide on Monday. By Wednesday the chief of staff has told the three people who needed to know, in words you would have used, and put a date on each piece.
3. Filter and prepare. Decide what reaches you, in what shape. A problem arrives with the options and a recommendation, or it does not arrive yet.
4. Own cross-functional projects nobody else owns. The board pack, the annual plan, the pricing change that touches sales, finance and product at once.

Here is the split I use when a CEO asks what to hand over first. "I can delegate maintenance, I cannot delegate building." Maintenance is the recurring machinery of the company. Building is new strategy, new products and the few relationships only you can hold. The chief of staff takes the maintenance so you have hours left for building.

The right-hand column is short on purpose. If yours is long, you are not ready for this hire yet. More on that below.

The switchboard problem the role fixes

The reason I install a weekly leadership meeting before almost anything else: without it, every piece of information routes up through the CEO and back down again. You become the switchboard for your own company. Every lateral conversation between sales and delivery goes through you, because there is no other place for it to happen.

A good chief of staff breaks that by building the room where leaders talk to each other. A bad hire becomes a second switchboard, sitting next to yours.

When does a company need a chief of staff?

A company needs a chief of staff when the CEO's time, not the team's capacity, is the constraint on how fast decisions get made and carried out. Four signs tend to show up together.

• Decisions wait days for you, not because they are hard, but because you have not had an hour to look at them.
• The same question reaches you from three leaders in the same week, because they do not talk to each other.
• Follow-through dies between meetings. You agree something on Tuesday and nobody owns it by Friday.
• You run more than one entity, or a team spread across locations, and nobody manages proactively when you are in the other one.

That last one is close to a rule for me. Any founder running multiple entities eventually needs a US-based chief of staff to oversee offshore teams and manage ahead of problems rather than behind them.

The authority wall

There is a wall I see between roughly $1.5 million and $3 million in revenue for owner-operated businesses. The founders who get through it give up authority, not just responsibility. The ones who stay stuck hand off tasks and still insist on being the final word on every decision.

A chief of staff hired at this wall walks into the same trap. The CEO hires one to get past the wall, keeps every decision, and the new person spends their days asking permission. You now pay a senior salary for a messenger. If you want to see what the role costs before you decide, the chief of staff salary data sets the published figures side by side.

What should a CEO do before hiring a chief of staff?

Here's the part most guides skip, and it is the rule I start with: do not hire first.

"If you hire someone first, you're not delegating to them how they're supposed to be efficient. So first we establish you as a hyper efficient leader, then you hire someone else and delegate part of that work and have them be your extension."

The order I give CEOs:

1. Fix your own week first. If your calendar is chaos, a chief of staff will inherit the chaos and organize it beautifully. Cut the meetings that do not need you, batch the ones that do, and protect a few hours a week for the one goal that matters most.
2. Install the leadership meeting. A weekly meeting where your leaders exchange information directly. Once that is real, one-on-ones can drop to every other week at thirty minutes. The one-on-one meeting guide covers the format.
3. Log what you wish you could hand off. For a month or two, write down every moment you think "I wish I could delegate this," and ask of each one: is this good for me? Sort the list into must, should and could delegate. That log becomes the job.
4. Define the process, then hire into it. Process before people. Hire before the leadership culture is defined and the new person installs their culture, not yours.
5. Decide what authority you are really giving away. Write down the decisions the chief of staff will make alone. If the list is empty, stop.

Step 3 is where the chief of staff job description template comes from. It is built on that log, not on a job board list, and it includes the decision rights most templates leave out.

If you want a quick read on where your own delegation stands before you start, the delegation quiz takes a few minutes. The longer version of step 1 is the playbook on delegation and systems for founders becoming CEOs.

Who to hire

Build a profile that is not you. If you lead with influence and strategy, the person next to you should lead with execution, with enough influence to be heard. Not another visionary. Not a pure relationship builder.

I know this one personally. I can both think it and do it, but I prefer the thinking, and if I have to do something more than once my brain is bored. So I always partner with someone whose strength is execution.

Is a chief of staff a senior position?

Yes, in reach, and often not in title. The role usually sits one line from the CEO and attends the leadership meeting, but it typically has no function reporting to it. That is why the seniority question confuses people: the chief of staff can speak for the CEO in a room full of vice presidents and still have no team.

McKinsey's sample gives the shape of it. The average chief of staff had just over 12 years of work experience, nearly two thirds were appointed from inside their organization, and the median tenure was 2.3 years, compared with 4.8 years for the average large-company CEO. Two thirds were promoted after the role (McKinsey, 2024).

That short tenure is worth planning for. McKinsey reads it as many chiefs of staff using the job as a springboard. Expect to rehire, and keep the job description current so the next person starts faster than the last.

Where the chief of staff role sits among senior hires

These three roles get confused, and the cleanest way to separate them is authority, not tasks.

An executive assistant handles administration: calendar, travel, inbox, logistics. A chief of staff carries responsibility for the CEO's priorities and decides small and mid-sized matters, while representing the CEO's decisions on everything larger. A COO holds both authority and responsibility for operations and can make the decision in the room without checking back.

Which one you need depends on how hands-on you want to stay, not on which title sounds more senior. And one test I use: if your two-year picture is hiring a CEO to replace yourself, hire a COO you can groom rather than a chief of staff. That takes about three years to anchor, so the clock starts now.

What makes a chief of staff hire fail?

Three failures follow directly from skipping the steps above.

Responsibility without authority, by accident. Every role starts with limited authority. The failure is when it never grows.

The CEO keeps pulling decisions back, and the chief of staff learns that everything needs a second yes. Soon the leadership team goes around them to you.

Hiring to fix a process that does not exist. The tools do not save you either. An operating system is only as good as the person who runs it, and a new tool on top of a broken process just gets you to the same mess faster, with dashboards.

Hiring a copy. Two visionaries in one office produce more ideas and less follow-through.

The failure mode is also the upside, turned around.

I once coached a chief of staff for about three months, deliberately pushing her toward a COO role and making her strong in front of the board. When the CEO decided to move on, the CEO and board skipped the external search and asked her to take the CEO seat, because of the authority and responsibility she had taken on in those months. I joke that I failed her, because she got CEO instead of COO. The point for you: a chief of staff grows exactly as fast as you let authority move.

What does a chief of staff do FAQ

What does a chief of staff do for a CEO?

A chief of staff runs the CEO's priorities between meetings. The work typically covers preparing and running the leadership team meeting, tracking commitments, filtering and preparing decisions, communicating the CEO's decisions to the people affected, and owning cross-functional projects without a natural owner. The chief of staff usually decides small and mid-sized operational matters and represents the CEO's position on larger ones, rather than making strategic decisions independently.

Is a chief of staff the same as an executive assistant?

No. An executive assistant handles administrative work such as calendars, travel, correspondence and logistics. A chief of staff works at the leadership level: attending the CEO's meetings, holding the leadership team to its commitments and making small and mid-sized decisions on the CEO's behalf. Many CEOs have both, with the executive assistant covering execution and the chief of staff covering priorities and follow-through.

When should a startup or small company hire a chief of staff?

A company typically needs a chief of staff when the CEO's time has become the bottleneck on decisions, follow-through fails between meetings, or the CEO runs more than one entity. The hire works best after the CEO has cleaned up their own calendar, installed a weekly leadership meeting and written down which decisions the chief of staff will own. Hiring before those steps tends to produce a well-paid messenger.

How long does a chief of staff usually stay in the role?

McKinsey's 2024 analysis of about 250 chiefs of staff found a median tenure of 2.3 years, compared with 4.8 years for the average large-company CEO. Two thirds were promoted after the role, often within the same company, and only about one in ten moved directly into another chief of staff position. Companies should expect to refill the role and keep its description current.

Should a chief of staff be hired internally or externally?

Both work. McKinsey found that nearly two thirds of chiefs of staff are appointed from inside their organizations, rising to 80 percent at companies with 50,000 or more employees, and that internal and external hires performed comparably. Internal hires bring relationships and context. External hires bring a fresh view and are more common outside the largest companies, especially where there is no obvious internal candidate.

Does a chief of staff need authority to make decisions?

Yes, within defined limits. A chief of staff without any decision rights becomes a message relay and the leadership team starts going around them. A workable setup gives the role authority over small and mid-sized operational decisions, written down before the hire, while strategic and irreversible decisions stay with the CEO. The list of delegated decisions usually grows as trust builds over the first year.

What a chief of staff cannot do for you

A chief of staff can multiply a CEO who already knows what they want. It cannot supply the wanting. If your priorities change every week, the best chief of staff in the world becomes the person who announces the change.

So answer the question in reverse. Before asking what a chief of staff does, ask what you will stop doing on the day they start. Name three things.

Then name the decisions you will no longer make. If you can do both, the hire will pay back fast. If you cannot, the work is on your side of the desk first.

For the delegation habits underneath all of this, the delegation training guide walks through the conversation and the check-ins, and the delegating leadership style page explains why you hand over outcomes rather than tasks. If you are weighing whether part of the work should go to AI instead of a person, the fractional chief AI officer page is a related read.

Getting the chief of staff decision right the first time

I get a lot of requests from COOs and chiefs of staff themselves. The CEO side of the question starts earlier, before the hire.

In my 1:1 CEO strategic advisory, week one is leadership assessments and preparation. Weeks two and three are a full-day intensive at your location, and that is where I would put this question: what you keep, what you hand over, and which seat you actually need. From week four, weekly sessions turn that into a live plan with dates.

I was one of Canon's youngest CEOs and a tech CEO for 10 years, learning which of my decisions could leave my desk and which could not. I take a small number of CEOs at a time, so the work stays personal. By the end of the intensive, "what does a chief of staff do" stops being a general question. You will know whether you need a chief of staff, a COO, or a cleaner week, and you will own the list of decisions that goes to whoever takes the seat.