What a Good Chief of Staff Actually Does — And Why Most Can't Do It

What a Good Chief of Staff Actually Does — And Why Most Can't Do It

The Chief of Staff role has grown significantly in recent years. Once confined to government and the military, it has spread across technology companies, scale-ups, and large enterprises. Deloitte has two active research projects studying it. The Chief of Staff Association now has members in more than 50 countries.

And yet, for most organisations, the role is deeply misunderstood — not in theory, but in practice. The theory is compelling. The practice collapses almost immediately into something much narrower.

McKinsey research reveals that 56% of Chiefs of Staff work over 50 hours a week, with 25% exceeding 60 hours. They're not working those hours on strategy. They're working them on coordination.

What the Role Is Supposed to Do

At its best, the Chief of Staff function exists to solve a specific problem: as an organisation grows, the executive at the top loses situational awareness. They're in too many meetings, managing too many relationships, making too many decisions with incomplete context. They can no longer maintain a current picture of what's happening across the organisation — what was decided, what's at risk, what needs their attention.

The Chief of Staff is the person who maintains that picture. They attend the meetings the executive can't attend, track the decisions that are being made, monitor the commitments that are at risk, and synthesise everything into the briefing the executive needs to make good decisions. They are the executive's situational awareness infrastructure.

This is genuinely valuable work. When it's done well, the executive makes better decisions faster, catches problems earlier, and allocates their attention to the things that actually require it.

What the Role Actually Becomes

The LSE Business Review notes that Chiefs of Staff who succeed do so by acting as relational gatekeepers — building alliances, maintaining context across functions, and bridging the gap between the executive's priorities and the organisation's reality.

In practice, most Chiefs of Staff spend the majority of their time on three things: calendar management, slide production, and coordination overhead. Not because they're not capable of more. Because the organisation has no other infrastructure for these tasks, and someone has to do them.

This is the structural trap. The executive needs situational awareness. The CoS is the only person positioned to provide it. But situational awareness — understanding what's actually happening across a complex organisation — requires an enormous amount of manual work. You have to attend the meetings. Chase the updates. Read the notes. Synthesise the signals. And do it continuously, not just before the quarterly review.

In organisations with ten active workstreams, that's a full-time job by itself. Add calendar management and stakeholder communications and it becomes more than a full-time job. The strategic work — the deep synthesis, the pattern recognition, the proactive identification of risks — gets squeezed out by the operational urgency of keeping the machine running.

The Infrastructure Gap Underneath the Role

The reason the Chief of Staff role so often collapses into coordination overhead is not a talent problem. It's an infrastructure problem.

Most organisations don't maintain a current, structured record of what's happening. Decisions live in meeting notes. Commitments live in Slack threads. Risks live in conversations. The CoS has to manually reconstruct the state of the organisation from these fragments — continuously, across multiple workstreams, in parallel.

That reconstruction is what consumes the hours. And it's work that, fundamentally, doesn't require human intelligence. It requires human presence — being in the right rooms, reading the right documents, stitching together the right signals. That's exactly the kind of work that should be automated.

When a coordination layer exists — a system that captures decisions from every meeting, maintains a current execution state, and surfaces risks proactively — the Chief of Staff's job changes fundamentally. The reconstruction work disappears. What remains is the judgment work: the synthesis, the pattern recognition, the hard conversations that require human intelligence and organisational trust.

This is the Chief of Staff role as it was intended. Not a highly educated coordinator, but a strategic partner who operates from accurate, current information — because the infrastructure maintains that information automatically.

What This Means for Organisations Hiring a CoS

The decision to hire a Chief of Staff often reflects a real and growing problem: the executive has lost situational awareness and the organisation is suffering for it. Decisions are slower, risks are caught later, and the organisation is harder to steer.

Hiring a CoS addresses the symptom. Building the infrastructure addresses the cause.

A good Chief of Staff, with the right infrastructure under them, can focus entirely on the judgment work that only a human can do. Without that infrastructure, even the best CoS will spend most of their time on reconstruction work that a machine should handle.

The organisations getting the most from the Chief of Staff role are the ones that have built the coordination layer first — and then given their CoS the space to do the work that actually requires them.

In Parallel provides the coordination infrastructure that lets Chiefs of Staff focus on strategy, not reconstruction. See how it works →

Related reading

• The Missing Middle: Dorsey Nailed the Diagnosis. Now What?
• The Briefing Nobody Writes
• Why Program Visibility Breaks: The Meeting Paradox Behind Execution Drift