The $400,000 Body Double and Defining the Chief of Staff Role

There is a First Round Review essay from 2017 called, "Why You Need Two Chiefs in the Executive Office," and if you have spent ten minutes in the Chief of Staff world you have had it sent to you, usually by someone who means well. Influitive's CEO Mark Organ explains how a Chief of Staff turned him from a founder forgetting his third meeting in a row into something the piece cheerfully calls "superhuman." Nine years later it is still the canonical venture take on the role, which is a problem, because it is mostly wrong.

I want to be fair, though, because one part of it is the best advice on this subject I have read anywhere, no wink at all. So let's start where he's right in his thinking.

The Onboarding is Brilliant. Executives, Please Steal it.

Organ puts his Chief of Staff in the same room. All day every day for an entire month. They listen to his musings, sit in on his calls and his one-on-ones, and read his email. He Slacks them twenty times a day and, in his words, holds nothing back. The stated goal is that the Chief of Staff can eventually predict how he would decide. And before anyone is hired, he simulates the job with a real project and watches how the candidate thinks under pressure.

This, kids, is the whole ballgame. Judgment does not transfer through a job description or a jam-packed two-day handoff that appears to be thorough but doesn't even scratch the surface; it transfers through proximity, repetition, and a executive willing to think out loud in front of someone allowed to disagree. Most executives will not do this. They want the output without the exposure, the board deck without anyone watching them flail toward it. If you take one thing from his essay, take this: your Chief of Staff cannot represent your thinking if you have never let them watch you think.

Here is the ultimate irony, though – the onboarding he describes builds an organizational mind, while the role he builds around it is a body double. His practice, in short, is smarter than his theory, a problem I intend to hold against him for the next thousand words.

The Superhero Problem

The essay is built on a single sentence, delivered without a flicker of irony: "The job is to make me a superhero." Actually, Mark, it really isn’t. Everything else grows out of that sentence like mold. The Chief of Staff becomes a "stunt double," a "two-headed monster," a discreet figure who helps the CEO "lead from the shadows," which is a stirring ambition for a Chief of Staff and also a tidy one-line summary of Iago. Strip the costume off any of these and you find the same creature underneath: not a colleague but a prosthetic, an extension of one man's reach, a way to be in two rooms at once and collect the applause in both.

That is not a Chief of Staff. That is a very expensive genetic-ish clone with excellent follow-through.

Contrary to popular belief, a Chief of Staff does not exist to amplify one person. Not your executive, or your CEO. They exist to move an organization toward that person's mission, vision, and values, which–and I really cannot stress this enough–are not the same thing as that person's mood. The distinction has teeth. When your performance is graded on "mak[ing] the CEO superhuman," every decision gets graded against the CEO's convenience and which side of the bed they woke up on. When performance is measured against "advancing the mission," decisions get graded against the ethos and efficacy of an organization, which occasionally requires strolling into the corner office to mention that the superhero's cape is caught in the door. A stunt double never breaks that kind of news. Not breaking it is the entire reason he was hired.

The White House worked this out generations ago. A great White House Chief of Staff, a Baker or a Panetta or a Podesta, was never there to make the President superhuman; he was there to run the building so the President could go run the country. The authority was real, the remit was the whole operation, and nobody confused the job with a body double flown in to handle the dangerous stunts. Silicon Valley admired that model from a distance, ran it through a juice cleanse until nothing was left but "my brilliant shadow," and then seemed sincerely wounded when the brilliant shadow kept refreshing its résumé.

The Pit Stop Problem

Then we arrive at the tour of duty. Organ runs a strict eighteen months and spells out exactly what happens during that stretch – the Chief of Staff turns up, endures an "identity crisis" somewhere around month twelve (his phrase, and a genuinely unsettling thing to schedule into a plan on purpose), interviews their own replacement by month fourteen, and graduates into something grander. The whole arrangement is sold as a launchpad: do your tour, and "the world is your oyster."

I understand the romance of it. I also think it is the single most corrosive idea the tech scene has brought to the profession. You're being evaluated on a ridiculous timetable where, in 90 days, you are expected to master this role and all of its intricacies and 15 months later expected to move on. That's a timetable even Marty McFly and Doc would question.

The Chief of Staff role is not a pit stop on the way to somewhere better, nor a rotation, nor a proving ground, nor an eighteen-month visa into the executive suite with the expiration date stamped in before you've even unpacked. It is a pinnacle. Design it as a temporary credential and temporary thinking is precisely what you will get a very capable person optimizing for their next business card instead of the institution's next decade, clearing out their desk at the exact moment they have finally learned where the bodies are buried and, more importantly, who did the burying. You would never introduce your CFO as "a terrific eighteen-month stepping stone," and if you tried, your board would gently introduce you to the lovely search firm around the corner. Yet we say it about the Chief of Staff out loud, in the pitch, as a feature rather than a bug, and then act puzzled that the market files the role somewhere between "the intern with opinions" and "the CEO's emotional support executive." Amy Brookheimer never treated the job as a layover for one second. She is fictional, she is terrifying, she would have your head on a spike before lunch, and she still understood the role better than most of the job descriptions that reach my inbox.

The Remit Problem

The deepest error is tucked into the shortest sentence in the piece with, "A chief of staff works only for the CEO." Everything downstream cracks along that one fault line.

A real Chief of Staff carries a remit that runs the length of the entire building. The CEO, naturally, but also the leadership team, the rest of the C-suite, and the people three floors down who will never once appear on the corner-office calendar and whose names the CEO can produce with roughly 23 percent confidence. The Chief of Staff sits in the one chair in the company with a view of all of it at once, the seams between functions that no single executive can see because each of them is, quite correctly, buried face-first in their own. The work is to stitch across those seams until everyone, from the boardroom down to the person who started Monday and is still hunting for the good coffee, is genuinely pointed at the same mission rather than four subtly different ones that only look aligned from the parking lot.

This is where the whole field keeps smudging the line. Yes, a Chief of Staff serves the executive, but we over-index on the executive as a person and forget the executive as a function. The strategic executive administrator, which is what a Chief of Staff actually is, serves the mandate and delivers it through the whole organization, not by fetching the executive a copy of their calendar.

At the Coul & Gold Group, we define the role as nine functions that form a system rather than a list: a foundation, an intelligence layer, functions that face the executive, functions that face the organization, and the structural work that holds all of it upright. The full definition lives at coulandgold.com/cos-functions, and I would set it beside any job posting before you write a word. All nine are the role, and the absence of any one of them is diagnostic. "Works only for the CEO" is not a lighter, leaner version of the job. It is a different job wearing the same title, and the org feels the difference long before anyone can name it.

The Secret Weapon Problem

None of this died in 2017. Last week Bloomberg ran the same errors under a headline engineered to travel: "The $400,000 Chief of Staff Is the CEO's Secret Weapon in the AI Age." A secret weapon, a price tag, an AI-age gloss. The same body double, now with a budget line.

The piece describes the Chief of Staff as "part confidante, part concierge and part consigliere," which is two-thirds of a Silvio Dante and one-third of a hotel lobby. CEOs, it reports, are "buckling under the stress and uncertainty of the AI age" and need someone to hand them "breathing space." Then a search partner defines the whole role in one admiring sentence: "You're connected to the person more than the position."

That sentence is the entire mistake, delivered as a virtue. Connect to the person and you have built an expensive friendship that ends the day they leave. Connect to the position, and to the mission beneath it, and you have built something the organization keeps after the CEO's badge stops working. The article signs off, on cue, by calling the role "an extraordinary springboard." We’ve met the springboard and it’s a pit stop that costs $400,000.

Which Brings Me to Korn Ferry

Korn Ferry ran a piece this month, "In Hot Demand: Chief of Staff?", and they land closer to the truth than almost anyone writing about this role, which is the reason I want to see them go the last mile instead of parking one turn short of it.

They clock the surge honestly: postings doubled last year, the title has tripled since 2021. They note, correctly, that it is no longer just the CEO's, that division heads and other C-suite leaders now have their own. And David Farris hands us the best line in the genre when he describes other leaders watching the Chief of Staff "wielding the sword of the leader of the entire firm." It is a classic Tywin Lannister conundrum – everyone can see who is actually holding the blade.

They do trip on one thing, though. The piece files the Chief of Staff as "not technically part of the C-suite," as though the org chart were handed down on stone tablets. Title and altitude are not the same measurement. If the person is making cross-functional calls, prepping the board, and speaking with the executive's authority, they are already doing C-suite work — and "not technically" is the noise an organization makes right before it underpays someone for the job they are actually doing. Leaving them off the chart does not lower the altitude of the work; it just guarantees the person doing it carries the responsibility without the standing, which is exactly the architecture problem that breaks the role in the first place. (I won’t even mention that I have no earthly idea where KF would like the Chief of Staff to sit if not in the c-suite.)

And for the love of all that is holy, can we please dispense with calling the role "connective tissue?" I have a whole suite of rules for Claude that bans certain words and punctuation (but I'll die with the em dash and oxford comma right by my side). Connective tissue is filler, it holds everyone in place, serves every part equally, and you can lose plenty of it before anyone notices. A Chief of Staff is a vital organ. A vital organ does not serve the other organs; it serves the body. Remove it and something stops, which is the whole argument: the absence of the function is not an inconvenience, it is a diagnosis.

Then, at the diagnosis, the piece reaches for a casting solution. The failures, Farris says, come from putting the wrong person in the seat. Two-thirds of chiefs of staff get promoted; one-third create the very bottlenecks they were hired to clear; and the fix, in his framing, is a better hire. "It's all about putting the right person into the role." And of course they would say that – that's their raison d'etre.

But you can't cast a role you haven't written. When a Chief of Staff becomes a bottleneck, the person is rarely the first cause. The role was scoped as "an executive assistant on steroids" for one leader and a "strategic utility player" for the next, with no shared account of what the seat is even allowed to decide on a Tuesday without checking upstairs. The mismatch Korn Ferry correctly names is not, at root, a talent problem. It is an architecture problem, and it exists before the search ever opens. Define the seat, and the placements stick. Coffee's on me.

One Chief, Defined

Organ's title asks you to put two chiefs in the executive office. You don't need two. You need one, scoped as a pinnacle rather than a prosthetic, in service to a mission rather than a man, with a remit that reaches every corner of the organization and a definition solid enough that the next person to hold it inherits a role instead of a rumor.

Keep his onboarding. Put them in the room and think out loud until they can predict you. Then do the one thing he skipped: point all of that hard-won judgment at the whole organization, not at your own reflection.

That is the job. It always was.

P.S. If you click one link this week, make it the nine functions. Then go reread the last Chief of Staff job description you posted, and count how many of the nine it actually asks for. I'd wait for your answer, but I have a four-year-old and we're currently negotiating his television schedule even though it feels closer to negotiating Middle East peace.

One voice from inside the role. One from the blueprints. Same mission.

[Forward this to the person who needs it. They'll know why.]

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