"This is Not Your Typical Chief of Staff Job!"

Lately, every Chief of Staff job description on LinkedIn opens the same way: "This is not your typical Chief of Staff role."

I have read approximately two hundred and seventy of these in the last year, and I would now, genuinely, prefer a run-of-the-mill typical Chief of Staff role. I'd like to see just one, if only to know what it looks like. Because if every posting says it's atypical, then either there's a single secret typical Chief of Staff role being kept in a vault somewhere—like the Coca-Cola formula—or, and stay with me here, none of these people know what the hell a Chief of Staff actually does.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, I'm going with the latter.

Some other words that pop up with disturbing frequency:

• "Cross-functional" [strategies, initiatives, collaborations] — apparently whatever follows is entirely interchangeable.

• "Amplify executive effectiveness" — a personal favorite, if only because it implies the executive isn't all that effective.

• "Force Multiplier" — a military term, apparently, but doesn't it sound like a bizarre physics experiment that went wildly wrong?

• "Partner" [strategic partner, right-hand partner, thought partner]. At the rate we're going, I'm just waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of this partnership with an Obergefell sequel.

• You clearly need a driver's license for this job, since it involves "driving" cross-functional initiatives, strategic direction, alignment, and communications. You also need a sense of direction, since we're "at the intersection of" strategy and execution, or operational cadence and processes. It's a miracle we qualify for car insurance.

• There is a superhero-like quality to some descriptions. Who else is expected to "navigate high-intensity, fast-paced, ambiguous" environments? Batman, maybe. And he had a butler.

• "Lead special projects." Why are they special? Because no one in their right mind wants to do them.

• And nothing says "we cannot begin to anticipate the kind of crap we're going to throw at you" quite like a description that ends with "other duties as assigned."

The job description is a confession

A terrible Chief of Staff job description—which is to say, almost all of them—is not a writing problem. It is a comprehension problem dressed up in a Hawaiian shirt and linen slacks that haven't been ironed in a year. By the time someone has typed "drive cross-functional initiatives" in the same bullet as "lead enterprise strategy," the damage is already done. The role has been designed by a committee of people who contributed "synergies" and "convenings" to the English lexicon, and HR has assembled a job posting out of empty words for one of the most nuanced roles in corporate America. It's hard to feel shock when the job is filled by someone who spends the next nine months wondering whether they were hired to think, to schedule, or to run around looking busy.

The root cause is simple: these descriptions are written by people who don't understand what they're hiring for. You cannot hire well for a role you haven't defined. You cannot define a role you don't understand. And you cannot understand the role if your mental model of it is "a very capable person who handles everything I don't want to deal with."

That is not a Chief of Staff. That is a projection. And projections make terrible job postings.

What the role actually is

A Chief of Staff has three functions. If your description doesn't reflect all three, you're advertising a different job.

Protect and extend the executive. This is proactive, not reactive. It means anticipating risk before it lands on the CEO's desk, understanding the political landscape well enough to navigate it on the executive's behalf, and flagging problems while there's still time to do something about them. It requires pattern recognition, discretion, and a finely calibrated sense of when to act and when to wait. None of that shows up on a résumé.

Coordinate and integrate across functions. The White House Chief of Staff exists because, without someone minding the store, the Department of Defense and the Department of State will say the exact opposite things in public on the same day. Your organization has this problem too—just with fewer nuclear codes and more Slack messages. Someone has to coordinate the leadership team so they're not actively undermining each other or the organization's direction. That's the CoS. One CoS. Not one per executive in a company of 50, not a committee of chiefs. One. Multiples create the dysfunction you hired someone to prevent.

Advocate for the staff. Your Chief of Staff has a specific kind of access that nobody else on your team has: they can walk into your office and tell you something is wrong. Not in a performance review, not in an all-hands, not via a passive-aggressive Slack thread—directly, candidly, and in real time. A policy landed badly. Morale is worse than you think. Two of your executives are in open conflict and everyone else is managing around it. The CoS sees this and has the standing to raise it. If your job description doesn't mention the staff at all, ask yourself who this person is actually serving.

The verbiage problem

Every CoS posting features, somehow, the same vocabulary. What's truly remarkable—an achievement, really—is that none of it means anything.

"Reads a room." I'm curious how, exactly, you propose to test for this in an interview. You're going to ask the candidate, "Tell me about a time you read a room," and they will tell you about a time they did, probably with the help of Claude or Gemini, using adjectives that sound sophisticated with a splash of vibes for good measure. You will naturally believe them, because the story will be reasonably compelling, and most interviews are an exercise in Oscar-worthy performances.

You cannot test for room-reading in a job interview. Room-reading is what someone does when they think nobody is watching. The interview is precisely the place where any candidate with three active brain cells and a body temperature of 98.6° is watching very, very carefully. (Side note: room-reading only becomes particularly useful when you actually know the people in the room. Reading a room full of strangers is just people-watching at a coffee shop.)

"Strategic thought partner." This phrase has appeared in every Chief of Staff job description since 2019, and I have yet to see a single one explain what the strategy is, what the partnership entails, or what it means to "think" with somebody at the executive level. If your job description requires the candidate to bring a thesaurus and a Masters of Fine Arts to decode it, you have not described a role. You've described a feeling wrapped in a box with a bow of horse manure.

"Wears many hats." Yes. So does a clown. The question is which hats, when, and whose decision it is. If you cannot tell me, the candidate is going to be wearing whichever hat is on fire that morning—which is not a job. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The thing nobody wants to admit

Here is the dirty secret of Chief of Staff hiring: there has historically been no reliable way to measure the things that actually matter for the job. So people fall back on vibes and crunchy granola feelings. "We had a great conversation. The energy was right. They get it." The energy is doing a lot of work in that sentence. None of it is replicable, defensible, or transferable to a different decision-maker who would also like to know whether this person can actually do the job.

The other fallback is the internal promotion. “Betty is great in marketing — let's make her Chief of Staff.” Betty might be objectively great. Betty might also be about to spend nine months in a role where everything that made her great in marketing is wholly irrelevant. Internal promotions can work, but they don't let Betty skip the arduous work of resetting expectations, redrawing boundaries, and explaining to her former peers that no, she does not work for them anymore.

References are the third option, and they can be genuinely useful, but only if you understand your own organization well enough to hear what they're actually telling you. I once did reference checks for a senior leader hire. Every reference described her as a bulldozer. The hiring team thought that sounded great, and it would have been had we been on a construction site. Instead, I worked in an organization so aggressively collaborative it made Woodstock look like the Middle East. They wouldn't have tolerated a bulldozer for three minutes. I said exactly that. They hired her anyway. She didn't last much longer.

The references were not wrong. The match was. The hire was a culture grenade pulled in slow motion over a sandbox full of people huddled in a circle of never-ending cross-collaboration.

The moral: references are not for confirming someone is good. They're for figuring out how someone is going to behave when nobody is watching, in your specific environment, with your specific people. If you don't know your own environment well enough to interpret what you're hearing, you are going to hire the bulldozer—and then fire the bulldozer—and then write another job description that says, "This is not your typical Chief of Staff role."

See what I did there?

The tools that actually help

This is why Suzi Coul and I built two things specifically designed to measure what matters.

The Chief of Staff Readiness Assessment is a structured, practitioner-reviewed evaluation of whether someone is ready to do this job, right now, in a real environment. It examines twelve qualities across three layers: foundational wiring (the things you cannot teach), operational capabilities (the things you can teach but most people don't), and skills (the things most likely to improve with practice). It produces a directional signal—one of four tiers—along with the specific factors that placed someone there and what would need to change for the tier to move. If it sounds nuanced and sophisticated, that’s because it is. Candidates can take it themselves. Hiring organizations can commission it. This is not a “multiple-choice-but-the-answer-is-obviously-B” exercise in flattery. It is a complete and honest answer to a question that is usually answered too politely or not at all.

The Leadership Operating Profile is the version we run on the executive, not the candidate. Because here is the other thing nobody admits: half the time the Chief of Staff hire fails, it isn't the candidate. It's the leader. They've designed an environment no Chief of Staff can succeed in, and then they cycle through three of them in five years and wonder where the talent shortage is. The Operating Profile maps a leader's signature across nine dimensions—what kind of authority they construct, what kind of room they create around themselves, whether they know how they land and produces a structured read that lets you design the role for the leader you actually have, not the leader you wish you had.

You can find both at coulandgold.com. Neither is a personality test. Neither analyzes feelings or inklings. Both exist so you stop hiring on the basis of who was the most charming and told the best story in the interview.

What to put in the actual job description

Since I have spent this entire piece telling you what's wrong, here is what should be in one. Note that I'm not giving you a template, because the moment I do, everyone will copy the bullet points and we'll be right back where we started. These are five structural moves. It's a place to start just before plugging, "Write me a Chief of Staff job description" into Gemini and hoping for a Dickensian masterpiece the likes of which LinkedIn has never seen.

Name the function weighting. What percentage is protect-and-extend, what percentage is coordination, and what percentage is advocacy? They have to add to 100. If you can't write the percentages, you can't write the role.

Name three decisions the Chief of Staff will own. Not "owns the calendar." What specific decisions does this person make alone, without checking in with anyone else? If you can't name three, you're hiring an assistant and calling it something else.

Name the reporting line—and make it the CEO. Not the COO. Not the head of HR. Not "the leadership team." If the CoS reports to anyone but the primary executive, the role is structurally compromised before Day One. Ask me how I know.

Name what you will stop doing. A Chief of Staff is not additive. You are giving up something—meetings, decisions, work—or the role does not work. List five things. If you can't name five, you are not ready to hire.

Name what success looks like in plain language. Not OKRs. Not deliverables. Outcomes you would actually feel. "Our executive team makes decisions in the room instead of taking them offline." That's a success metric. "Drives strategic alignment" is not a metric. It's a feeling wrapped inside someone's chakra.

That's it. Five moves. If a job description does those five things, in language a reasonable human being can understand, it will land in the top 5% of Chief of Staff postings on the internet. Which is, frankly, a low bar—but it has to start somewhere.

A closing thought

The Chief of Staff role is becoming more important. Every executive I talk to is more overwhelmed than they were two years ago, and every leadership team is being asked to make more decisions with less information. The organizations that figure out how to hire and deploy Chiefs of Staff well are going to materially out-execute the ones that don't.

But you cannot hire well for a role you cannot describe, and I attribute the inability to describe it almost entirely to the fact that the role is profoundly misunderstood. The current state of Chief of Staff job descriptions is, and I'm being polite here, a monumental disaster. These postings are part of the reason the Chief of Staff role has a PR problem, and AI is only going to make it worse.

So write better job descriptions. Or have someone write them for you. Or—here's a thought—measure what you're actually hiring for, instead of describing it in nouns that mean nothing and hoping a compelling candidate materializes from the ether.

The Chief of Staff role does not need to be reinvented. It needs to be understood. And hired for the structural, consequential, executive-shaping role that it is.

Not like a wish list for a sentient calendar with an MBA.

Want a structured read on whether you — or your candidate — are ready for this role? The Chief of Staff Readiness Assessment is live at coulandgold.com/#assessments. Want to know whether your environment is set up for a CoS to succeed? That's the Leadership Operating Profile, and it's coming soon to coulandgold.com.

➡️ And if you've recently seen a Chief of Staff job description that begins with, "This is not your typical Chief of Staff role," we'd love for you to reply to this newsletter with it. We collect them. For science. And possibly dartboards.

See you in two weeks, Rachael