THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 31 · SEPTEMBER 22, 2026
I have strong feelings about people who have strong opinions on a job they've never had. Shocking, I know. Can you imagine? Me? With an opinion?
But if one more person who has spent their whole career in marketing and communications, nowhere near the room where you have to look an executive in the eye and tell them their idea will end worse than Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, turns around and lectures me on what this job actually is, I am going to lose it. I see one of these several times a week now, and I’ve run out of patience for them. (Admittedly, I never had much patience to begin with, but I do try to give people the benefit of “didn’t have the title, but did the role.” That can be true. It’s just rarely what’s actually happening here.)
Apparently the entire hiring bar for Chief of Staff is a keyboard, an opinion, and the nerve to type it out despite never having done the job. And then you have the audacity to define the job for the rest of us, like someone who read the SparkNotes for Anna Karenina and is now teaching the seminar at Princeton, in the original Russian, while translating the novel for Christopher Nolan’s next film. Get real.
Before you file me under “Resident Gatekeeper” and “Kvetcher-in-Chief,” here’s what I’m not doing. I don’t care about your pedigree. A shiny résumé and a stint at a fancy consulting firm won’t make you right for this job, and some of the best chiefs of staff I know would flunk every credentialing filter you could build. I mean, specifically, the person who spent seven years in marketing, did a short stint as an operations analyst, and decided that qualifies them to run point on someone else’s entire operation. (Want the actual bar? Here’s our definition: coulandgold.com/cos-functions.) I also don’t care how long you’ve held the title, either. What I care about is whether you’ve done the work and understood it, two different things, and both miles from typing the words into LinkedIn.
The trouble usually starts with a title stapled to another title: “Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff,” “Operations Manager and Chief of Staff.” Do the math. There is no version of an executive assistant’s day with a second, strategic job hiding inside it. The calendar alone makes that impossible. If you’re doing both jobs, you’re doing neither one well. They both require enormous energy, focus, and effort. (And for those asking, they’re both strategic. Where they differ is the altitude in which they’re operating and the breadth of their remit.)
Can you get from Executive Assistant to Chief of Staff? Yes. I have watched people make that leap, and it is real. It is also brutally hard, it almost never happens inside the same building, and it usually means leaving for somewhere that will let you run the play instead of just booking the room for it. You do not get there by editing your LinkedIn headline on a Sunday night.
And you certainly do not get to eighteen months in the role and start narrating it to the rest of us as though you’ve cracked the code. Treating the seat as a pit stop and then billing yourself as an authority on it is like claiming a Harvard degree because you once sat in on a lecture and got a coffee in Harvard Square.
We have standards for almost everything else. We license plumbers and certify welders. We have boards, credentials, and continuing education for teachers, accountants, and every other chair in the C-suite. Your Chief Financial Officer cannot wake up one morning and decide the title simply fits. But a Chief of Staff? You type it into your profile and, poof, you are one.
(Am I a little unhinged on this topic? Sure. But I’m also not wrong.)
Of course people can write about this role and not live it. There are plenty of organizational psychologists, historians, and journalists who have studied this role sufficiently to understand what it is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. And while I’m quite clear on what it is and feel reasonably confident in writing about the role, I also readily concede that as a human being, I can be wrong. You can ask a slew of people I’ve encountered on LinkedIn. When someone challenges me (in a credible way that doesn’t feel like an ad hominem attack), I welcome the debate. I eagerly pursue an opportunity to talk to them over Zoom or in person because either I’m wrong and I need to own that, or I’m right and the exercise sharpens my argument and my own thinking.
But a Chief of Staff? You type it into your profile and, poof, you are one.
And teaching people the fundamentals of this work is a fine idea, and I would take several of the classes that are offered out in the ether. My objection to certification runs deeper than snobbery. The job runs on judgment, on timing, on an ear for whose problem a problem really is, on knowing when to push your CEO and when to keep your mouth shut. You can teach the frameworks. The instinct underneath them has never once fit on a rubric, and that ungovernable little gap is precisely where every pretender strolls right in. And, frankly, it’s why those of us who have actually served in the role keep getting screwed.
There is a flip side that is just as maddening. Some of the most capable chiefs of staff I know have never carried the title at all. They do the work, hold the room together, take the incoming so their boss can think clearly, and their business card says Operations Lead or Director of Special Projects. The definition is so mushy that impostors grab the label while the people actually doing the job go uncredited.
And this is the part that should bother all of us, because of what the job actually is. A Chief of Staff is the bullshit barometer in the building. You are the one who says the strategy has a hole in it before the board finds it. You are the one who tells the CEO the thing nobody else will. You puncture their information bubble and say the hard truths out loud. So watching a person who has never done any of that appoint themselves the authority on it, and then instruct the rest of us on how to define it and who to hire, is a very specific kind of absurd.
The tell — The one role built to detect fakery is completely faked.
Nobody lets you pull this anywhere else. Immediately after I passed the bar, not once did anyone suggest I could write intricate trusts or wills, or litigate a complex class action lawsuit Erin Brokovich-style in a courtroom. No one said, “Oh, you watched a few episodes of Law & Order? By all means, prosecute this criminal case.” You cannot call yourself a surgeon because you are good at describing anatomy and have a mastery of chopping vegetables in the kitchen.
So why does this job get the hall pass? My best guess is that nobody reports to a Chief of Staff, so there is no team standing by to call the bluff. We are supposed to be Switzerland, neutral and deniable, everywhere in the room and accountable for none of it. That is convenient cover for anyone who wants the credibility without the scars.
Follow the money and the whole thing suddenly makes complete sense. The people with the most to gain from a fuzzy definition are the ones selling the podcast, the community, and the certificate. A blurry role sells far more product than a clear one ever could.
There is a bigger current running under all of this. We live in an attention economy that pays out for inflation. Everyone is a founder, a strategist, an expert, a thought leader, and the titles came untethered from reality a long time ago. That’s the reason we can no longer tell the real from the fake. We started blurring the two long before the AI slop arrived. By the time the machines got good at manufacturing plausible nonsense, we had already spent a decade softening the ground for them. When Brian Williams could embellish a war story on the nightly news, get suspended, and still keep a television career, it told the rest of us the ground rules. Being at the top of the profession did not make the story true, and being loud about this one does not make anyone a Chief of Staff.
None of this is abstract. Every counterfeit definition makes it harder for a hiring manager to recognize the real thing when it finally walks in. It trains CEOs to hire an assistant and then expect an architect, and to blame the person when those two never reconcile. It drags on a career track that a lot of serious people are working to build into something that lasts.
So, one request, and it’s a pretty straightforward one. Before you publish the next "What to Look For in a Great Chief of Staff," sit with one question first: when did you last do this job yourself, and not from the seat beside the person who was doing it? If the answer is never, you are qualified to write about a hundred other things, and I hope you do. Leave this one to the people who have actually sat in the chair, and let the rest of us define our own damn profession.
— Rachael
The Difference Between Doing the Job and Describing It
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