Promoted to Nothing in Particular

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 27 · 25 AUGUST 2026

I have just finished watching Suits. A full binge of all the series over the last couple of weeks. I know that I am about a decade behind everyone else, but my life was a little busy when it came out and to be honest with you, I didn’t really fancy it before. I enjoyed it far more than I expected to. Great characters, terrible legal ethics, amazing dress sense, complete escapism and fantasy.

But one thing really niggled me towards the end, and it is not a plot line that most people would complain about.

They made Donna the COO.

I know it is fiction. I was not looking for accuracy. But that promotion annoyed me, because the show handed her a title that had nothing to do with what she was actually doing, and then treated it as a shiny reward that she had earned.

Watch what she actually does. She reads the room before anyone has spoken. She knows which partner is about to do something stupid and gets there first. She carries information between people who are not talking properly to each other. She sits in on decisions she has no formal authority over, and more importantly the decisions are better for it. She protects Harvey’s time, judgement, and reputation, roughly in that order.

She was not a great legal secretary who got lucky. That framing is the one I want to kill first. Her value was never her filing, her diary management, or her typing speed. It was her judgement, her read of people, her nerve, and her willingness to say the thing. Strip out the desk and the job title and every one of those things remains. That is what the firm was actually valuing, promoting and benefiting from. It just had no name for it.

So this is not an argument that assistants should become Chiefs of Staff. Most should not, and the pipeline question is a different issue with a different answer. It is an argument that the thing the firm valued in her had nothing to do with the role she was hired into, and everything to do with a role they did not know existed.

She does not own a single system. No headcount, no delivery, no cost line, no infrastructure. Nothing a chief operating officer is appointed to run.

The show knew, too. There is an episode where she is asked to produce a return-per-square-foot analysis and it is stated plainly that she is not that kind of COO. That is the writers noticing the title does not fit and choosing to write a disclaimer instead of a different title.

An exception clause is not a job description. It says what she does not do. It does not say what she owns, or what her mandate is.

Being “Donna” is not an answer that would hold any weight in the real world. Change the CFO, or let the board ask what the COO is accountable for, and the exception of “not that kind of COO” will fall flat and the person will fail.

What the role actually does is the part that would matter in a real firm. A title is not decoration. Give someone the COO title and eventually someone measures them against what a COO owns. Donna would fail that measurement, not because she is not capable, but because she was never appointed against it. She would be assessed on the axis of her title instead of her role.

The second cost is less visible and worse. When she leaves, nobody replaces what she was actually doing. The function she performed — the judgement, the pre-emption, the connecting of people who have stopped talking — simply stops. The firm gets slower and nobody attributes it to the promotion, because on paper the promotion was an upgrade.

I should be clear about what I am not saying. Donna is not a model Chief of Staff. Run her against our definition of the role and she fails parts of it outright.

There is no Directional function at all. She holds no fixed strategic point and pulls the firm back towards nothing. Her Diagnostic read is person-level rather than system-level: she sees the partner about to do something stupid, never the structure that keeps producing them. Her Political Intelligence is outstanding and she weaponises it, which the role cannot survive. Positional independence does not exist, because she is loyal to a person rather than independent across the enterprise, and that independence is not a preference in this role, it is the condition that makes it work. Her Sounding Board instincts are real but the confidentiality is not structural. And Incubation is entirely absent. She never takes something unowned, develops it, and hands it to the right owner.

What she does have is Truth-Telling, done better than almost any version of the role I have seen on screen, and the Guardian function in the parts that involve absorbing the no. Two out of nine, plus a set of instincts pointing at several more.

She would not clear the bar. That is not a criticism of the character. Fiction needs a protagonist who acts, not one who builds mechanisms nobody can see on screen.

What she has is the raw material. The judgement, the read, the nerve, the standing with people who owe her nothing. Those are the parts that cannot be trained into someone. The rest of the role, the independence, the discipline, the strategic anchor, the restraint, is learnable, and nobody ever asks her to learn it, because nobody ever names the job.

Almost every Chief of Staff you have seen on screen is a political one. West Wing, Veep, Scandal, House of Cards. That is not a different job. The White House Chief of Staff is the blueprint for the business role, and the mandate is the same: the whole-system vantage point, holding the direction, telling the executive the truth, protecting their attention. What changes is the terrain, not the job.

What television changes is which parts you get to see. Drama needs visible agency, so it films the fixing, the gatekeeping, the leverage, and whatever is on fire this week. It cannot film someone holding a strategic line steady over eighteen months. It cannot film someone taking a problem nobody owns and developing it until it has a home. Those have no scene. So the screen version keeps the functions that look like action and drops the ones that look like nothing.

Which is the same omission Suits made with Donna. Different genre, identical gap.

Firms do exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

The role gets titled COO. Or Head of Strategy. Or VP Business Operations. Or Special Projects, which is where ambiguity goes to live. Not because anyone believes those are accurate, but because they exist, they are legible to the board, and Chief of Staff either does not exist in the structure or is assumed to mean senior assistant.

The converse is more common and does more damage. A COO, a head of strategy, or an operations lead gets given the Chief of Staff title because it sounds close enough and nobody wants a new line on the org chart. Now the title means whatever that person happens to do, and the next firm to use it inherits the confusion.

Then the appointment underperforms. Someone concludes the person or role does not work.

The role worked. The expectations that the wrong label gives were the problem.

Because being Donna was never the problem. The issue was nobody gave her the right job.

As for my current binge-watch, I have moved on to Designated Survivor. Which is fun to watch, but you can probably guess what I make of the Chief of Staff in that one.

— Suzi

A diagnostic and a twelve-week development program for Chiefs of Staff currently in the seat. It starts with an independent read of how you operate across the twelve capabilities the role runs on. Then twelve weeks of work on what it found, in a cohort capped at twelve. Rachael and I run it ourselves.

What you get:

Enrolment closes next week. We have three spots left! And the program starts in September.

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