The Return on a Chief of Staff

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 40 · NOVEMBER 3, 2026

The person who judges a Chief of Staff is the one who sees the least of what they return.

In July we argued that the Chief of Staff role is not hard to define. This issue makes the next argument, which is less comfortable: the role is not hard to value either, and it is still valued wrong almost every time. The return is not small. The problem is how, when and by whom it gets judged. There are four ways it goes wrong, and most organizations manage all four at once.

The first is the most common. The role is judged too early. Several of the nine functions run on trust, track record and a working map of the organization, and none of those arrive on a schedule. A review at six months is a review of whatever showed up first.

The second is the most convenient. The role is judged on what is easy to count: hours saved, meetings cut, actions closed. Those numbers describe a different job. Measure a Chief of Staff on them and you will get a Chief of Staff who produces them, which is to say the back office. That is the diminished version from July, built this time by the scorecard.

The third is the one nobody likes hearing. The role is judged against a mandate that was never ratified. Every return in this issue assumes the authority that comes with the role was ratified by the executive on day one, the access is real, and the organization believes the Chief of Staff belongs to no single part of it. Withhold any of those and the returns come back partial. Partial returns are almost always read as a performance problem. They are a design problem, and replacing the person reproduces it.

The fourth is built into the job, which is why almost nobody notices it. The person who judges the return is the person who sees the least of it. The executive commissions the role, reviews it and decides whether it stays. But of everything a Chief of Staff produces, only a fraction lands on the executive directly. Most of it lands on the leadership team, the wider organization and the board, and some of it takes the form of things that never happened. From behind the executive's desk, a dispute that never reached it does not look like a return.

Put the four together and you get a familiar story. The public version: Reince Priebus lasted 189 days, the shortest tenure of any White House chief of staff who was not interim or leaving with their president. By the end, other top aides were going around him to report to the President directly. The President had privately questioned his competence after major legislation failed. Too early, half a mandate, and a verdict on the person. We are not relitigating that White House. We use it because it is the story most Chiefs of Staff live privately, with fewer cameras.

So here is the return.

The trifecta from July tells you where the returns land: the executive, the leadership team and the wider organization. Add the board. There are eleven returns across the four, and they are not equally visible from the executive's chair. That unevenness is the point.

Attention. Less noise reaches the executive, and what does reach them needs them specifically. The work does not shrink. Most work harder, on fewer and better things.

Decision quality. The executive decides on what is actually happening, the informal version rather than the managed one that travels up the hierarchy, and it has been tested before it arrives.

Leadership quality. The executive gets better at the job. Nobody coached them. The conditions changed, and they rose to them.

These three are what the executive feels, and most reviews are built on them. They are three of eleven. The rest land on other people, and the largest land furthest from the executive's desk.