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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
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