Unvisited Tombs

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 26 · 18 AUGUST 2026

When I was 20, a career counselor at UPenn asked where I ultimately wanted to end up.

“I want my obituary on the front page of The New York Times.”

I was not joking. I meant it in the way you can only mean something at 20, when you have accomplished absolutely nothing and are therefore certain of everything.

She looked at me for a second and said, “But Rachael, you’ll be dead. You won’t know your obituary was on the front page.”

Touché.

I have thought about that exchange more often than I care to admit. And no, I didn’t change my mind that day. I kept the ambition for a long time. It sat in the back of my head through law school and every job after, a scoreboard nobody else could see except—weirdly—my parents, but only at cocktail parties.

Then my mother died.

I’m not going to write you the grief essay. Everyone gets one eventually and mine isn’t more interesting than yours. What I’ll say is that when it was over, the ambition that came back was much smaller and much better.

Hundreds of people came to my mother’s funeral. Her obituary was shared two thousand times on Facebook. Those are numbers, and I suppose they measure something. What she actually left behind, outside of me and my brother, was a small white binder holding a hundred and eighty letters from students she had taught. They wrote to tell her she had made their lives better, and that she had given them confidence in a world that had not offered them any.

I want my own white binder. I want to have helped people. That’s the entire list, and it has not needed revising since.

Which is, awkwardly for my 20-year-old self, a fairly precise job description for a Chief of Staff.

“I want to have helped people” sounds like something you’d cross-stitch on a pillow. In the job it’s unglamorous and extremely specific, and it almost never involves saying anything inspiring to anyone.

Most of the underperformance I’ve been called in to look at turned out to be a blockage with a name and a street address. Somebody has been carrying a project for seven months with full responsibility and no decision rights, so every choice runs up a chain that doesn’t answer email. She looks slow in the quarterly deck, and she is the fastest person in that building. Get her the decision rights and she hands you back three months by Friday.

Or the two executives locked in a cold war that everyone has decided is a personality clash, because one of them is difficult and the other one is worse. Go read both charters. The same decision right has been granted twice, in writing, by two different people in two different years. So the war is entirely real and entirely manufactured, by a sentence somebody wrote down wrong that eleven other people have since built their calendars around.

Or the person heading for the door, where the exit interview will say compensation, and the truth is fourteen months without a single soul telling her whether she was any good at this.

There’s a phrase for the thing I’m describing that I refuse to use, involving whole selves and workplaces, and it has been beaten to a pulp by people selling offsites. So here is my version. People do their best work when they know what they own and who decides, when someone keeps the bureaucracy off them, and when they believe someone will tell them the truth in a bad week. That’s most of it. Nearly everything I have ever fixed for one person came down to one of those three going missing, and all three are architecture, whatever they feel like from the inside.

The individual work only holds if the organization around it isn’t fighting itself.

Cohesion gets filed under culture, which means it gets treated as a morale question, which is how a company ends up buying a ropes course and a marginally competent facilitator when what it needed was to settle who signs off on pricing under $50K. Culture is downstream. Most of what people experience as a bad culture is a decision that has never been assigned an owner, showing up in their week as a meeting that keeps getting rescheduled.

So you go looking for where the friction lives. Which conversation has to happen before which meeting. Which handoff between two teams has no agreed definition of done, so each of them assumes the other one has it. Then you find the recurring 60 minutes sitting on 30 calendars that outlived the crisis that created it by two years, and you kill it, and nobody mourns.

A company running well is faintly boring from the inside. Decisions land at the level where the information already lives, and things stop getting escalated to a CEO who was never the right person to deal with them. The week has less drama in it. Everyone assumes it was always going to be like this.

I don’t think this job is teachable past a certain point. Skills are teachable. The wiring is something you either have or spend a career faking, and faking it is exhausting in a way that shows up around year two.

You have to be able to sit in a room where two people describe the same meeting and believe both of them, at least long enough to work out where the gap is and which one of them knows they’re lying. You have to be able to tell a CEO on Tuesday that the thing he announced on Monday is going to detonate in procurement, and still be the person he calls on Wednesday morning.

The hard one is credit.

You have to hand over work with your fingerprints all over it, watch someone else present it, and feel fine about that. Actually fine. Not performing fine while drafting a LinkedIn post in your head about being underestimated by an organization that will one day understand what it had.

The chiefs of staff who are wired for this describe the job the same way when you get them alone and they’ve stopped being careful. They like the puzzle and they like the access, and they are not especially interested in being congratulated for either. It’s a strange species of ambition. It reads as modesty from the outside and it is nothing of the sort — wanting to be the reason a thing worked, without needing anyone to know it, is still wanting. It’s just wanting that has made its peace with the obituary problem about twenty years early.

You are the only Chief of Staff in your company. You are probably the only one your CEO has ever had.

So your performance review is written by a person who has never done your job and frequently can’t describe what he wants from it beyond a general sense that things should be smoother. There’s no peer three doors down doing the same work slightly differently, so you can steal her better version of it. There’s no rubric. Nobody has a comparison set, including you.

A year in, you don’t know whether you’re good at this or merely surviving it. Neither does anyone else. Everyone is being very polite about it.

And moods are terrible at telling you the thing you actually need to know, which is the difference between what you’re good at and what you’ve simply gotten used to. Those two feel identical from the inside. One of them is a strength. The other is a groove you wore into the floor because it was there on day one and nobody ever asked you to stop.

That’s why Suzi Coul and I built the Chief of Staff Operating Program.

It’s a cohort, and that is the entire point of it. The one thing you cannot get inside your own company is other people who do your job, so we put them in a room with each other, and Suzi and I run it.

What happens in there is worth the price of admission on its own. You discover that the thing you’ve been carrying around as a personal deficiency is a structural condition of the role, and that five other people in the room already have a name for it. You also discover, on a less comfortable afternoon, that something you’d been filing under structural condition is in fact just you. Both of those are useful. Only one of them is fun.

A word on fit. It assumes you took this seat on purpose and intend to be excellent in it, and it will not tell you you’re doing great. If that’s the errand, save your money.

Because the Chief of Staff role is a pinnacle. I’ll defend that against anyone who wants to call it a stepping stone. It’s also the only pinnacle I know of where the person standing on top of it keeps finding a floor underneath they hadn’t checked. That’s the part I love, and it’s why the good ones don’t get bored and leave at 18 months. The job keeps handing you a harder version of itself.

Middlemarch is my favorite book, which I’m aware is the answer of a woman who wants you to know she finished an 800-page Victorian novel for 11th-grade summer reading. I reread it every few years. Somewhere in my forties it stopped being a book about marriage and love and became a book about work.

Dorothea Brooke is, in nearly every respect that matters, a chief of staff. Enormous judgment, no standing. She wants to attach herself to a great work rather than sign one, so she marries Casaubon and teaches herself Latin and Greek to be useful to a scholar whose life project turns out to be a filing system with no building under it. She draws up plans for the tenants’ cottages because somebody has to and nobody else has looked at the roofs. She reads that town better than anyone living in it and is handled, throughout, as a nice young woman with ideas. Eliot knows exactly what she is watching, and closes the novel by saying so:

I think that’s the most beautiful last line in English fiction. I’ll take arguments. At 20 I would have read it as a threat, because unhistoric acts and unvisited tombs are the precise opposite of the front page. I read it now as the job description, and a compliment.

Dorothea doesn’t become anyone. She isn’t known for greatness. She lives a quiet life among people who are better off for her having been there, and Eliot spends 800 pages arguing that this is the win.

So, to the surprise of no one, my obituary is not going on the front page of The New York Times, and I would like to formally release that woman at Penn from any further obligation on the matter.

I have a husband and a young son, both of whom make me laugh all the time. And a binder that is a great deal thinner than my mother’s, but exists nonetheless.

— Rachael

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. Suzi and I run it ourselves.

What you get:

Four spots left at this discounted rate. It closes at the end of August, and the program starts in September.

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