We Beat the Wi-Fi Password

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº [00] · OCTOBER 27, 2026

At every conference, exactly one slide sends the whole room reaching for their phones. It's the one with the Wi-Fi password.

Last week in New York, Suzi and I beat the Wi-Fi password.

We were on the program at Chief of Staff Connect, the Chief of Staff Network's conference, in a room full of working Chiefs of Staff whose companies had paid to send them. These people do one of the hardest jobs in any company, and they've done it for years without anyone agreeing on what the job is. Plenty of them have had to explain the title to someone who thinks it means "assistant with a fancier email signature." More than a few have had to explain it to their own executive.

Then we put the nine functions of the role up on the screen.

Phones went up. Then more phones, row after row, until it would have been faster to count the people who weren't taking a picture. I've watched plenty of frameworks go up on plenty of screens, and the usual soundtrack is the polite rustle of people checking email. This was something else. It looked like a room that had argued for years about what one word means, watching someone finally hand out the dictionary.

When nobody can say what a job is, nobody knows how to develop the person doing it, or what that person is worth. For a lot of people in that room, our slide was the first time anyone had drawn the whole job in one place. You could watch them recognize it.

The photos were flattering. What happened the next day mattered more.

At the closing session, Scott Amenta and Tom Guthrie, who lead the Chief of Staff Network, handed the room the question this community has never managed to settle: what is a Chief of Staff? Every table had to come back with an answer.

If you've spent any time in this community, you know how that exercise usually goes. Somebody says "an extension of the CEO." Somebody else says "whatever the CEO needs." A third person says "it depends," and everyone nods, because it does depend, and nobody wants to be the one who says on what.

This time the answers came back different. Table after table described a job whose purpose is moving the whole organization forward, with the executive as the means and the company as the point. A day earlier, plenty of these same people would have reached for the word "support." By the closing session, the room was describing a member of the executive team. (Suzi just read this over my shoulder and yelled, "The Chief of Staff is not a damn support function!" She's been yelling some version of that for as long as I've known her. The room caught up fast.)

That kind of shift almost never happens at a conference. Most people go home with a tote bag, a pocketful of business cards and a vague plan to update their LinkedIn. These people went home with a new answer to the question that shapes every other part of their job, and I'd bet some of them have already said it out loud to their CEO.

The nine functions are Positional, Diagnostic, Political Intelligence, Brokerage, Directional, Truth-Telling, Sounding Board, Incubation and Gatekeeping. The list does two jobs at once. It tells a CEO what she's actually hiring, which most job descriptions never manage. It also gives a Chief of Staff something better than a vague sense of whether she's doing well.

Say you're superb at Gatekeeping and Sounding Board and thinner on Political Intelligence. Now you know where to grow, and your executive knows what to invest in. The annual review stops being a vibes check and turns into a development plan with actual parts. A lot of people told us afterward it was the most complete picture of the role they'd seen, and we agree with them, obviously.

This community needs a pep talk, and I mean that as a compliment to the people in the room.

The Chiefs of Staff in New York came with their companies footing the bill, and their executives cleared two days of their calendars because they wanted to invest in someone they valued. That's a real signal, and you could see the talent in that room from the first coffee. These are exceptionally good Chiefs of Staff.

And they still talk about the job like it's a layover. "What comes after this?" "How long do people usually stay?" "Is this the road to COO?" Nobody asks a CFO what she wants to be when she grows up.

So here's your pep talk. This job is the destination. After the CEO, the Chief of Staff is the most consequential executive in the building, and I will argue that with anyone, at any dinner party, for as long as the wine lasts.

Think about what you have that nobody else does. You sit closer to power than anyone except the people who wield it. You've built trust in every direction, including departments nobody upstairs thinks about until something breaks, and people tell you things they won't tell their own managers. You see the whole company at once. The head of sales sees sales, and the general counsel sees risk. You see how all of it fits together and where it's about to come apart. And you spend a real share of your week advocating for the staff in rooms they'll never see the inside of.

AI raises the stakes on all of it. Companies are reorganizing around new tools, and layoffs that used to make headlines now show up as a slide in the Tuesday all-hands. When a company moves that fast, its best people need somebody who knows their names and says them out loud where decisions get made. Software can summarize a meeting. It can't tell the CEO that her best engineering manager started interviewing elsewhere after the last reorg and would stay if somebody asked.

Let me say this as many times as it takes: this is not a glorified EA role. Executive assistants do hard, skilled (and strategic!) work, and they deserve better than having their job used as the insult in someone else's job description. The job also takes far more than time spent around executives. I spent the last year of the administration supporting John Podesta while he was Chief of Staff to the President, and I learned more than I can tell you. That proximity didn't make me a Chief of Staff, and it won't make anyone else one either.

If the best Chiefs of Staff I've met in a long time need a pep talk, so does everyone reading this. Consider this one yours.

The frustration in New York was real. People are tired of explaining their job at dinner parties and, worse, in their own performance reviews. They wanted to know why so few people understand the role, and what they could do about it.

The why isn't complicated. For years, a cottage industry has sold this job as something anyone can pick up from a listicle: “twelve hacks for managing up,” or “a certificate you can finish over a long weekend.” Some of that advice is fine on its own. Taken together, it teaches executives that the job is a bag of tricks, and nobody pays a senior executive for tricks. This is a complicated and nuanced role that requires significant skills in navigating power, cultivating people and relationships, and understanding the politics of any room at any given time.

Three habits would help:

If you want proof that the definition works, spend a season inside the Chief of Staff Operating Program.

Suzi and I have two groups running this fall, and those sessions are the most energizing hours of my week. (My toddler would probably take issue so, ok, second most.) The participants work at companies of wildly different sizes, for executives with wildly different temperaments. And week after week, they bring the same problems to the table.

Mandates that showed up without decision rights or any shared definition of success. Executives who ask for candor and stop listening the first time they get it. Colleagues who call them "too emotional" for noticing the exact dynamics they were hired to notice. And AI, which keeps arriving on their desks with a note that says "figure it out," usually with no budget and no owner after launch.

Every one of those problems fits inside the nine functions. The definition stays put from company to company. The organization around it changes, and so do the personalities: the executive who hates conflict, the investor who moves the goalposts every quarter.

That's also why the cohort works. A Chief of Staff rarely has a peer inside her own company, and in the program she gets a room full of them.

If you subscribe to the Briefing, Suzi and I would like to give you thirty minutes of our time, free. We're making this offer only to Briefing subscribers and the Chiefs of Staff we met at Chief of Staff Connect, and the booking link below is for subscribers alone, so please don't pass it along.

Bring the function that's giving you trouble, or the executive you can't read. If you want to know where you stand across the nine functions, we'll tell you whether the Chief of Staff Capabilities Assessment makes sense for you. (Note: this is a new and completely different assessment from the Readiness one. The goal here is to evaluate how you currently operate as a chief of staff and which skills or capabilities need strengthening.) And if what you need is a room full of peers, we'll walk you through the Chief of Staff Operating Program, whose next cohort starts in January.

Yes, we run a business, and we have kids who expect dinner most nights. But we started The Coul & Gold Group because of this role. We want it strong enough that the next person who takes it doesn't spend two years fighting for respect, and we want talented people like the ones we met in New York to thrive in it and stay. We also want every CEO to understand that a great Chief of Staff gives a company an edge very few other hires can match.

Or reply to this email and tell us which of the nine functions you most want to get better at, and we'll start the conversation there.