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EA vs Chief of Staff: Two Jobs, Not Two Rungs
I have sat in both of these seats, and the first thing I would say is that almost everybody who asked me which one was better was asking the wrong question.
Here is a scene I have watched more times than I can count. Somebody has been running the leadership meeting for a year. They write the papers that go into it. They decide which of the eleven things that landed this week is the one the chief executive hears about on Monday, and twice this quarter they have said something out loud that nobody else in the building was going to say. Their job title has the word assistant in it. At a conference, somebody asks what they do, and they hear themselves answer "I support the CEO", which is true and covers about a third of it.
Then somebody says they should be a Chief of Staff, as though it were the next floor up in the same building. And off they go, turning it over for a year.
I want to take the ladder out of this. Partly because the research does not support it, and mostly because the ladder is the reason the question feels so hard to answer. These are two different jobs. One of them, and this is the finding that reorganised how I think about the whole subject, is barely a fixed job at all. It is a position that two particular people negotiate into existence, and it comes out differently every single time.
What you will get out of this
Why there is no fixed Chief of Staff job to be promoted into, and what that frees you from
How to read a Chief of Staff advert, with ten live ones read and counted so that you can see what they do and do not agree on
What is actually known about the corporate role, which turns out to be a great deal less than the confidence around it
What is known about your job, which is less still, and the thirty-year-old paper that still describes it better than anything since
Why two rungs is the wrong picture, said plainly, including the part I cannot prove
A better question to take into any conversation about one of these roles, and the reason it is more answerable than the one you were asked
This is the first of two parts. The second is the part you can run this week: what to go and get, what a fit question really is, the two questions that decide whether one of these roles will work, a free interactive check and printable pages to take into the conversation.
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There is no Chief of Staff job
Start with the thing that took me longest to accept.
I have met a lot of Chiefs of Staff and I have been one, and for years I assumed that the differences between us were differences of style, in the way two project managers might run the same project differently. They were not. We were doing different jobs, and we were all using the same word for it.
The reason sits in a 1997 analysis of the White House Chief of Staff role, which built a four-part typology out of what it found: the custodian, the sentry, the counsellor and the vicar. Four jobs, one title. The names matter less than the finding underneath them. Which of the four somebody ended up doing was contingent on two things at once, the particular principal and the particular person in the post. Not the organisation chart. Not the job description. The pairing.
Nearly twenty years later, a study of how that office had settled since Reagan found the same variability persisting even as the role became a permanent fixture. A 2024 case study of the Downing Street equivalent opens by saying the responsibilities of the role are difficult to define, which is a very British way of admitting that nobody has pinned it down. Those are political roles rather than corporate ones and I will keep saying which is which, because they are not the same job. On this one point the corporate evidence agrees. The best study of the corporate role calls it quasi-executive, which is a careful way of saying the same thing.
There is no fixed Chief of Staff job waiting to be filled. There is a position that two specific people negotiate into existence, and it comes out differently every time.
So when somebody asks whether the Chief of Staff role would suit you, there is a word missing from the question. Which one, and whose. A Chief of Staff to an executive who wants a second brain in every room is doing almost none of the same work as a Chief of Staff to an executive who wants the operating rhythm run and the diary defended. Both are real versions of the job. The second overlaps enormously with what a very good Executive Assistant is already doing, which is exactly why the boundary feels blurry when you are the person standing on it.
There is something freeing in this, and it took me far too long to see it. If the role is made in the pairing, then your read on the specific person in front of you is not the soft part of the decision, to be weighed up once the career question is settled. It is most of the career question.
Try this. Write down the name of the executive you would be doing this for, then write one sentence on what they would actually use you for. If you cannot finish the sentence, you have found the real problem, and it is not a problem about you.
The research behind this section
Cohen (1997) examined the roles and functions assumed by John Sununu as George Bush's first chief of staff and developed a two-dimensional, four-square typology delineating four roles a chief of staff can assume: custodian, sentry, counsellor and vicar. The paper's third finding is that the role occupied is contingent on both the particular president and the particular chief of staff. Cohen (2002) explored the three major roles chiefs of staff usually assume during their tenure, administrator, adviser and guardian, using original survey data across six chiefs of staff in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Cohen, Hult and Walcott (2016) traced the institutionalisation of the Office of Chief of Staff from its formalisation under Carter in 1978, documenting stabilising expectations alongside continuing variation in how individual incumbents worked. Stafford (2024) presented a first case study of the Downing Street Chief of Staff role, which has existed since 1997, and states at the outset that the responsibilities of the role are difficult to define. Cohen and Hult (2020) examined four major roles performed by chiefs of staff and their deputies, administrator, advisor, guardian and proxy, across the first three years of one administration. Pickering, Bellens and Brans (2023) compared profiles and trends for prime ministers' chiefs of staff across four Westminster democracies between 1990 and 2021, describing existing knowledge of these actors' backgrounds as surprisingly patchy. All of the above study political chiefs of staff. Zhou, Hiller, Zaccaro, Campbell, McCauley, Parris and Klimoski (2024) is the corporate study and describes the role as quasi-executive and not typically a member of the top management team.
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How to read a Chief of Staff advert
The question I get put to me most often, usually within a minute of saying any of the above, is the obvious one. If there is no fixed job, why are there hundreds of them advertised, and why has somebody's executive been told by three different people this quarter that they need one?
Both of those things are true. Neither one makes it a job in the sense people mean.
I went and read the adverts, which is a thing I recommend doing before anybody tells you where this role sits. Ten of them, live on public applicant boards on the morning I wrote this. All ten carry the same two words at the top of the page. Underneath, the person being supported is a founder, or "the executive team", or an unnamed executive, or a Chief Business Officer, or a general manager of advertising, or a chief operating officer, or a chief executive. Seven different principals across ten posts. The experience asked for starts at two years and ends at fifteen. Where pay is stated it starts at ninety thousand dollars and ends at three hundred and sixty seven thousand, so the top of the range is four times the bottom for a title that does not change. And seven of the ten do not ask for any previous Chief of Staff experience at all, which is a very strange property for a rung on a ladder. You cannot be promoted up something that mostly is not asking whether you have stood on it before.
Then I did the slower part, which was to write down every duty each advert names and sort them. Twenty distinct kinds of work across the ten adverts. Two of the twenty appear in all ten.
The two are working directly with one principal, and leading work that crosses functions. Everything after that splits. Preparing board or investor material, six of the ten. Removing blockers, five. Running the operating rhythm of reviews and planning, four. Drafting the executive's communications, four. Managing the principal's diary, inbox or expenses, three, while one of the ten says in writing that it is "not a traditional Chief of Staff role focused primarily on meetings, presentations, or administration". Three of the twenty kinds of work appear in one advert only: preparing a company for fundraising, board governance and trustees, and using artificial intelligence and automation.
Read that list again and notice what it is telling you. Two things survived all ten adverts, and they are not the same kind of thing. One is a relationship, with a particular named person on the other end of it. The other is a direction of travel, which is work that crosses functions, the role pointed at the business moving rather than at any one desk. Both of those are the job. Everything after them is whatever that particular executive cannot get done, which is the 1997 finding turning up on a job board twenty nine years later, and it is better evidence than the paper on its own, because this time it is the market failing to agree with itself rather than an academic saying so.
I would put that second finding more strongly than the adverts do, because it is the part most often mislaid when this role gets described as a senior assistant. The partnership with the executive is real and the role does not work without it. What the role is for is moving the business forward through that partnership. Both of those have to be true at once, and a version of the job that has the first without the second is a version that tends to disappoint everybody standing near it.
I should be straight about what that sample is. Ten adverts I could open on one morning, mostly United States technology companies, found through public applicant tracking boards. Six more would not load and are not in the counts. It is a convenience sample and not a survey of the market, so treat the shape as the finding and not the exact proportions.
On the other half of it, the executives being told they need one. That advice is practitioner commentary and it does not agree with itself either. One search returns a piece in Entrepreneur titled "Why I Need a Chief of Staff (And You Probably Do Too)" and a piece from the Chief of Staff Network titled "Seven reasons you probably don't need a Chief of Staff", sitting a few results apart. None of it carries a design or a sample. What does carry numbers is a consultancy's read of around two hundred and fifty people who have held the role in the past eight years, which is an analysis of public profiles rather than a study, and should be held a good deal more loosely than the two papers above. On its figures, nearly two thirds of chiefs of staff are appointed from inside the organisation, rising to four in five at the very largest employers. The median time in the role is a little over two years. Two thirds are promoted afterwards, and on average they move up more than one level.
Put those together and the market is behaving exactly as the contingency finding predicts. An executive works out they have a particular gap, hands it to somebody who already knows the building, for about two years, and that person then moves on and up. That is a posting with a shelf life, made around one pairing. It is not a step on a path, which is why the people who treat it as one so often arrive and find themselves doing work they did not expect.
None of which means the jobs are not real. They are real, they are well paid, there are more of them each year, and if one of them is right for you then go and get it. It means the advert in front of you is not a specification of a profession. It is a description of one executive's gap, written by or for that executive, and that is a thing you answer with evidence of the gaps you have already closed.
Try this. Take any Chief of Staff advert and read it three times. Once for who the principal is, because that is the job. Once for the two or three duties that carry real weight, which are usually the ones written with the most specific language. And once for what is missing, because the gap in the advert is often the thing that executive has not admitted to needing yet, and it is frequently the thing you are best at.
The research behind this section
The advert reading was done by hand on 9 November 2026. Sixteen adverts carrying the title Chief of Staff were located through public applicant tracking boards; ten could be retrieved and read in full and six returned errors or redirected to general careers indexes, so the counts use a denominator of ten. The ten employers were Mytos, Hive, Shield AI, Firework, Pinterest, Acumen, Workstream, Xsolla, Zum and Aeva. Each advert's stated duties were coded against twenty categories derived from the adverts themselves, with presence recorded once per advert per category. This is a convenience sample of mostly United States technology employers and is not a probability sample of the market, so it supports statements about the spread of the role rather than estimates of its distribution. Two categories, working directly with one principal and leading cross-functional work, were present in all ten. Stated experience requirements ranged from two years to fifteen. Stated pay, where given, ranged from a floor of ninety thousand dollars to a ceiling of three hundred and sixty seven thousand six hundred and twenty six dollars. Three of the ten mentioned previous Chief of Staff experience, two as preferred and one as part of an unlabelled requirements list. Goodman, Rochford, Ramsay Gray and Johnson (2024), writing for McKinsey, analysed publicly available data on approximately two hundred and fifty people who had served as chief of staff within the previous eight years across roughly three hundred organisations, and report that nearly two thirds are internal appointments, eighty per cent at organisations of fifty thousand employees or more, that median tenure in the role is 2.3 years against 4.8 years for the average large-company chief executive, that nine per cent hold another formal role alongside it, and that two thirds are promoted afterwards with eighteen per cent moving laterally and around one in ten moving into another chief of staff position. That piece is a consultancy analysis of public profiles, not peer-reviewed research, and its own text describes responsibilities as varying widely without putting a figure on the variation. The practitioner pieces named in this section are cited as evidence of disagreement in the advice literature and not as evidence about the role.
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What is actually known about the corporate role
Here is something that should make all of us a little more careful about how confidently we talk about this role.
The title is everywhere. It is on LinkedIn, it is in job adverts, it is in the mouths of people who will tell you where it leads. The peer-reviewed corporate literature on it consists of two empirical papers, both published since 2024. Everything else a search returns is about political chiefs of staff, or about a different C-suite role entirely, or practitioner commentary with no design and no sample behind it.
Two papers. That is the honest answer, and it is worth sitting with for a moment before anybody tells you anything about this job with a straight face.
The first of the two combined three sources: two and a half thousand LinkedIn profiles, surveys of a hundred and eight chiefs of staff, and in-depth interviews with thirteen. It maps the work onto the three things the role touches, which are the chief executive, the top management team and the wider organisation. It sits behind a paywall, and I am not going to tell you its taxonomy of job functions, because I could not read it and I am not willing to invent one and put somebody else's name on it. What I can tell you is the list of things its authors say are still unknown, and that list is the useful part. Whether a Chief of Staff actually changes what the chief executive pays attention to. What they do to the top team. What kind of organisation ends up having one. And where chiefs of staff go afterwards.
Hold on to that last one. We will come back to it the moment somebody tells you where this role leads.
The second study is the one I would press into your hands. It interviewed seventy-four people, sixty-one of them chiefs of staff, and what it describes is almost entirely about relationships rather than functions. It names a process the authors call heedful challenging, which is an academic label for something you will recognise on sight: putting a view in front of a powerful person that they have not got, in a way shaped for that particular individual.
What makes that possible is the part I find most interesting, and it is not what most people would guess.
Read that description again and notice what it is not. It is not seniority. The paper's theoretical home is unequal-power relationships, and it studies chiefs of staff as lower-power employees. The influence in this job comes from position and from knowing one person extremely well, which is precisely why the ladder picture misleads.
To its credit, the same study covers the drawbacks of occupying that position, and the cases where the process goes wrong. I am glad it does. A paper that lists only the attractions of a role is an advertisement, and so is a blog post that does the same.
One more, from a setting you would not expect, because it names something you will recognise instantly. An ethnography in military headquarters, with twenty-eight interviews across generals, staff officers and personal assistants, identified two things these roles do for their principal's standing. The first is a set of small daily rituals that build it, in meetings and on visits. The second is what the authors call wrapping, which means brokering access and the environment around the leader so that the leader can hold their own agenda. The paper calls these people power brokers, and says the equivalent exists outside the military. That is gatekeeping described as status work rather than diary work, and it covers assistants and staff officers in the same breath.
Try this. Take the last time you told your executive something they did not want to hear. Write down what you knew that made you able to say it, in two parts: what you know about them as a person, and what you know about how things are landing further down. That is the raw material of this job, and you are already holding it.
The research behind this section
Zhou, Hiller, Zaccaro, Campbell, McCauley, Parris and Klimoski (2024) presented a foundational exploration of the corporate chief of staff role, synthesising 2,500 LinkedIn chief of staff profiles, surveys of 108 chiefs of staff and in-depth interviews with 13 current and former chiefs of staff, identifying tasks and functions that interface with and influence the chief executive, the top management team and the broader organisation, describing the role as quasi-executive and not typically a member of the top management team, and setting out a four-domain future research agenda covering influence on chief executive attention and psychological states, influence on top management team and organisational processes and outcomes, the characteristics and conditions of organisations that have a chief of staff, and the long-term career trajectories of chiefs of staff. The article is closed access and its specific taxonomy of job functions, its named challenges and any figures on incumbent backgrounds could not be retrieved, so none are stated here. Barnes, Lacerenza and Volpone (2024) interviewed 74 people, 61 chiefs of staff and 13 leaders, and developed a process model of heedful challenging, in which lower-power employees present alternative perspectives to organisational leaders in ways tailored to the individual, drawing on knowledge of the leader as an individual and an understanding of how organisational issues are affecting employees, and showing leaders the implications of their own behaviour; the paper also covers how someone becomes a right-hand partner, the defining characteristics of the position, its drawbacks, and cases where the process goes wrong, and is framed theoretically within unequal-power relationships. Sang and Golan (2022) conducted an ethnography in Israeli military headquarters with 28 semi-structured interviews across generals, staff officers and personal assistants to generals, and identified daily aggrandising rituals and wrapping, meaning the brokering of the leader's environment and others' access to them, as two strategies by which these roles build their principal's standing, discussing the incumbents explicitly as power brokers and noting equivalents outside military organisations. Howell, Welsh and Hendricks (2026) used archival panel data and a three-wave field study of founders and found that the presence of a second-in-command weakened the relationship between founder identification and a bottom-line mentality, reducing founder moral disengagement and leader-directed unethical behaviour. Hood (2017) interviewed 13 higher education chiefs of staff reporting to a president or chancellor and cites a 2014 member survey of the National Association of Presidential Assistants in Higher Education in which 15 per cent of members held the chief of staff title, four points up on 2012.
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And what is known about your job, which is less than it should be
If the Chief of Staff literature is thin, the literature on your job is thinner, and I would far rather tell you that than quietly write around it.
There is no meta-analysis of the Executive Assistant role. There is no published competency model and no task inventory in a top-tier journal. The largest quantitative study I could find surveyed a thousand and eleven secretaries and was published in 2012. For comparison, a systematic review of the company secretary role, a job with a statutory definition attached to it, found sixteen peer-reviewed papers across thirty-one years.
These roles are not under-researched because they are simple. They are under-researched because the people who allocate research funding have not found them interesting enough to fund. That is a different problem, and it is not yours.
What the 2012 survey did find is worth having. The people in these roles were better qualified and generally better paid than the stereotype allowed. A minority were already doing complex managerial work. Most were still doing traditional tasks alongside it, and the route out of the occupation remained poor. Hold those last two findings next to each other, because together they are the strongest independent evidence I have for the argument in this post. Some people in assistant roles are already doing managerial work. And promotion out of the occupation is not the usual way that happens.
Which means the work arrives before the title does, if the title arrives at all.
The paper that describes this best was published in 1994. It is qualitative, its sample is modest, and nothing in the thirty years since has improved on its central observation. It begins from the gap between the roles that are formally acknowledged and the labour that is actually performed, and it finds that much of the work, including its intellectual and emotional parts, is invisible to the organisation while being essential to what the organisation achieves.
Its sharpest line is about language. The articulation of these tasks, it says, has been stunted by the lack of words to adequately describe them. That sentence is three decades old, and it is why you stood at a conference saying "I support the CEO" and knew as the words were leaving your mouth that they were doing none of the work.
A 1996 case study supplies the structural half of it. When one company moved its secretaries out of one-to-one pairings and into a shared pool, the people in those roles lost the room for judgement that the pairing had been giving them. The discretion had never been written into the job description. It lived in the dyad. Take the dyad away and it goes with it.
Sit with that, because it is the hinge of this whole post. The Executive Assistant role and the Chief of Staff role are both defined by a pairing with one person. That is what they have in common, and it is a far more useful thing to know than any list of differing duties.
The work arrives before the title does, if the title arrives at all. That is not a complaint about recognition. It is the normal order of events, and it has a name in the research.
There is one more line of evidence, from a literature that has nothing to do with either job and happens to measure the thing both jobs run on. Research on frontline public-service workers has spent forty years testing what happens to judgement when a role is written as a procedure. The finding, with more than seven hundred citations behind it, is that rules do not eliminate discretion, and that under some conditions more rules produce more of it, because every new rule creates another point at which somebody has to decide. That research is about social workers rather than assistants and I will not pretend otherwise. The transferable claim is narrow and it is strong: in a role written as procedural, judgement survives, and procedure tends to multiply the places where it is needed.
Try this. Describe your job for ninety seconds without using the words support, manage, coordinate or help. What you are left with is closer to the truth, and it is the vocabulary you will want for the conversation at the end of this post.
The research behind this section
Truss, Alfes, Shantz and Rosewarne (2012) surveyed 1,011 secretaries in the United Kingdom and found evidence of both continuity and change: secretaries are now better qualified and generally well paid, a minority is undertaking complex managerial tasks, most continue to perform traditional tasks, and career prospects for all remain bleak; the authors conclude that role gender-typing remains deeply entrenched. The exact size of that minority is not stated in the abstract and no percentage is given here. Truss, Goffee and Jones (1995) used questionnaire and interview data from secretaries in England, France and Germany plus interviews with their principals, and introduced the secretary as an agent acting to shape her own work identity, which the authors note had hitherto been ignored in the literature. Wichroski (1994) began from the discrepancy between formally acknowledged roles and actual labour performed, found that many clerical jobs have been neither successfully routinised nor rationalised, that articulation of the tasks has been stunted by a lack of language to adequately describe them, and concluded that much of secretarial labour, including its intellectual and emotional aspects, is invisible to organisations while being essential to fulfilling organisational and professional goals. Kleeh-Tolley (1996) studied secretaries in a pharmaceutical plant who were moved from individual principals into clerical pools under restructuring and found they lost the ability to manipulate office relations in the ways that had previously given them moments of perceived autonomy and control. England and Boyer (2009) analysed the shifting meanings of clerical work across three historical periods in Canada and the United States. Khalidi, Mohd Saat and colleagues (2025) conducted a PRISMA-guided systematic review of the company secretary role synthesising 16 peer-reviewed publications spanning 1993 to 2024 and found a discernible shift in perception from administrative facilitators to governance professionals. McNulty and Stewart (2014) studied the company secretary role in and around the board of directors, a role they describe as hitherto largely ignored in governance and organisational research, and found its potential lies in acting as a boundary spanner, walking the lines and working the spaces that connect executive and non-executive directors. Kakabadse, Khan and Kakabadse (2016) conducted 40 one-to-one semi-structured interviews and 12 focus groups with company secretaries, chairs, chief executives, chief financial officers, senior independent directors and non-executive directors, and found discretionary capacity critical to effective role contribution. Evans and Harris (2004), with over 700 citations, argued that rules do not eliminate discretion and that in some conditions more rules create more discretion, since every additional rule creates further points at which judgement must be exercised; Evans (2011, 2013) developed the argument, and Choi, Park and Lee (2025) provide the current systematic review. This discretion evidence concerns frontline public-service workers rather than assistants.
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Why two rungs is the wrong picture, said plainly
I need to be straight with you about the state of the evidence for the central claim in this post.
No study anywhere compares Executive Assistants and Chiefs of Staff directly. Not on what they do, not on their backgrounds, not on outcomes, and not on moving between the two. I looked hard, and I would tell you if I had found one. The claim that these are two different jobs rather than two rungs rests on inference from two separate literatures that have never been introduced to each other, and on three findings inside them. That the Chief of Staff role is contingent on the pairing rather than fixed by the chart. That the best corporate study of it treats the people holding it as lower-power employees. And that a minority of people in assistant roles are already doing complex managerial work while promotion out of the occupation stays rare.
That is a reasonable case. It is not a tested one, and I would rather you knew the difference than be persuaded by me.
What there is very good evidence for is the thing most people assume is a weakness.
A study of around thirty thousand employees, using a quarter of a billion internal emails, found that people whose career paths were atypical for their organisation had access to more valuable brokerage opportunities than the people who had arrived by the conventional route. They sat between groups that did not otherwise talk to each other, and that position was worth something.
If you came to this work sideways, through an assistant role, by being the person who happened to know everybody, that is the finding about you. It is very well powered and it points in exactly the opposite direction to the anxiety most people bring to this question.
So the better question is not whether you are ready to move up. It is which of the four or five versions of this role you are already doing parts of, whose version it would be, and whether the conditions exist for it to work at all. The rest of this post is about answering that, and the check halfway down does it with you.
Try this. List the three people in your organisation who talk to you and do not talk to each other. That list is the asset the brokerage research is describing, and it is more specific than anything on your CV.
The research behind this section
No peer-reviewed study was found that compares Executive Assistants and Chiefs of Staff directly on tasks, backgrounds, outcomes or transitions between the roles, and the argument in this section is presented as inference from separate literatures rather than as a tested finding. Kleinbaum (2012) analysed the career paths of approximately 30,000 employees alongside around 250 million email messages in a single large organisation and found that individuals whose career paths were atypical for the organisation had access to more valuable brokerage opportunities than those following conventional paths. Barnes, Lacerenza and Volpone (2024) frame chiefs of staff as lower-power employees, as above. Truss, Alfes, Shantz and Rosewarne (2012) found a minority undertaking complex managerial tasks alongside bleak career prospects, as above. Cohen (1997) established the contingency of the role on the particular principal and the particular incumbent, as above.
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Where this leaves you
There is a word missing from the question people keep being asked, and putting it back is most of the work. Not whether the Chief of Staff role would suit you. Which version of it, and whose.
That sounds like a narrower question and it is in fact a far more answerable one, because it is about a person you can observe and a gap you can describe, rather than a ladder somebody else has to let you onto. Everything in this half has been pointing at that. There is no fixed job waiting. The adverts do not agree with each other. The research on the corporate role is two papers deep and the research on your own occupation is thinner still. The one finding that holds across all of it is that these positions are made in a pairing, which means the specific person opposite you is not the soft part of the decision to be settled after the career question. It is the career question.
What this half does not do is tell you what to do on Monday, and that is deliberate, because the answer to that is long enough to need its own post.
Read part two What to go and get and where it leads, what a fit question actually is, the two questions that decide it, and the free check and printable pages that go with them.
One last thing before you go. If you recognised yourself in the opening, running the meeting, writing the papers, deciding what reaches the chief executive on Monday, then please notice that you were already doing a version of this work while you were reading about whether you would be allowed to. The title arrives last, if it arrives at all.
Stay savvy.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The two jobs check, the interactive tool in part two of this piece, free
The Two Jobs Pages, the printable download in part two, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Strategic Contribution, the dimension this post sits in
The Irreplaceable Audit, free, for what the shape of your role is worth rather than what it is called
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on the Two Roles?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence this half is built on. These are the papers behind why the Chief of Staff role has no fixed shape, what the two studies of the corporate role actually found, and how thin the research on our own occupation still is. Part two carries its own list for the fit and self-assessment evidence.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where I could not confirm a figure from the paper itself, I have left the figure out rather than guess, and where I could not read a paper at all I have said so in the body rather than quote it.
📃 Cohen (1997) Case study of one White House chief of staff that developed a four-part typology (custodian, sentry, counsellor, vicar) and found the role adopted depends on both the president and the incumbent. https://doi.org/10.1080/07343469709507824
📃 Cohen (2002) Original survey data on six White House chiefs of staff in the Reagan and Bush era, identifying three major roles usually assumed in the job: administrator, adviser and guardian. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2002.tb00002.x
📃 Cohen, Hult and Walcott (2016) Historical analysis of the office since Eisenhower, finding the position has institutionalised while still adapting to each president, with incumbents differing considerably in temperament, relationship and circumstances. https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12249
📃 Stafford (2024) Case study of the Downing Street chief of staff role, which the author finds difficult to define but covering human resources, gatekeeping, closest adviser to the prime minister and institutional reform. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-024-00256-3
📃 Cohen and Hult (2020) Case analysis of the office of the chief of staff in the Trump White House, 2017 to 2019, one of a series documenting the office across successive presidencies. https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12646
📃 Pickering, Bellens and Brans (2023) Dataset mapping the profiles of 56 chiefs of staff to prime ministers in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand from 1990 to 2021, finding these offices attract particular characteristics. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12834
📃 Zhou and colleagues (2024) Mixed-methods study of 2,500 LinkedIn profiles, 108 surveys and 13 interviews framing the corporate chief of staff as quasi-executive, influencing the chief executive, top team and wider organisation, with four domains still unresearched. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518241267078
📃 Goodman and colleagues (2024) Consultancy analysis, not peer-reviewed research, of publicly available data on around 250 people who held the chief of staff role in the previous eight years across roughly 300 organisations, reporting that nearly two thirds are internal appointments, that median tenure is 2.3 years, and that two thirds are promoted afterwards. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/chief-of-staff-anatomy-of-the-role-in-eight-charts
📃 Barnes, Lacerenza and Volpone (2024) Qualitative study of 74 people, 61 chiefs of staff and 13 leaders, describing how a lower-power employee becomes a right-hand partner by challenging a powerful leader in an individually tailored way. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2021.1390
📃 Sang and Golan (2022) Ethnography and 28 interviews in military headquarters, finding that assistants to senior leaders build those leaders' standing through daily rituals and by brokering access to them. https://doi.org/10.1177/17427150221078442
📃 Howell, Welsh and Hendricks (2026) Archival panel data and a three-wave field study of founders, finding the presence of a second-in-command weakens the link between founder identification and a bottom-line mentality and so reduces unethical conduct. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001342
📃 Hood (2017) Interview study of 13 higher education chiefs of staff reporting to a president or chancellor, producing an initial four-theme typology covering duties, personality, traits and the role within the organisation. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI10615912
📃 Truss and colleagues (2012) Survey of 1,011 UK secretaries finding they are better qualified and generally well paid, that a minority undertake complex managerial tasks, and that career prospects for all remain poor. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0432.2012.00587.x
📃 Truss, Goffee and Jones (1995) Questionnaire and interview study of secretaries in England, France and Germany, plus their principals, introducing the secretary as an agent actively shaping her own work identity. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679504801105
📃 Wichroski (1994) Study of secretaries across organisations of differing size and control, finding much secretarial labour, including its intellectual and emotional parts, is invisible to organisations yet essential to their goals. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.53.1.a1205g53j7334631
📃 Kleeh-Tolley (1996) Case study of secretaries moved from individual principals into clerical pools, finding the restructuring removed the office relations that had previously given them moments of perceived autonomy and control. https://doi.org/10.1177/016059769602000204
📃 England and Boyer (2009) Longitudinal historical analysis of clerical work in Canada and the United States across three periods, finding what counts as a good job in the sector has shifted with economic conditions. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0284
📃 Khalidi and colleagues (2025) PRISMA-guided systematic review of 16 papers published between 1993 and 2024, finding a shift in how company secretaries are seen, from administrative facilitators to governance professionals. https://doi.org/10.22495/cbv21i3art1
📃 McNulty and Stewart (2014) UK study of the company secretary, finding the role can act as a boundary spanner connecting executive and non-executive directors and so develop the governance space in ways that enable board effectiveness. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840614556919
📃 Kakabadse, Khan and Kakabadse (2016) Forty interviews and twelve focus groups with company secretaries, chairs and directors, finding discretionary capacity is critical to effective contribution in the role. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr-04-2016-0023
📃 Evans and Harris (2004) Review arguing that rules do not remove discretion from frontline work and that, in some conditions, more rules create more discretion by multiplying the points where judgement is needed. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bch106
📃 Evans (2011) Critique of street-level bureaucracy theory as applied to professionals and managers, re-examining how far managerial control displaces the discretion professionals actually exercise. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcq074
📃 Evans (2013) Study of organisational rules and discretion in adult social work, examining how far formal rules constrain the judgement frontline workers actually exercise. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs008
📃 Choi, Park and Lee (2025) Systematic review of street-level discretion, mapping how it has been conceptualised and what antecedents and consequences the literature reports. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2559852
📃 Kleinbaum (2012) Six-year study of 30,000 employees using over 250 million email messages, finding people whose career paths are atypical for their organisation gain access to more valuable brokerage opportunities. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839212461141
📃 Lee and colleagues (2024) The counterweight on brokerage, finding that spanning between groups is associated with burnout and with abusive behaviour towards others. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1664
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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