How to Hire—and Deploy—a Great Chief of Staff

After filling a cap table with prestige names and an Atherton basement with Screaming Eagle, what does a busy mogul on the rise acquire next? Increasingly these days, a chief of staff.

Long a staple in government and the military, the chief of staff role has lately become a faddish fixture in the private sector, too, particularly in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Giants like Amazon, American Express and Hewlett Packard employ them, and at this moment, Microsoft, TikTok, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart are among the hundreds of firms seeking to hire one. In recent years, a number of professional  organizations—for instance, the Chief of Staff Network and the Chief of Staff Association—have sprung up to guide new entrants, and institutions as varied as McKinsey and Oxford University have added chief-of-staff trainings. “Everyone lately wants to grab a bit of the magic,” said Leigh Felton, who was a chief of staff at Microsoft and Mozilla before becoming executive director of the Chief of Staff Leaders Circle, a consulting firm.

The role does seem to require a bit of wizardry—an ability to do everything and be everywhere, all at once. Depending on the company, a chief of staff might run the leadership and all-hands meetings, liaise with the board, draft speeches and decks, and act as the CEO’s eyes and ears within the organization and proxy, as needed. “They can act like a double you,” said Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue, an Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence unicorn. Qiu has both employed chiefs of staff and been one herself at Dropbox, supporting CEO Drew Houston.