Our Role is Getting Diluted

Recently I’ve noticed two things happening around the Chief of Staff role.

On one side, the role is becoming increasingly credentialed. I’ve seen companies offer courses, certifications and programs designed to formalize what a Chief of Staff does.

Then on the other side, I just saw someone proudly describe an AI system they built as a “digital Chief of Staff.” It triaged email, organized tasks and structured the day automatically. 

If I was hoping to be liked, I’d say both are impressive in their own way. But the new me is less interested in political correctness and more interested in asking a simple question:

Are we holding this role to a high enough standard?

Because both of these trends reveal the same underlying problem, the Chief of Staff role is being simplified. And that simplification happens for one reason:

the real work is hard to see.

When the real work is hard to see, people define the role through the parts that are easier to observe. Inbox triage. Scheduling. Certification programs.

But those things aren’t the source of the leverage.

Having built a company myself, I often think about how different certain decisions might have been if I had someone sitting beside me in this role. Someone perceptive enough to see what I couldn’t see in the moment. Someone close enough to the work to understand the nuance behind a decision. Someone willing to step in when action was needed and disciplined enough to stay quiet when it wasn’t.

When you’re the person making the decisions, you’re inside the problem. You’re moving quickly, processing incomplete information, navigating pressure from multiple directions that can easily create blind spots. Even the most capable leaders operate inside that reality.

The opportunity in the Chief of Staff role is that someone else can see the situation differently. And not because they’re smarter, but because they’re uniquely positioned. 

That perspective, paired with the willingness to act, is where the role becomes powerful. The best Chiefs I know understand this instinctively.

You can see the tension others can’t. You sense when a decision is drifting and quietly reframe the conversation. All while protecting your principal’s attention as the organization pulls them in ten different directions.

Most of this work happens in small moments. A comment here. A reframed question there. A quiet conversation after a meeting.

This is what makes the role difficult to describe and what’s difficult to describe inevitably gets simplified.

From the outside, the role looks operational. Scheduling. Coordination. Workflow management. But this isn’t why great leaders rely on you. The real leverage of the role is judgement.

Judgement about where a leader’s attention should go.

Judgement about when to push and when to wait.

Judgement about which problems deserve oxygen and which ones should quietly burn out on their own.

Judgement about how decisions will ripple through the organization.

Here’s where I’ll get spicy: this kind of judgement doesn’t come from a course. It comes with scars. It develops slowly through grueling exposure, when you’re close enough to decisions that matter to see what happens next.

You watch the good calls play out.
You watch the bad ones unfold.
And over time you begin to understand the context behind both.

But somewhere along the way, we started pretending this part could be skipped.

And to top it all off, the very best Chiefs I’ve met (many of you) share a trait that almost never appears in job descriptions or in certifications. 

They’re humble.

The work isn’t about them. Their orientation is toward the mission, the leader and the business. Words like visibility or credit aren’t part of their vocabulary. They don’t care about being the smartest voice in the room, or being a hero. They care about one thing: whether the leader and the organization are making better decisions.

When someone operates that way, the noise fades and the leverage remains.

Humility paired with perception and action creates a powerful partnership. One where the leader knows someone is watching the edges of the system, noticing what others miss and willing to say the thing that needs to be said.

From the outside, everything is invisible except the results.

So maybe the responsibility sits with us… the ones already in the role. Because if the work stays invisible, people will keep simplifying it and leaders will keep missing the opportunity.

More leaders deserve this kind of partnership. And if we don’t raise the standard for the role, who else will?

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