Chief of Staff vs. COO vs. Executive Assistant
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In this week’s issue, we’re defining three roles that often get mixed up when it comes to talking about the Chief of Staff remit: Chief of Staff vs. COO vs. Executive Assistant. Having worked in the Chief of Staff space for 4️⃣➕ years now, this is still a question I get regularly. If I never have to answer this question again, I’ll know I have made it 😅
While there are certainly some characteristics that overlap in these three roles, at no point are any of these roles substitutes for each other. I’d like to start by referencing Mark Organ in this First Round Review article:
The Chief of Staff role is an intensely personal one. This is a position scoped for the CEO, and it has elements of both an executive assistant and a COO. Like an EA, a Chief of Staff works only for the CEO and doesn’t have direct reports, except maybe an intern or executive assistant. Like a COO, a Chief of Staff works on strategic and critical items, working with employees as well as customers and board members.
This is pretty much where the similarities end. In an ideal situation, a Chief of Staff, a COO, and an EA can all work in tandem to build a stronger leadership layer at the top of the organization. Referencing the image below from a presentation I gave to a VC firm, you’ll see that an EA and Chief of Staff both sit firmly within the “Office of the CEO” while a COO sits outside of it on the “Leadership Team”.
Let’s further breakdown the differences between an Executive Assistant and a Chief of Staff. Last year, I was a guest on the The Founder & The Force Multiplier podcast, where I talked about the different scopes of an Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff:
➡️ An EA is a powerful business partner because of their administrative and tactical nature.
➡️ A Chief of Staff acts as more of a strategic project manager, communication facilitator, and often advisor to a CEO.
➡️ The EA has the ability to take administrative tasks off both the CEO and Chief of Staff’s plates so that the Chief of Staff can better use their time helping the CEO strategically guide the organization.
But but but Clara, you say, I know lots of EAs who manage strategic projects and also help with board decks and investor relations! In my opinion, I think these EAs are mis-titled (🌶️ spicy take!). The Chief of Staff title is still relatively new in the corporate world and so, many EAs may have graduated their administrative responsibilities and might even manage more junior EAs who take on the scheduling, travel arrangements, etc. If you’re an EA who finds themselves working on more strategic initiatives vs administrative or tactical ones, it might be time to renegotiate a title change or responsibility re-scope.
Ask yourself: Is the work I’m doing freeing up time for my principal to work separately on things or is the work I’m doing complementary to my principal to drive initiatives forward together? If it’s the latter, a Chief of Staff title might be better suited for you.
In a more built out “Office of the CEO”, a Chief of Staff and Executive Assistant work in tight coordination to best serve both the tactical and strategic needs of the principal. For more on how EAs and Chiefs of Staff can best work together, check out this prior issue of our newsletter:
The other role that a Chief of Staff often gets conflated with is the Chief Operating Officer. Here, the distinction does become a bit trickier, but the biggest difference I see between a Chief of Staff and a COO is that a Chief of Staff serves their Principal first and foremost, while a COO serves the organization above all.
A Chief of Staff often sits in an interesting hierarchal position between the C-Suite and the rest of the higher ups - it’s often why a Chief of Staff can feel so much like an island of one. They’re floating in between levels of the organization and also expected to help bridge the gap between leadership and other higher ups. A COO, on the other hand, is firmly a part of the leadership structure and is a peer executive to the CEO. If you’re a Chief of Staff to another C-level, you’ll find yourself in a similar limbo: you’re often in the leadership room and have influence to drive decisions, but rarely are you the one pulling the trigger at the end of the day.
Additionally, Chiefs of Staff are a team of one - they report up to their principal and don’t have direct reports. If a Chief of Staff does work in tandem with an EA, they might be responsible for managing them, but the EA’s workload is often still focused on the principal. A COO, however, can build a team beneath them that spans managers, individual contributors, and more. They might even have a Chief of Staff of their own! Dependent on the size and stage of the company, departments under a COO’s remit may include People & Talent, HR, Financial Operations, Business Operations, and more.
In my own experience, my Chief of Staff role had a lot of responsibilities that overlapped with what a COO could have done - the main reasoning being that we didn’t have a COO on our team. The three co-founders of the company skewed heavily on the science and engineering side and so my CEO brought me in as a counterpart to himself and between the two of us, we tackled anything that didn’t fall under the Tech/Science side of the organization. Some of my first initiatives included: creating the first draft of our parental leave policy, merging our PEO with our health insurance provider platform, and managing the move from in office to fully remote when the pandemic shut down New York City. Each of these initiatives could have easily fallen under a COO remit, but given the stage of our organization and because our CEO had been the one to manage similar projects prior to my hiring, it was imperative that we worked in lock step so I could pick up where he had left things off, not to mention many of these projects were institutional in building the culture of our company.
My principal and I also kept an open conversation about my role potentially becoming that of a COO later down the line if the need for a more dedicated Operations executive arose, but during my year plus there, I was more than happy to continue to be a pinch hitter because I was able to float between “departments” and shadow my CEO.
I know that was wordy, so here are all those words in a neat graphic - special shoutout to Lee Pham for helping me put this together:
When someone asks me, “So what does a Chief of Staff do?”, I like to hit them with this acronym: Culture, Operations, and Strategy. The acronym covers the 3️⃣ large buckets of “stuff” a Chief of Staff works on and there’s nothing administrative about them. If you’re a Chief of Staff and you’re assigned an initiative that doesn’t fit under one of these umbrellas, it might be a chance to delegate to other members of the team.
At the end of the day, being a Chief of Staff means amplifying your Principal’s impact and helping them free up bandwidth to work in their zone of genius. If you’re looking for more tactics and strategies to get better at this, consider joining the Ask a Chief of Staff Slack Community or attending one of the workshops below!
January 16th: Prioritization for Chiefs of Staff
January 23rd: Fireside Chat with Laurie Arron
As a reminder, events and workshops are free for all Ask a Chief of Staff community members and the recordings will only be provided to members.
How to Prioritize During Permacrisis
Five Reasons A Chief Of Staff Will Be Your Best Hire
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