Help Is Here
Today’s senior executive needs more than an assistant. He needs a chief of staff.
By Liza Wright
Liza Wright is a founding partner of Lochlin Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based executive search firm, and former principal at Heidrick & Struggles and director of presidential personnel in the George W. Bush administration.
In the title of his 1970 book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler accurately characterized the root cause of one of the major issues facing the modern corporate executive. He defined future shock as “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” Four decades later, the change continues to accelerate even as the time grows ever shorter. The demands placed on a senior executive working in a global, 24/7 environment have the potential to seriously eat away at his focus, effectiveness, and indeed his very health. The CEO at one multibillion-dollar company summed it up: “The additional time I need to keep up with the demands of my job and do it effectively comes from one place—the amount of sleep I get.”
But today’s executives have no choice. They have to figure out how they can be more efficient with their time so they can react and respond effectively to increasing internal and external pressures while guiding their enterprises toward the future. Basic time-management strategies will get them only so far. Enter the rebirth of an important role currently undergoing a reformulation in the executive suite: the chief of staff.
Most think about chiefs of staff in the context of a military, government, or political organization, understandable since it has been a key role in military operations for centuries and, under different titles, in government operations just as long. Officially, the position has existed at the highest level of American government—the White House—since 1953. Increasingly, senior corporate executives understand the value in creating such a position.
In 2008, Kevin Cox, executive VP of HR at American Express, hired his first chief of staff, David Clark, a veteran chief of staff who had worked on Capitol Hill, in several government agencies, and spent four years in a senior staff position at the White House. Cox comments that his decision to create the position was motivated by his need to become “much more purposeful” about how and when he spends his time. His objective was to create the time and space he needed to focus on the most strategically critical demands of his position, including the need to partner at a higher level with his CEO, his C-suite colleagues, and the board of directors. He estimates that Clark’s addition to his senior team created a 30 percent time dividend he has used for those purposes.
Like Kevin Cox, Aflac president and COO Paul Amos II hired the company’s first chief of staff. In January 2010, he told Fortune, “When I first started talking to my HR department, they said with the exception of politics, nobody really [has one]. . . . I said, ‘I promise you this is needed out there.’”
