The Corporate Chief of Staff: Strategic Leadership Influence From Outside the Spotlight

Abstract

For decades, scholars of strategic leadership have explored the degree to which senior executives and the team of top managers influence firm outcomes. However, one growing quasi-executive role in corporate settings, the chief of staff (COS), has been almost entirely ignored. Our paper presents a novel, foundational exploration of the COS role, including primary job functions and challenges, characteristics and backgrounds of incumbents, and relevance for strategic leadership and upper echelons theory. We synthesize three original sources of data — 2,500 LinkedIn COS profiles, surveys of 108 COSs, and in-depth interviews of 13 current and former COSs — to identify COS tasks and functions that interface with and influence the CEO, the top management team (TMT), and the broader organization. Though not typically considered a member of the TMT, we find compelling evidence for their ‘behind the scenes’ relevance to strategic leadership processes and outcomes. We then lay out a future research agenda comprising four domains: COS influence on CEO attention and psychological states, COS influence on TMT and organizational processes and outcomes, characteristics and conditions of organizations with a COS, and long-term career trajectories of COSs.