What Is a Chief of Staff? A Business Leader’s Guide to the Role

Chief of staff job postings have grown roughly 85% since 2020, and the number of executives holding the title has tripled since 2021.⁽¹⁾ The more interesting question isn’t whether the role is growing. It’s why now, in the middle of an AI boom that’s supposed to be automating exactly the kind of coordination and reporting work a chief of staff does.

We put that question to Sonia Nelson Germinario, a senior program management professional with a background spanning media, entertainment, and technology, who has been researching the chief of staff role while exploring her next career move. Her answer reframes the whole conversation: AI can summarize the report. It can’t be the connective tissue between people.

What Does a Chief of Staff Do, Exactly?

A chief of staff is a strategic partner and force multiplier for an executive, extending their capacity to lead rather than just managing their calendar.⁽²⁾ The role centers on judgment and cross-functional influence, and it typically reports directly to a CEO, president, or other senior executive. Day to day, that means managing priorities, coordinating initiatives across teams, preparing board materials, and acting as a trusted advisor on key decisions.⁽²⁾

That’s different from an executive assistant, who manages logistics: scheduling, travel, correspondence. A chief of staff operates further upstream, applying strategic judgment to problems an executive hasn’t defined yet, and is trusted to represent the executive’s thinking in rooms the executive isn’t in.⁽²⁾

Sonia put the core function more simply than any job description does: “You’re bubbling up information for them sort of separating signal from noise.”⁽³⁾ To be clear, this also isn’t a government or political role, despite sharing a title with the White House Chief of Staff. It’s a corporate position built around one leader’s priorities.

Why Is Business Complexity Driving the Growth?

Because leaders are managing more simultaneous, high-stakes initiatives than they can absorb the details of. Chief of staff postings have grown roughly 85% since 2020, and the number of executives holding the title has tripled since 2021.⁽¹⁾ Sonia pointed specifically to AI: organizations now run numerous AI initiatives alongside everything else, and senior leaders can’t dig into every project or read every lengthy update.

That creates a real need for someone who can determine what’s important, what deserves executive attention, and where risk or opportunity is emerging. “I think leaders want to hear the cliffs notes, like what are all the things that we’re working on and how might they bear fruit in the future?” Sonia said.⁽³⁾ “A leader is not necessarily reading multiple 20 page decks every week to understand what is the status on all of these major initiatives that could be groundbreaking.”

She described the underlying problem as a volume issue as much as a complexity one: “I think there’s a lot of sifting through,” a high volume of information to distinguish what’s important amid monumental changes happening across the business.⁽³⁾ As organizations get more complicated, the value of a chief of staff may not be providing leadership with more information. It’s determining which information matters.

What Makes Someone Good at This Job?

Communication, more than any other skill. Asked which trait stood out most across the chief of staff job descriptions she’s reviewed, Sonia didn’t hesitate: “I think the number one thing, and it’s definitely soft skills, is communication.”⁽³⁾ But she means something more specific than talking often. It’s creating structure around communication, so leadership can track what was promised, what happened, and what changed.

She described that structure directly: “What should I expect to happen in Q1? And at the end of Q1 report out on what actually happened in Q1 and what is the delta? What did we say we’re going to do that we didn’t do and why didn’t we do it?”⁽³⁾ Without that rhythm, an executive gets overwhelmed by everything happening underneath them. Sonia’s phrase for it stuck with us: “Otherwise, you’re asking CTO to drink from a fire hose.”⁽³⁾

The second skill she named was less expected: a good BS radar. Her example was specific. A team says a project will be done by fiscal year end. Fiscal year end is three weeks out. The system of record shows the work is 25% complete. “How is this going to be done in three weeks, right?” she said, describing “a good sniffer for BS, like being able to flag risks accordingly” as one of the most important things a chief of staff does.⁽³⁾

That only works if the person is willing to surface bad news, and Sonia was blunt about how rare that willingness is. “I’m a straight shooter. Sometimes people don’t like hearing about risk. They’ll say, don’t tell me anything bad,” she said. “I think risk is a real thing that needs to be surfaced and it can be mitigated, if everybody has awareness.”⁽³⁾ That candor also has to land with the rest of the organization, not just the executive. Otherwise, as Sonia joked, employees start wondering whether the chief of staff is “a total snitch” instead of someone acting in the spirit of collaboration.⁽³⁾

Can AI Replace a Chief of Staff?

Not the parts that matter most, according to Sonia, and this is where the growth numbers start to make more sense. AI is good at summarizing, reporting, and synthesizing data, the exact tasks that once filled a program manager’s week. Sonia has noticed fewer project and program management postings in her own search, and wonders whether the perception that AI can absorb that coordination work is part of why.⁽³⁾ That’s her read on her own job search, not a confirmed hiring trend, and it’s worth treating as an open question rather than settled data.

What she’s confident about is the limit of what AI can do. “AI can synthesize data really well. But in terms of connective tissue between people that I don’t see,” she said.⁽³⁾ She connected that directly to the growth in chief of staff postings: “This whole exponential increase in chief of staff JDs might be an acknowledgement that AI can’t do all the functions. We still need people to be able to bridge gaps.”⁽³⁾

She raised a second, sharper distinction: accountability. “If a CTO actions bad data that he or she got from AI, who’s to blame?” she asked. “Can’t blame AI, right? You can’t blame a non-person. I think there’s something about accountability there, you know a chief of staff is a highly accountable professional.”⁽³⁾ AI can produce a recommendation. It can’t own a decision, take responsibility for a bad call, or have the difficult conversation that follows one. As organizations hand more coordination work to AI, the distinctly human parts of the job, judgment, accountability, and trust, may be exactly what’s becoming more valuable, not less.

Why Does Hiring for This Role Require More Than a Resume?

Because the job description tells you less than it seems. Sonia has noticed that most chief of staff postings read similarly, but conversations with people in her network who’ve held the role surfaced a consistent theme: the person you’re supporting can change the job. One contact who’d previously served as a chief of staff told her just how tightly the two roles have to align, describing a need to be “precisely on the same wavelength” with the executive.⁽³⁾ Sonia’s own conclusion from those conversations was direct: “the actual dynamics of the role of the person that you’re supporting, that’s huge.”⁽³⁾

That’s a hard thing to screen for on paper. A candidate can meet every listed requirement and still not be the right match for a specific executive’s communication style, pace, and appetite for hearing hard news. It’s also exactly the kind of high-trust role where standard vetting isn’t enough. 23% of candidates who reach the late stages of a hiring process still present fraud-risk signals, and a chief of staff is the kind of trust-based hire where that check can’t be skipped.⁽²⁾ The job description tells you what someone will do. It doesn’t tell you who will succeed doing it for your specific executive.

What Does a Chief of Staff Really Cost?

Typically $150,000 to $200,000-plus a year, depending on experience, scope, and company size.⁽²⁾ That range should be weighed against what the role replaces: fragmented coordination that would otherwise consume the CEO’s own time, which is the most expensive time in the company. Compensation scales with scope, and a chief of staff supporting a company through a fundraise, acquisition, or major AI rollout commands more than one focused primarily on internal coordination.

Where Does a Chief of Staff’s Career Go From Here?

Often somewhere unexpected, because there isn’t a standard next rung on the ladder. “Chief of staff is not a typical career trajectory. What comes after it? If you do four year stint as chief of staff, what is the career progression after that? I don’t know,” Sonia said.⁽³⁾ She’s heard of chiefs of staff moving directly into C-suite roles after developing broad enough knowledge of the business that promoting them became an easy call.⁽³⁾

She also floated a different model: instead of a vertical climb, a horizontal path across companies and industries. “You do a chief of staff role, you get things organized for X period of time, and then they’re in really good shape and you walk away,” moving to another organization that needs the same kind of operating rigor built.⁽³⁾ What draws her to the role in the first place is the impact: “I think what makes me interested in it is that I know it can be high impact,” she said, pointing to her own background supporting high-stakes live events in sports and media.⁽³⁾

The Bottom Line on the Chief of Staff Role

The 85% growth in chief of staff postings since 2020 isn’t just a hiring trend.⁽¹⁾ It may be an acknowledgment that as AI absorbs more of the coordination and reporting work that used to fill a program manager’s week, the distinctly human parts of the job, judgment, trust, accountability, and the ability to connect people across an organization, become harder to automate and more valuable to have.

That also makes the hire harder to get right. A chief of staff isn’t a role you fill by matching a resume to a job description. It’s a role you fill by finding someone your executive can be on the same wavelength with, someone who’ll surface the bad news along with the good. If your team is weighing whether this role fits your organization, let’s talk through what the right fit looks like for your executive and your business.