Nova Chat - All Things Chief of Staff with Maggie Olson

Jeremy · 0:00

Howdy, friends. Welcome to episode 305 of The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's your host, Jeremy Burrows, and I'm excited to share another Nova chat from my friend, Maggie Olson. In this chat, she talks all things Chief of Staff, and I'm going to cut right to the chase and let you enjoy it. So check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/305, and we'll talk soon.

Speaker 2 · 0:27

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 0:44

Hey friends, the NOVA Chief of Staff Certification Course is one of the most popular professional development resources for growth-minded leader assistants like you. With dozens of templates, self-paced learning, multiple instructor touchpoints, and peer engagement, NOVA alumni walk away empowered and confident to level up as an assistant or even negotiate a promotion to a Chief of Staff role. With well over 500 students across 22 countries, NOVA is the top spot for Chief of Staff learning and development. Join the movement today at leaderassistant.com/nova. That's leaderassistant.com/nova.

Maggie · 1:31

Today, we're going to talk about all things Chief of Staff. First, I'll give you a little introduction to me, a brief background about me, about NOVA Chief of Staff and the Founder of NOVA Chief of Staff, premier destination for Chief of Staff education, development, coaching, consulting. Then we will really just dive into all things Chief of Staff. First and foremost, if we are not connected on LinkedIn, please connect with me on LinkedIn, maggi-olson, O-L-S-O-N-C-O-S. Tara will put the link in the chat. I post daily on LinkedIn about the Chief of Staff role, so it's a really good place to start finding resources from me, from Nova, and also from the Chief of Staff community that exists on LinkedIn. Then I think real quickly what I will do is share about Nova Chief of Staff. A lot of you know Nova, you're in our network already. I launched the Nova Chief of Staff certification course last year. It's been almost a year. It is a self-paced online student-led course. It's around 50 or 60 hours full of hands-on real-life practical examples of what a Chief of Staff does every single day. We've got over 400 students in our course across 20 countries. It's been a resource that's been received with open arms. There's been a huge hunger for hands-on resources in the Chief of Staff space. And my background really led me to creating this course. So I was most recently a corporate Chief of Staff at a large telecom company. You can figure that out pretty easily in LinkedIn. I'll let you go over there and do some research. But I was a buyer at Nordstrom previously for about five years. I popped around to a lot of businesses. I did get my MBA. We can talk about if I think an MBA is necessary for the Chief of Staff role and why. I don't think it's necessary for the Chief of Staff role later. We can totally get into that if you'd like. But through the MBA program, I was recruited into an executive development program at this company. I ended up networking with executives at the company and moved into a Chief of Staff role there. It was my first Chief of Staff job and it was the first Chief of Staff that this president had ever had. I was tasked to figure out all the things. What are the processes? What are the tools? How do we make the leader more efficient? How do we drive business forward? And I was privileged enough to build a team of about seven or eight of us on this back office team, doing things from business planning to business process to employee culture and engagements and communications and events and filling gaps and on and on and on. So I loved the Chief of Staff role. I really felt like it was the culmination of all the pieces of my jobs prior that I really, really liked. And I'll get into some of that as we go forward here. And I left that job wanting to go into Chief of Staff Consulting, which we do at NOVA. I do Chief of Staff Consulting now. And I figured, you know, I'm going to, so I was talking to my mom, basically, back when I left my corporate role. And I was talking to her about how crazy it was that I, that there are thousands of project management certifications out there in the world, all over the place and nowhere for a Chief of Staff to get hands-on practice doing the things Chiefs of Staff do every day. And I'll always thank my mom for this. She said, well, why don't you build it? So that's what I did. I was pregnant, building a course, built it for about a year, had the baby, launched the course. Here we are a year later. My little guy is almost a year and a half and things are great. It's a new, I'm in a new world here as an entrepreneur, but I'm loving it. The Chief of Staff role really prepares you well for entrepreneurship, but that's something that is in your future. You don't have to know that right now, but that's a little bit about Nova Chief of Staff. We've got a team of five full-time folks. We support our students. It's the most important thing we do because it is, and we just love the space that we're in, and we're so glad that you're all here. Without further ado, one thing that I'm doing just for people who registered for this call. Now, if you know Nova, you know that we do not do discounts. We don't discount. The product is already well underpriced from market value. There's no need to, and it just doesn't make a ton of sense for our business model to do it. However, we are very, very, very excited to have 1200 people registered for this chat, and we wanted to do a little something special for the summer period here. For two weeks only, if you are interested in enrolling in Nova's Chief of Staff Certification course, we're going to give $250 off to anybody who's registered, anybody on this call, and we'll send an email out with that link. And at the end of this call, I will also share a QR code for that. Tara will pop the link into the chat. You have a couple weeks to figure it out if you need to talk to your leader. Many people in our course are company funded with learning budgets and different things, but we also intentionally keep our prices, hopefully achievable for people paying on their own because we know that a lot of people do. That's that. We'll remind you at the end of the chat. We'll get the link in the chat here for you, but let's get into it. Feel free to pop questions in the Q&A in about half an hour, 45 minutes, we'll get to those questions, and I'm just going to get going here. Let's first talk about my definition of the Chief of Staff role. A Chief of Staff is the business leader's strategic thought partner, who's excellent at execution and allows the business leader to focus on what's most important. Those things are vision, strategy, growth, and leadership. And I know we have a lot of business owners on this call too, who are interested in the Chief of Staff role. So I will continue to try to kind of point different kind of articulations to you as well. Just like an Executive Assistant, we all understand the term Executive Assistant a lot better than Chief of Staff. Just like an Executive Assistant, a Chief of Staff supports the leader directly, but in a highly strategic role that at its core is focused on driving the leaders many and varying business initiatives forward quickly and efficiently, solving problems and removing roadblocks along the way. The Chief of Staff also often acts as a proxy for the leader, driving alignment across the leaders executive team and leading major cross-functional projects as needed for the leader. Could be cross-company, could be cross-organization, major initiatives. Now, before I get into the differences between EA and Chief of Staff, let's talk about how they're similar because both roles are key. I think the other day I talked about how on LinkedIn, the Chief of Staff, like let's say is the left hand and the EA is the right hand or vice versa. It's a strong partnership between the three, the business leader, the Chief of Staff and the EA. And often, the most important relationship is the Chief of Staff and EA because the business leader is sometimes really hard to find. So that relationship is really important. So how are these two roles very similar? Both roles, EA and Chief of Staff, exist to support a person versus their own scorecard or business category, like a COO, which I'll get into in a minute, or market it. Both roles, Chief of Staff and EA, are highly organized and planful in their work. Both roles can be seen as the glue that holds an organization or team together. Both roles have a major impact on the leadership team and the company. And both roles, as I mentioned, can be kind of the right hand or left hand to the business leader. It's total trifecta, partnership of three. Now, let's talk about kind of the differences here between EA and Chief of Staff. My definition of EA, and for all of the EAs on the call, I always say, you know your job a lot better than me, so forgive me if I'm not getting it exactly right, but this is where I've landed and I think it's pretty strong. A Senior Executive Assistant is a highly skilled problem solver, a strategic doer, and the logistical mastermind behind their executive's calendar, travel, and expenses while acting as the go-to support leader partner for tactical items across the executive's leadership team. So a Chief of Staff almost never has the core responsibilities of an EA, and I described those core responsibilities as calendar, inbox, travel, expenses, logistics. But often an EA will move into leading a few strategic projects or identifying problems and solutions to solve. So there can be some crossover, but the two roles fundamentally are very different because those core EA functions are truly performed by EA versus Chief of Staff. Now, when we're talking about definitions, the last example I'm going to give is between Chief of Staff and COO. I'm Maggie Olson, founder of NOVA Chief of Staff Certification, the first of its kind online course for aspiring and existing Chiefs of Staff. With curriculum taken directly from on-the-job responsibilities, NOVA's self-paced learning modules provides you with hands-on experience so you can feel competent and confident moving into a Chief of Staff-style role. It's the perfect next step for executive assistants. Head to leaderassistant.com/nova to learn more, grab the syllabus, and enroll today. A COO, for the business leaders on the call, a COO is actually like Chief Operating Officer. It can be a pretty debatable cc position for a few reasons. Operations exists in everything we do. Marketing, heavy operations. Product, heavy operations. Sales, heavy operations. When you say Chief Operations Officer, yes, they exist everywhere. They're usually awesome leaders, important and relevant to the company. But it can be a little tricky just generally to talk about the wide understood definition of exactly what a COO is. But we're often asked and there's often confusion around COO versus Chief of Staff. The Chief Operating Officer is different than Chief of Staff because a Chief of Staff exists to support a person and the Chief Operating Officer exists to support the organization. When we think about COO, they have their own organization, their own scorecard, their own problems to solve, almost their own kind of mini business, if you will, within the company, operational categories of business. If you think about a org chart and you have a business leader and then you have a line under them with all of their direct reports. The EA is off to the side reporting to the business leader. The Chief of Staff is off to the side reporting to the business leader. The COO is one of the people that owns a major function of the business. They have their own scorecard. So the key difference is that the Chief of Staff truly exists to catch all the initiatives from the business leader and doesn't have their own org. They don't have their own, you know, usually major category of business. If they do, it makes it a lot harder for them to have the strategic impact and gap filling and ability to execute quickly and jump on lots of things for the business leader if they have their own whole kind of organizational responsibility, org-wide responsibility. Now kind of pivoting a little bit here, as you know, proof of all of you being here, we are almost up to 400 now, this Chief of Staff role is growing in popularity. Chiefs of Staff, and I guess, you know, CEOs are telling their friends, hey, my Chief of Staff is making my life easier, you should think about getting one. The EA role is widely known as imperative. If you're a CEO, you should be focused on what I said earlier, vision, future growth, strategy, leadership, head up, looking forward. Those admin tasks are going to pull your head down, you're going to be in the operational, the day-to-day. Same with chief of staff work. Let's say you have incredible initiatives that you're wanting to go after. CEOs should, and when I say CEO, I mean business leader, principal, like all the terms for whoever that business leader is that the chief of staff reports to. That business leader should be in the vision space, should be in the idea space, and they should stay there. They should have lots of ideas all the time, and the chief of staff exists to catch those ideas, to prioritize, to drive them forward, to execute on some of them themselves, to bring the kind of follow up back to the leader. So the chief of staff role is growing in popularity because business leaders are talking to each other. They're feeling the impact of this strategic support. They've had the admin support for a while now. They need the strategic support so that they can stay in that looking ahead future vision space. Now, what's interesting about the chief of staff role, and I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this, is that it's just like not well understood, and it's not necessarily widely known either. So the chief of staff role exists everywhere and nowhere all at once. And what I mean by this is that you will find a chief of staff, and I've talked to chiefs of staff in every single industry that exists. I'd love to find an industry that doesn't have a chief of staff because they probably actually do. You take sports, you take media, higher education, for-profit, non-profit, startup, big business, small business, health care, I mean, food and beverage, like the government, of course, military, it goes on and on and on. And then you walk in to any of those places, like walk in to a business on the list that I just mentioned, and they may have never heard of the chief of staff role. So it's a bit of a conundrum. It's everywhere and nowhere all at once, but it's growing in popularity. Now, another thing that's interesting is that the chief of staff role exists under many different titles. So what's helpful is to realize that you're doing chief of staff work, to have resources and things like what we're doing today, to bring awareness to the work that you're doing and understand that the work you're doing is chief of staff work. But the other titles out there are things like business planning and business process and director of transformation and special assistant to the business leader. The list goes on and on. We just posted a link in our chat for a blog on our site that talks about this, but 20 plus different titles that chiefs of staff exist under. And the easiest way to identify chief of staff work, like let's say you work in a large company and you are in the C-suite, maybe you're a C-suite EA. The easiest way to identify a chief of staff, let's say in a different division, maybe not in the C-suite, like maybe for a director or a VP, would be to look at the person that is doing the special projects for that leader. Who's putting together the all hands meeting decks? Who's running the all hands? Who's delivering the work that your leader might be asking of that VP? Who's the one actually doing it behind the scenes, getting approval from the leader, sending it to you? Who are you interacting with? The person that is kind of that right hand to the business leader and their role mostly exists to take on things from that leader, the doer, the operational, the strategic, the execution, that's the chief of staff. Now, along with a million different titles, there's also many, many, many different leadership levels. There's different leadership levels of chiefs of staff, and there's different leadership levels who have chiefs of staff. So in this example I was just giving, directors have chiefs of staff. They might be under another title. VPs have chiefs of staff. C-suite have chiefs of staff. Entrepreneurs and startup founders have chiefs of staff. It doesn't mean they all have them. It doesn't mean they all know what one is, but you'll find them in all of those places. Okay, so, who would make a great chief of staff? This part's fun. As I share this list, I often think about the people that I've worked with in my career that fit into this profile. It's easy for me. People just pop into my head. Well, Mallory over here and Kate over here and Travis here. I'm assuming that it will also be easy for you to either identify yourself as this kind of profile who a great Chief of Staff person would be, and likely others that you work with too. Who would make a great Chief of Staff? You're fast, you're driven, you're curious, you're growth-minded, you have strong executive presence where you're getting there, you're achievement-focused, you have high emotional intelligence, you can build trust well. You love working on breadth versus depth. I like to call this expert generalist. You're really good at a lot of things and you like to do a lot of different things. You're a problem-solver, you're solution-oriented, you learn quickly, you ask great questions, you're collaborative, you're an influential leader in your own way. It doesn't mean you have to have been a people leader before. You want more responsibility and you love supporting senior leadership, learning a business from the top down. Take that in for a minute, think about, oh gosh, that totally resonates with me or whoever that might be in your life. But these characteristics, I have no doubt, make great Chiefs of Staff. Where do Chiefs of Staff come from? Do you need an MBA? Do you need a consulting background? Who's the perfect person from a job profile perspective to then be a Chief of Staff? Do you have to be a Chief of Staff before? These are all very great questions that most of the answers no. You do not need an MBA. You do not need to have a consulting background. You do not need to have been a Chief of Staff before. Now, of course, there are job descriptions out there, job postings that require these things. But that does not mean that you would not be a great Chief of Staff. And I have student meetings. What's so fun about this job is, I've been speaking on this topic and doing a lot of work on this world for a long time. And what's so fun now about this job and the growth and the Chief of Staff role is, I have kickoff calls with all of our new students at NOVA a couple of times a week. And on these calls, multiple times a week, I am hearing from senior executive assistants or people in other roles who are working with their leader and their leader is approving them moving into a Chief of Staff role. And that's either happening before they find NOVA's course and then the course is helping them hit the ground running or they're going through NOVA's course and they're building confidence and practice and hands on learning. And then they're having conversations with their leader about moving into a different role and they're being supported. So just know that it absolutely is happening, I think, two to three times a week. I'm hearing from students telling me this, which is amazing. And that's just people in my network. And I'm talking to CEOs a lot too, who are considering like, who is it, how do I move? Like, what is it? So an MBA. I loved my MBA program, but nothing I learned in my MBA program is how I learned how to be a chief of staff. Not at all. I learned confidence for sure. I learned that I could do hard things, like a mergers and acquisitions class. I received this incredible access to a hyper local network in Seattle, where I'm from. And I had an amazing opportunity out of my MBA to move into that executive development program I was talking about. So those are really, really good things. If those sound like things that make sense to you from a financial perspective and other reasons why you'd want to go get an MBA, absolutely do it. But is it relevant and necessary for the Chief of Staff role? I don't believe so.

Jeremy · 22:31

No.

Maggie · 22:33

OK, so a couple of questions here, and then I'm going to dive into some of the tactical things that you do every day as a Chief of Staff. Let's see, first, how do you get into like a Chief of Staff role? How do I move into a Chief of Staff role? I always tell people the easiest way to do that is that you're at your current company. And that's not like revolutionary advice. Most people trying to get a promotion, it's going to be easier at your current company. You have access to leaders. You have the ability to see all the jobs in front of you. You have existing relationships. You have time while you're still employed. So it's always easier in your current job. But like anything else, networking, conversations, talking about what you're good at, talking about how you solve problems is the way to do it. Start paying attention if you're not already on LinkedIn. Follow me. Follow Clara Ma. We're always posting any open roles that we see for chief of staff positions. If you're thinking about externally, what could that look like outside of your company? So I think real quick here, if you were a business leader and you're on this call and you're thinking, okay, cool, but do I need a chief of staff? I just still don't know. It's expensive and we can talk about salary for sure if you'd like. But do I need one? Here's when an entrepreneur, a business owner needs a chief of staff. It's when you are feeling so bogged down in the day-to-day operational aspects of your business. Your head's down, you're chasing follow-ups, you're just executing operations like constantly non-stop, and you have not been able to lift your head up to look forward to think strategically in a while. If you are not able to imagine a place in a few months at least, where you can go take a solo off-site and have some strategic planning time. If that just feels so far outside of your wheelhouse right now, you probably need a chief of staff. Now, you probably need an admin first, but if you already have one and you're still feeling like you're chasing all these operational tactical items, that is definitely when a business leader needs a chief of staff. In terms of how do I level up in the chief of staff role? How do I move into the chief of staff role? I think there's a lot of resources for you at novachiefofstaff.com. We've got a whole free resource library. If you're looking to build confidence and get hands-on practice and deeply understand how to do the role, Novach's course is a great option for you. If you're looking to start having conversations and having more impact in your job today, things like ensuring that you're having one-on-ones with everybody on your executive's leadership team is a good place to start asking important questions around their priorities and problems they're trying to solve and things that are hard for them right now. Starting to lift your vision to a more heads up strategic place, looking across the organization at what's going on in the business right now. If you're looking to level up in your current role and you're trying to add more impact in your job, let's say you're an executive EA, how can you make your boss's job easier? How can you get them more prepared? Is there a process that briefs them for every single meeting they walk into? Do they have a piece of paper that quickly tells them background and the relationship history and the sales history for a vendor meeting that they're going into? If that doesn't exist yet, maybe that's something that you can add impact in. Maybe you can help be their executive project manager and catch all of their wild and fun and crazy ideas and help them prioritize and figure out who's up and where things are going. Talk to your leader about your goals, even if you're not sure yet. Hey, I'm considering, I'm thinking about, I'm hearing about this chief of staff role. There are resources out there to help me. Would you support me going and getting some hands on practice because it will show up for you in your day job. Nova's course is all about things that probably sound very familiar to you, but with the chief of staff lens. So we've got executive project management, we've got creating briefs, strategic recommendations, throwing a complex off-site, ghost writing for your leader, throwing big events, presenting verbally and digitally. There's a lot of scenarios that are hands-on practice focus to give you the practice and confidence you need, if that's what you're looking for. I think what I will do here is go into, what are the things that a chief of staff does every day? What's fun about the chief of staff role is that it changes all the time. You're always doing something different. There's no core functions of the role. I mean, there are, but those can look very, very different depending on where you're a chief of staff. Unlike the purpose of the role, which is the same everywhere, which is to maximize your leader's time, to support your leader and maximize their time. The core functions of the chief of staff role, I'm going to say some buzzwords and then I'll dive into them. Business planning, rhythm of business, business process, executive project management and prioritization, employee culture, events, communications. I could go on, but those are some high-level bucketed things. Now, what do those mean? Let's take communications to start. We'll go backwards. Communications, you may have somebody at your company that writes comms for your leader, but the chief of staff is usually the last person to approve, or maybe the first person to draft before it gets to the business leader. Communications like a Juneteenth announcement to your company. Is anybody talking to your company about Juneteenth? Is anybody talking about a social event that happened, that your people want to hear from, hear from you from? The chief of staff should be very connected to employee culture, very connected to the culture of the business and your people, and be able to give really important, sometimes tough, and relevant feedback to the business leader for how they should show up. Often, communications is one way that a chief of staff really supports a business leader. Events. You may have an events team that you work with. Obviously, an EA is very involved in throwing events from room booking, and food, and invites, and all of it. But if you don't have a chief of staff, usually, it's the business leader that's overseeing it and has to be really involved. That's not ideal. Ideally, the chief of staff oversees an event from left to right, top down, in a project management style approach. So who's on rooms, who's on food, who's on agenda, who's on all of the things? And the chief of staff should at any time always have the most latest information if somebody were to ask, if the leadership team were to ask. It's ready to share, it's ready to provide on a template or something like that. The chief of staff has to be in the know about everything that's going on, and they have to make sure it goes off without a hitch. So they're overseeing major events and highly connected to them, even if they're not the one doing all of it. Now, we were talking about employee culture, employee communications, all of the employee sentiment. A chief of staff, as I mentioned, should be hyper connected to employee culture, so that they can give that feedback to the leader, how they're showing up. As you guys know, the higher a leader gets in leadership level, the less they hear the truth from their teams. A chief of staff should be able to be that truth teller, and from an employee culture perspective, maybe that looks like you are not feeling super connected to your employee base. So even though there's an HR function, you want to dive deeper into insights from surveys. You want to ask maybe a few additional questions on the survey. You want to bubble up information in a better, different or more actionable way to your leadership team. So the chief of staff might take on a huge projects, like the feedback surveys or like an employee newsletter, kick off and launch. Now, they're probably not writing the newsletter every single week. The more projects a chief of staff takes on that are repeating, the less they're going to be able to go and solve other problems in other places. So figure out the problem, help create a solution, help launch it, get it off the ground and then figure out who's the doer. They should probably be involved from the beginning and make sure that there's a process to continue all of that going on, so that the chief of staff can remain really, really broad. As we talk about, we talked a bit about employee or excuse me, executive prioritization. So that's like, if you're an executive on this call, you have a million ideas, where are they going? Are they just in your head? Who's following up on them? Who's managing them? Who's feeding you information back about the progress? Who's leading some of them? That should be the chief of staff. Removing roadblocks, refining process, building process, identifying sticky, clunky processes that exist today that really should be refined and prioritizing which ones do we tackle, which problems do we solve. And then I'll end talking about business planning. Rhythm of business is a term that is used often with business planning. Now, your rhythm of business is really, when is your leader meeting with everybody that he's meeting with? Not one-on-ones, but major business driving meetings, so operational meetings. When is the leader looking down at today, current operations, current product launch, employee statistics, those types of things? When is the leader looking back, retro, past performance, last year, last month? You learn a lot from looking back. It's important. And of course, when is the leader looking forward? When is the team doing long-term planning? Five-year, maybe 10-year, depending on the company you work for, one-year planning, next month, upcoming product launch. All of these meetings are referred to as the leader's rhythm of business. It's truly the operating rhythm that is moving the business forward ideally. The Chief of Staff is responsible for this rhythm of business. They should, and I like to talk about the first things the Chief of Staff should do. The first thing a Chief of Staff should do, and if you haven't done it yet and you're Chief of Staff on this call, that's okay, go do it now, is document your current state of your rhythm of business. When are all those meetings? We have some templates for this, actually. novachiefofstaff.com and our resource library. Our team will post the link here, but document current state. If we cannot see things clearly, because as we know, leadership's back offices, they're messy. There's a lot going on. They're changing all the time and that's okay. But we have to document current state to be able to see things clearly and then to be able to make strategic recommendations for how to move forward. Now that I'm seeing this, we actually don't have a time that we're talking about this really important product launch coming up. In two months, and we probably should have a bi-weekly meeting for this. You put a strategic recommendation together, you figure out who should be in the room, and often the Chief of Staff should be the person making sure that people show up prepared, that the meeting is facilitated well, and that all the follow-ups are captured, and not only captured, but they're being acted on, that the folks who are tagged as responsible for whatever action item, that you're then, as the Chief of Staff, following up with that person and saying, can I get an update there before the next meeting so that I can share, and then we can maybe send in advance where we're at on this action item. So that is Rhythm of Business. It's a huge function of the Chief of Staff role in most places, not all. And I think with that, what I will do now is pause and have a sip of water. I want everybody on the chat to think about if you have any questions, please to put them in the Q&A portion of this chat. And I'm going to go through them in here in a second. Okay, so can a program or project manager move into a Chief of Staff role easily and vice versa? There is an incredibly strong thread of project management through the Chief of Staff role. So that answer is definitely yes. I think it's about positioning your resume and positioning your articulation and your kind of talking points around the work that you do and how it would be applied well to the Chief of Staff role. But yes, there's a strong correlation for folks who are in program or project management right now thinking about the Chief of Staff role. I would try to identify like who are the leaders that you'd want to work for your current company. Do they have Chiefs of Staff? Where are gaps? Are there problems you can solve for them? Maybe there's little projects you can take on. I never recommend trying to do both roles at once, like current job plus Chief of Staff. You're not recognized for that usually. You're not rewarded. You're going to burn out. There's too many reasons not to do that. But maybe you have the bandwidth to take on a project and do it really well. Definitely be networking and asking executives that you potentially would want to work for, what that could look like for you. Good question. And let me, okay. Okay, so operations management, very similar answer. We just got a question around, what about operations management? I have a strong background in ops management. The Chief of Staff role is heavy in operations, process, efficiency, speed, execution. You can't do any of those things without strong operations. There's a lot of overlap between ops and Chief of Staff, for sure. Can you please tell us how a Chief of Staff is better for entrepreneurs? What are some key features in the Chief of Staff course that will help upcoming entrepreneurs? This is a fun question. At the end of the day, the easiest, quickest answer is that there's no better way to learn how to run a business than learning how to run a business from somebody at the top who's already doing it. The coolest thing about the Chief of Staff role, in my opinion, is getting to be shoulder to shoulder with an executive running a company. Whether they're in a small company or a big company or they're a business leader and not in a C-suite yet, that's okay. They're still running their own mini businesses for sure. There's just no better way to learn how to run a company than from somebody who's doing it. The Chief of Staff role is one of the only roles that exists that you are truly intentionally there to be next to this leader consistently, like all the time ideally. On top of that, I guess from the Chief of Staff course perspective, the course goes through how to support a leader in the best, most strategic and tactical and organized and project management ways to make that leader the best they can be. A future entrepreneur going through our course is going to figure out what kinds of things they need, what kinds of processes to run as a leader, who to look for in a chief of staff. They're going to get hands-on practice figuring out how to build these tools and support leaders. I would love to get in front of students more, students like business school students or undergraduate business school students and talk to them about future entrepreneurship and the chief of staff role because you can tell I'm just so passionate about it. There's just truly no better way to learn how to be an entrepreneur. Personally, I am a much better entrepreneur from my background as a chief of staff. You learn how to, you learn what to focus on. What's most important? What's not important? When to give a 10 second answer and when to talk for two minutes about something. You learn that you have to be breath focused versus depth focused. That you have to be able to dive in deep when you need to. You definitely have to be able to dive in deep, but most of the time, if you dive in deep, it's going to hinder your ability to be effective in the breath that you need. So hope that helps, Miss Anonymous Attendee. All right. Do you have a funding request letter for the certification that we can present our organizations? I'm happy to say the answer is yes. So if you are looking to enroll in Nova's course, you can head to our website in our resource library or actually at the bottom of the page too. I think there's just a link. We have a drafted letter to help you position the Nova Chief of Staff course as an important learning opportunity for you that your employer could fund. So, yep, head over to our site and you can find that there. Okay. So I already touched on why an MBA is not necessary to be a strong chief of staff. And I'm just going to reinforce this here by going back to that list that I was talking about. And let's see if I can pull that back up without screwing up our view here. Those characteristics, and I'm going to go through them really fast again, fast-driven, curious, growth-minded, executive presence, achievement-focused, high emotional intelligence, breadth-first-step, problem solvers, solution-oriented, graded a lot of things, learns quickly, asks great questions, collaborative, influential leader, wants more responsibility, loves supporting senior leadership. None of those things have any weight on whether there's an MBA. I know a ton of MBAs. I love my MBA friends. They're great. MBA is great. We talked about why earlier. I would choose every single day, I would choose somebody with these characteristics that I just shared over just somebody with an MBA, credentialed with an MBA. It doesn't mean that job postings aren't sometimes going to require it. They are. But there's plenty that are not, and it's happening widely, widely, it's happening that folks are moving into chief of staff roles without MBAs or consulting. More often than not, I would, I would assume. Okay. Yes, we will be sending a recording of this session. So everybody registered will get a recording of this session with links, with the discount code for the next two weeks, which is $250 off our NOVA course. We never, ever, ever discount, but we were really excited about having so many people and so much interest, 1200 people interested in this topic today. So we're doing like a little summer fun to week $250 off. So you'll get an email after that, after this with the video link and that information and a bunch of other resources. Okay. Let's keep going here. From a career growth perspective, is it best for an aspiring Chief of Staff to report directly to a C-suite or to the Chief of Staff? Okay. So there's different structures that exist. In a world where there's already a Chief of Staff, like let's say there's a CEO and there's a Chief of Staff, and there might be this Chief of Staff like I had at my previous company, had many direct reports, and then there might be another leader who has a Chief of Staff with no direct reports. Where should you work? Should you aim for the, working for somebody directly as a Chief of Staff? Should you be on a team of Chiefs of Staff? My opinion is that it doesn't necessarily matter, especially if this is your first Chief of Staff role. You will learn a ton reporting to the Chief of Staff. You will be their doer. They will be a little bit more focused on strategy and vision and future with that business leader, and they will be implementing new processes and building things and creating things, and you'll be right there a part of it. You will maybe not have that same relationship and communication directly with the C-suite leader or with the business leader, but you'll hear all of it, and you'll understand a lot about the priorities as somebody who reports to the Chief of Staff if you're on a Chief of Staff team. So there's no downside here. They're both great opportunities. And then as a next step, being a Chief of Staff that reports directly to the leader would be a really good next step in your career for sure. Can you share the definition of Chief of Staff again? Yes, I can. And I'm guessing you're not the only one that wants to hear that again. So I'm going to read it. A Chief of Staff is the business leader's strategic thought partner who's excellent at execution and allows the business leader to focus on what's most important, vision, strategy, growth and leadership. Just like an EA, the Chief of Staff supports the leader directly, but in a highly strategic role that at its core is focused on driving the leader's many and varying business initiatives forward quickly and efficiently solving problems and removing roadblocks along the way. The Chief of Staff also often acts as a proxy for the leader, driving alignment across the leadership team, the executive team, and the Chief of Staff often leads major cross-functional projects as needed. So often we find out about the Chief of Staff role before our leader does. And part of the job of somebody wanting to move into a Chief of Staff role is educating your leader. I don't know the best way to do this besides trying to have conversations with them, pointing them to resources, maybe sharing the NOVA with them and how we can help. We will. We do have a number of kind of flyers around like the competencies gained and like different things like that in the course. But yes, the Chief of Staff role is hard to explain. It's hard to define. It's kind of mysterious. Follow me on LinkedIn. I'm trying to demystify it as much as I can every day. I'm a business operations manager doing a Chief of Staff role. How can I justify the change in title or job description in my annual review to reflect my current responsibilities? This is so common. It's really common to have a title like business operations manager and to either have the aha of like, oh, my gosh, I'm actually doing a Chief of Staff role, or like you already knew you were doing the Chief of Staff role, and you're wanting the title and you're wanting it to sort of just be agreed upon and that your job is reflective of that. I believe that the most important thing here is that you now are aware that you're doing the role because now resources open, you may have a little bit more of a roadmap for what you should be doing. You might have some validation that you're doing the right thing as a Chief of Staff. Often, a company, we can't control a company's aptitude to use the term Chief of Staff or not. Often, they may not like the term Chief of Staff. It comes from the government and some people have an opinion about the term. I think some companies prefer it only to be used in the C-suite. Some companies just don't really understand it or know it, many don't. We can't control that, unfortunately. What I would try to do the most is kind of what you're asking here is how do you make sure that your job description and that you're aligned with your leader on your actual tasks? I think that's just a conversation with your leader talking about resources and awareness to the role. I'll take this one step further to your resume. If you feel genuine and confident that you are doing the Chief of Staff role and you feel comfortable saying on your resume, Chief of Staff style role or de facto Chief of Staff, and you can even ask your leader, are you okay with this? You are in charge of what goes on your resume. What are the five bullets? We have to pick those. Make sure that your job description is, if you're looking to move into a Chief of Staff role in the future, make sure that your job description bullets are tailored to the Chief of Staff work that you have done. Even if you're doing 20 different things, and a lot of them sound business operations-y because that's how they've been presented to you, if they're actually Chief of Staff type work, make sure that they say that, make sure that it's clear and review your resume for sure before going after a Chief of Staff role. Okay, so is the NOVA Chief of Staff program accredited? There is no accrediting body for Chiefs of Staff. To work through this, I worked with, gosh, eight or 10 experts in the field. You can go to our website. The course has been endorsed, organically, genuinely endorsed, no partnerships here, nothing like that, by a number of leaders in this field. Clara Ma and I, she runs Ask a Chief of Staff, a great membership community. We are partners through 2024 in terms of how we partner in, what we recommend to each other, so it's great to have her endorsement. Jeremy Burrows, Leader Assistant as well, several other folks in this space we have endorsements from. So we're working to figure out governing body or advisory committee, something like that for accreditation, but it just doesn't exist in the Chief of Staff space. So that is the answer there. Would love your thoughts on structural reporting into Chief of Staff for an EA. Most EAs report into this person who's the Chief of Staff, and there's a lot of discussion on whether the structure should stay in place. OK, sorry, that was a little hard to explain here, but the question is, what's the reporting structure for EA, Chief of Staff and business leader? I believe that most of the time, the best option is for the EA to report to the business leader. The EA is intimately connected to the business leader's calendar, and the calendar drives so much of the day to day that it kind of to me only makes sense that you are directly like leaders from a leadership perspective reporting into that business leader. It doesn't mean it's the only way, but that's how I've definitely seen it most successful. EAs can report into Chiefs of Staff. It can be a little bit tricky and a little bit sticky when it changes. So if a Chief of Staff comes in and then the EA moves from reporting to the business leader to the Chief of Staff, they're not going to love that. You guys know that's not ideal, but it can be done. So I talk about the EA and Chief of Staff relationship a lot. I think it's very, very, very important that you each really intimately understand each other's daily job functions, that you've sat down next to each other and spent a bit of time watching what each person does all day, especially the Chief of Staff, seeing how the EA runs in the executives world, and getting to know each other on a personal level from a Chief of Staff perspective, building buy-in and making sure you're collaborative before you implement and execute. Chiefs of Staff are like go-getters. They're driven achieving. They want to make an impact fast. I'm always telling new Chiefs of Staff to just take a deep breath, slow down, and the first three months or so to truly just focus on listening, building relationships and getting to know your people and what the problems are before you jump in and try to solve a bunch of problems. What would you title a role at an early startup poised for growth that's 33% Chief of Staff, 33% EA, and 34% General Operations Unknown? Oh, this is a hard one. I almost always don't agree that a Chief of Staff and an EA should be in the same role. The only time I think it might be okay is if it's a very early startup and it's short term. A Chief of Staff cannot really be a Chief of Staff if they're doing the core functions of the EA work because it's a lot of work. It doesn't leave a lot of room to do the functions of a Chief of Staff and it doesn't set you up from a positioning perspective and a credibility perspective to then be that influential strategic leader of a Chief of Staff. I think as long as it's short term, a blended role, I would call something probably more like business operations. I'm not a titling expert. I would go to our blog and the titles blog and check out the 2025 plus titles to see what you would pick there. All right, let's do a couple more and then we'll jump. As a Chief of Staff, if you have an EA to utilize for calendar, but your executive still wants you to be involved in how their time is used, what's the best way to utilize the EA but ensure that the exec's time is being utilized appropriately? I think what this person is asking here is, how do you still have the oversight of everything when the EA is actually truly responsible for the calendar? My suggestion, what's worked well in the past for myself and folks I've talked to, is the EA is absolutely the driver and owner of that calendar. It'll just get messy if anybody else is in there. But the Chief of Staff should have visibility settings, visibility permission. And that's because the Chief of Staff role is to see things really, really clearly to be able to understand what's going on in broad strokes of that term across all categories for their leader. And then to be able to make suggestions as to how the leader's time is spent better. So the Chief of Staff can still be a part of the calendaring scope, but it's not the day to day. It's not the every little thing oversight. It might be insights across a month. So a good way that you could approach this is if your leader wants you to have some oversight into the calendar, it could be, okay, I'm going to deep dive the last three months. I'm going to do a little time analysis. Where are you spending your time? Business meetings, strategic time, creativity and flow, travel. And we're going to put something together so that we have visibility. You'll share that with you. And then I'm going to make some suggestions for how to get you more time in the areas that are most important to you. Maybe that's strategic or creative time. So that's how I would kind of approach the calendar conversation. Okay. Well, I think this is it, you guys. We will go through the questions and see if there's anything else we can add in the follow-up email. But thank you so much for being here. Please reach out to hello at novachiefofstaff.com if you have any personal questions around if Nova's course is right for you. We'd love to have you. I'll meet with each student a few times through the course. And we're getting amazing feedback and hope that you consider joining Nova.

Speaker 2 · 54:54

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