Hi {{first_name|there}},

Last week, Judy Abad told us the path to leverage runs straight through the messiest work, write the PRD, own the projects nobody wants, but are of critical importance to the business. David Kirby, former Chief of Staff at Ford and author of The Ultimate Chief of Staff Guide, cuts the other way this week: if you are great at doing, you get rewarded with more doing, and that is the trap.

They are closer than they look. Judy is talking about choosing the work that builds you, David about doing everything that lands on your desk. The shift is not from doing to not doing, it is from indiscriminate doing to deliberate leverage.

Here's the uncomfortable math at the heart of this week's episode. If you're really good at doing, you will be rewarded with more doing. And more doing is exactly what keeps you out of the room where the role actually pays off.

David Kirby calls this the doer trap, and his framework for climbing out of it is altitude. Effective Chiefs of Staff operate across three: the 100,000-foot view, the 50,000-foot view, and the one-foot view, often in the same day. The doer lives at one foot. The orchestrator moves between all three on purpose. Kirby's analogy is an Amazon shipping manager, not a bottleneck but a proactive gatekeeper, sequencing deliveries so the system runs faster, not slower. A bottleneck slows things down. A gatekeeper slows one thing down so ten others speed up.

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"The force multiplier, its nature, its definition has to be more. So you have one input. It's you and it's your contributions, but the output has to be significantly larger than what you can accomplish alone."

David Kirby

As we progressed through the conversation, it became more clear why people stay stuck. Kirby reframes career stalls as a leverage problem. If you're crushing it as a doer, your executive is structurally disincentivized to move you up. You have to create the leverage that makes the next altitude possible.

Underneath all of it sits trust, which Kirby treats as an output of three inputs: competence, integrity, and benevolence. Benevolence is the one most Chiefs of Staff misread. It is not keeping the peace. It can be, in his words, "aggressively benevolent" pushback. The confidant, not the yes-man. Trust is the foundation that lets you operate at higher altitudes at all.

Which leaves the question Kirby ends on. What does it actually look like to build something that runs smoothly even when you're not there?

Listen to the episode

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