Happy Wednesday.
This week is about how the Chief of Staff role actually gets scoped. On our blog, we’re sharing the interview playbook for landing your next seat, and why the job description undersells the work at every level.
And on the Chief of Staff Podcast, Singapore based Chief of Staff, BreeAnne Yek, shares her view on managing yourself as the product. Plus don’t miss the latest CoS events happening this fall.
Scroll on!
📝 Landing your next CoS role: the interview playbook that actually works
Most Chief of Staff postings reduce the job to a list of tasks. Run the staff meeting. Keep projects on track. Manage the inbox. Every line is true, and every line understates what it takes to do it well. Candidates absorb the list and interview to it, and the offer goes to someone who, on paper, looked less qualified.
The real work, even early in the arc, is running the operating cadence, keeping teams aligned, and steering the projects that would quietly stall without you. The interview is where you show which part of that arc you can credibly hold. This piece breaks down what principals are actually testing for, and how to interview for the scope and judgment you already own.
🎧 You Are the Product: Managing Yourself as a Chief of Staff
BreeAnne Yek joined Singapore’s Attorney-General’s office to roll out an enterprise system three years in the making, and watched it add work instead of removing it. The people who built it understood the workflow but not how humans actually behave. That lesson stuck, and then she turned it on herself.
THE CHIEF OF STAFF PODCAST
You Are the Product: Managing Yourself as a Chief of Staff
You are the product. So you have to manage your own product here.
If the job is designing around how humans actually behave, the human you have the most access to is you. Bree takes the standard tensions of the role and points them inward. The frustration of persuading people never fully goes away, so the thing to build is your own capacity to sit inside it. Assume your principal means well and treat the gap as a skills issue, then run the same test on yourself, where skill means bandwidth and emotional headroom, not just competence.
Her approach to influence follows from the same place. She rarely tells people what she knows. She reflects the question back, and lets them arrive at it themselves.
🚀 Chief of Staff Launchpad kicks off September 15
Six weeks of certification built for people heading into their first Chief of Staff seat, or their first time doing it deliberately. It runs September 15 through October 21, and it is the most direct way to build the operating muscle this week’s blog is about.
Virtual cohort. Free for PRO members. Limited spots.
📅 Upcoming events
📍 This week
|
|
Next two weeks
|
|
|
|
Coming up
|
|
That’s it for this week. If you’re heading into an interview soon, read the blog before you walk in, and give Bree’s episode an honest listen on the way there.
Scott
