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Moving the Chief of Staff from War Rooms to Board Rooms
MOVING THE CHIEF OF STAFF FROM WAR ROOMS TO BOARD ROOMS
By Dominic Gabriel-Dean
The Chief of Staff is quickly becoming a strategic part of the CEO’s office in businesses globally. We speak with Geraldine Yip, Chief of Staff of HSBC Singapore, and De’Angello Harris, President of the Chief of Staff Society and Partner at Think & Grow to understand how this role is being implemented across industries.
The former Private Secretary to Winston Churchill revealed the former Prime Minister’s high regard for his Chief of Staff Lord Hastings Ismay:
“Churchill owed more, and admitted that he owed more (to Ismay) than to anybody else, military or civilian, in the whole of the war.”
Hastings Ismay acted as Churchill’s confidante and negotiated the decisions and relationships of his Prime Minister and the Service Chiefs. After the war, Ismay remained close friends with Churchill and even reviewed and edited the latter’s memoirs. Ismay’s refined talent for decision-making, coordination and compromise led him to become the first Secretary General of NATO.
The impact of Lord Ismay on Churchill’s leadership echoes that of the Chiefs of Staff of our present day. Balancing strategic and tactical priorities in the executive rooms of the public and private sector, the Chief of Staff (COS) allows senior executives the space to function seamlessly. While the role has its roots in the military and governments, it has grown to become more mainstream in the private sector in recent years. A 2023 study shows that there were around 4,700 Chiefs of Staff hired by U.S. businesses. Closer to home, Lizzie Goodburn of member company Clifford Chance became its U.K. Regional Chief Operating Officer in late 2022 after serving as Chief of Staff for close to 4 years.
To understand more about the Chief of Staff role and how organisations can tap into its outsized power that is increasingly recognised by businesses, I spoke with Geraldine Yip, Chief of Staff at HSBC Singapore, and De’Angello Harris, President of the Chief of Staff Society and Partner at Think and Grow.
Q: What is the Chief of Staff and what role does it perform within an organisation?
De’Angello:
The Chief of Staff is the right-hand person to the most important leader within an organisation. They act as a sounding board, a confidante, and a second head in thinking and making strategic business and people decisions. Essentially, they are the better professional halves of CEOs, Presidents and senior leaders in firms.
The definition of the Chief of Staff is a big point of debate within the COS Society because the role is dependent on many nuances. The COS is truly the snowflake of job descriptions. No two COS have the same job description. Each principal and industry will define the role differently. The season the business is in and its priorities will influence the role of the COS. In fact, the COS’s role may look very different from their first day on the job as opposed to a few years later.
Geraldine:
Even though the term Chief of Staff has only recently become more common at HSBC, there are similar roles across the organisation that already do the type of work that a Chief of Staff typically performs. For example, we have business management roles which support different businesses, taking on responsibilities and enabling their leaders in the same way that a typical COS would.
The position I took on was previously called Head of Strategy and Planning, but it was decided that the role should be renamed to better reflect the breadth of the role, beyond strategic planning. The organisation wanted the COS role to help oversee strategy execution for the Singapore business and take on responsibilities to support the safe growth of the business across its different verticals, ranging from wealth, insurance, asset management, commercial, corporate and investment banking. I would say that broadly, my role enables strategy planning and execution, business development, governance and government relations across the different organisational verticals.
As COS, part of my work includes supporting the CEO to prioritise and manage, act as his sounding board and get critical assignments over the line. My role aspires to do two things well: first, to act as an enabler, navigating the complexities that the internal and external business environment may present, to get things done. Secondly, to also add value to these very interactions, as well as my colleagues. This aspect is especially important for large organisations.
Q: How does the Chief of Staff support a senior leader in an organisation?
De’Angello:
The number one power of the Chief of Staff is to act as a catalyst in the decision-making process of leaders. They implement or accelerate the speed of decision-making and implementation.
Another major way they support this, is by freeing up time by as much as 50 per cent. A Chief of Staff typically lessens one-on-one meetings by prioritising and taking on some of these meetings themselves. They can also take on more complex work on behalf of their senior leader, for example, the Chief of Staff may work on a business proposal for their CEO.
Protecting the senior leader’s time is also a key power of the Chief of Staff. The CEO’s time is split between running the company, partnerships, vendor and relationship management, media interviews and many other commitments. For example, the Chief of Staff of one of the largest European banks tells me that their CEO can only do 144 external meetings a year. That is around three a week. His CEO does not want to just meet with billionaires. He wants to meet innovative leaders across different arenas, and visionaries who are poised to become future customers of the bank.
Therefore, his CEO must be very militant in each of the three meetings he takes every single week. At the end of the year, the Chief of Staff audits these meetings with his CEO. The COS then gets feedback on how many meetings were amazing, and how many were a waste of time, and they try to figure out why and how to do better.
Q: Geraldine, what does your day-to-day as Chief of Staff for HSBC Singapore look like?
Geraldine:
The truth is that no two days are really alike.
There are certain aspects of the job that have a regular schedule. Governance would be a good example of this, where ExCo, Business Reviews, Finance and Risk forums and meetings are all scheduled in advance.
The rest of my job is often determined by importance or immediacy. I typically try to decide what I am going to focus on at the start of my day, but of course, urgent tasks will come up and have to be attended to. Depending on the type of issue, we have alerts and triggers set in place, so we know when and who to escalate to, as well as who to communicate to, such as other business heads or regional colleagues.
We recently had a board visit that I oversaw, for example. My tasks for the day around that period tended to be focused on the successful execution of that visit.
Determining my priorities requires empathy and alignment to the CEO’s priorities. I try to ask myself, “If I was CEO, what would I be trying to achieve?” My role adds the most value and impact when I am able to help the CEO simplify and focus on the most important objectives and engagements. This is best exemplified through ensuring that he is making the best use of his time by meeting the right people, but also equipping him with the right tools and information for his meetings.
Client meetings are the most obvious ones to prioritise – as clients always come first! External stakeholder and internal meetings tend to be more nuanced and focused on long-term relationship building, requiring more context to understand the value and ultimate benefit. Either way, it is all about making sure that everyone’s time is well-spent.
Q: How can the Chief of Staff set up an effective office for their leader?
De’Angello:
Think and Grow has been working with funded start-ups to build out their principal leader’s office and hire their Chief of Staff. The team in the principal office is key because they are closest to the CEO.
The first hires are typically the Head of Operations, Head of Strategy and Head of Finance. This is essentially the core policy office for most established businesses, and we fattened it up from there.
A good Chief of Staff can play a strategic part in the hiring and interview process. The Chief of Staff knows exactly what gaps exist in the business, how much time the CEO is spending on his tasks, and what responsibilities need to be delegated to someone else.
They also know what the company culture is like, what resonates well with their executive, and what personality fits the organisation. For example, a supply chain business may need a DevOps Director with a can-do attitude to move the needle at a challenging phase.
Geraldine:
The Chief of Staff needs to help build and drive engagement, communication and transparency on behalf of the CEO’s office.
We need to work with and enable our colleagues to get things done and sometimes persuading them that certain requests for work are for the ‘greater good’ and will eventually make their jobs better! Consistent communication and engagement are very important to demonstrating transparency about the work you are doing, which is key to building trust between employees and the CEO’s office.
Q: What are the most important characteristics of a Chief of Staff?
De’Angello:
I would look out for three key qualities.
Trustworthiness—the principal need to be able to trust this person with professional and sometimes personal matters.
The Chief of Staff will act as the CEO’s sounding board. Ideally, the CEO should be getting an unfiltered version of their views. So, the trustworthiness index has to be huge.
Resourcefulness—The Chief of Staff is an army of one role. This person needs to be able to get a lot done. In many cases, the Chief of Staff do not have subordinates that directly report to them, in that sense, they do not have direct power. The power they have is a power proxy to the most important person in the room. The Chief of Staff needs to be able to use that power tactfully to move people and critical tasks along.
Communications—Being an excellent communicator makes up for other skills that the Chief of Staff may be lacking in. Being able to manage stakeholders, knowing how to use their words, how to receive communication and being able to speak confidently across all platforms and mediums are all key skills to have.
Geraldine:
De’Angello covered three important qualities. I think having a problem-solving mentality and the ability to anticipate is also really important. A part of being able to anticipate is having a proactive mindset. Being able to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and figure out where they are coming from. The Chief of Staff likely has limited direct authority, but potentially a lot of influence. The role requires somebody who can figure out how to influence other people, and get support from them, all without much formal authority.
Q: How will the Chief of Staff role evolve in the next five years?
De’Angello:
This is an interesting one because the Chief of Staff is one of those positions that is quite transient. I think the Chief of Staff is going to be one of the last roles to depart the CEO’s office because it needs to be so humanised. We are a generation away from confiding our deepest and darkest thoughts to artificial intelligence.
We all want to see a human making business decisions. We want a real person capable of empathy to make decisions that have real-world consequences. For that reason, the Chief of Staff role is going to evolve and become more critical as other C-suite functions around the CEO’s office get replaced or leveraged with some version of AI.
The Chief of Staff will probably need to use emerging technology to enable themselves and other stakeholders to be more effective in their roles.
This role will always exist in some form. I don’t know if it is always going to be called the Chief of Staff. But having someone with the ability to deal with the unexpected is definitely going to be continual in the CEO’s office, especially in a world like ours.
This role will always exist in some form. I don’t know if it is always going to be called the Chief of Staff. But having someone with the ability to deal with the unexpected is definitely going to be continual in the CEO’s office, especially in a world like ours.
Geraldine:
Change is a constant at most organisations and there are all kinds of changes that a Chief of Staff faces. A distinction that I try to make is that I am not just the Chief of Staff to the CEO, but that I am also the Chief of Staff for HSBC in Singapore. My role is to enable and support all of HSBC’s businesses from an enterprise perspective. Having said that, there always will be varying definitions of the role, mostly because the role is somewhat defined by the person in it, not to mention the primary individual that the role supports.
Like De’Angello says, the role may not always be called Chief of Staff, but naturally, some parts of the role will remain key, like the advisory/confidant/ partnership aspect. Organisations, especially at a senior level, will always require that human touch and hiring a Chief of Staff with different work experiences in their career has its advantages. Experienced Chiefs of Staff have probably seen and been through more, giving them a greater ability to offer different perspectives and deal with something that is completely unexpected - a very necessary skill set in this day and age!
Founded in 1865, HSBC offers a comprehensive range of banking and financial services, including retail banking and wealth management; commercial, investment and private banking; insurance; forfaiting and trustee services; securities and capital markets services. With assets of US$2,975bn (at 30 June 2024), the HSBC Group is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations. In Singapore, HSBC opened its first branch in 1877 and is a full qualifying bank serving the international needs of individual, corporate and institutional clients.
Visit www.hsbc.com.sg for more information.
Since its 2015 launch, Think & Grow has expanded globally, aiding fast-growth tech companies in attracting talent and scaling into new markets. We blend in-house expertise, market knowledge, and a global network to build scalable, innovative workplace cultures and implement tailored talent and growth strategies.
Visit www.thinkandgrowinc.com for more information.
