The soft power of the modern chief of staff
Behind every consequential CEO of 2026 is an operator you've never heard of.
Priya Ravindran
Jun 28 · 6 min read
The title used to belong to the White House and a handful of investment banks. Now it belongs to nearly every technology company big enough to have a floor plan. LinkedIn's own hiring data, cited in a 2023 Harvard Business Review piece, showed the number of chiefs of staff at S&P 500 companies growing more than threefold over a decade. The pandemic sped it up. When executive teams stopped sitting near each other, someone had to become the router.
The role is easy to misread. It is not an executive assistant with a nicer title. A functional chief of staff owns the rhythm of the company — the weekly business review, the board pack, the follow-up on the decision the CEO made verbally on a Tuesday and had forgotten by Thursday. Done well, it is the difference between an executive team that ships things and one that mostly meets about them.
The people who take these jobs tend to look the same on paper. Mid-thirties. One prior operating role at a startup or a scale-up. One prior stint in consulting or banking. A temperament that treats being unnamed in the press release as a feature, not a slight. At OpenAI, Stripe, Anthropic and Ramp, the chiefs of staff are the ones deciding which of a founder's twenty top priorities become the three the company actually works on this quarter.
The career risk is real. The role has no budget of its own, no big team to manage, and a shelf life measured in single-digit years. The people who use it well treat it as a fellowship — eighteen to thirty months of unusual access to how a company actually gets run, followed by a general-manager job or a founding role they could not have earned in a straight line. The ones who overstay it become permanent second chairs.
For boards, the quiet emergence of the role is a governance signal. A CEO who has hired a strong chief of staff is a CEO who has admitted, without saying so out loud, that the job has outgrown a single calendar. The ones who resist the hire tend to be the ones the board ends up replacing.