The Chief of Staff Guide to Delivering KPIs

The most common question I get asked is what do you do as Chief of Staff. The second most common question is what are your KPIs as Chief of Staff.

This is especially so because I graduated in computer science from UC Berkeley, but joined a news-and-media company instead of a tech one. Naturally, then, such questions arise. I’ll try to answer them here, though, at a 30,000 feet level. As Chief of Staff to Vice Chairman at one of India’s premier media conglomerates, I’m fortunate to contribute to high-impact projects, lead some strategic initiatives, and in essence, help my mentor scale up.

But even as I answer these questions, a part of me feels they are flawed; they assume that the CoS has quantifiable, measurable KPIs, like an engineering manager. A CoS does not. Rather, a CoS's KPIs are meant to be qualitative and are often immeasurable, as they vary from industry, company, context. A CoS's KPIs may not be strictly valued but they are valuable, or else the role wouldn't exist in the first place. Tanya Reilly put it best when she called this phenomenon glue work: “the less glamorous – and often less-promotable – work that needs to happen to make a team successful.”

So, the problem at hand is subtle: The CoS is supposed to make everything work. If it all works, great, and you move on to the next project; if it doesn’t, it’s your fault, at least at some level. Not that you’ll be directly held responsible for it, but you’ll feel that some glue work could have helped the project succeed. Now, this is an interesting dynamic. A CoS is like the orchestra conductor who brings out the best in each musician; when the orchestra succeeds, musicians succeed, but when it doesn’t, the conductor fails. Through the prism of this intriguing dynamic, we will explore the CoS’s role + KPIs, and answer these two common questions: What do you do as CoS + What are your KPIs.

But First, Who Is The CoS?

A CoS is a senior advisor who coordinates among stakeholders, helps oversee high-impact + critical projects, and serves as a liaison between the company's senior management and other executives, all the while ensuring that the company's goals are met. In short, the CoS is responsible for work above and below the 'call of duty'. In such a case, glue work matters much more than non-glue, quantifiable work. Here, sales targets fade when compared to resolving a high-impact regulatory challenge, or negotiating agreements, or divesting assets.

As CoS, you need to think about how to align the organization's KPIs with its overall goals, and how to ensure that progress is made toward achieving those goals.

The Role Of KPIs

The CoS's KPIs, then, naturally become qualitative, and for lack of a more accurate description, "fluff". Yet, this 'fluff' has immense depth beneath it, once you understand the context in which a CoS operates, and the high-leverage that the CoS's work has. For instance, communicating well across different teams and aligning them to work together on a complex problem ends up as a more non-trivial problem than, say, meeting X thousand dollars in sales targets for Q1. The former sounds lackluster; the latter fancy, but in terms of impact, the two differ. Now, of course, this is not to say that one piece of work is definitively more impactful than the other... In another context, the CoS’s role would be less valuable than the salesperson’s role. So, context matters. This example is to demonstrate that quantitative and qualitative KPIs have different degrees of impact, and that one is not necessarily superior than the other. It all depends on context. Now, as a corollary, let’s understand the KPIs of a CoS.

Another example of a CoS's nontrivial KPIs is establishing priorities. At senior levels, when you are constantly context-switching and dealing with a flurry of dynamically-evolving situations, you need to be able to prioritize. A CoS helps senior management do just that. In fact, here's a hypothesis: The CoS enters with no KPIs as such, but over time, builds his/her own KPIs whilst also creating the same for others.‍

At senior levels, when you are constantly context-switching and dealing with a flurry of dynamically-evolving situations, you need to be able to prioritize. A CoS helps senior management do just that.‍

In that sense, a CoS gets to deal with ambiguity, manage esoteric knowledge, handle subtle situations, and crystallize the abstractness into concrete next-steps. For instance, how you translate the problem of "employee motivation in a company in flux" to meaningful next-steps like "compensation rewards, post-flux bonus, retention schemes, elevated titles, and ESOP proposals" is an important element of the CoS's skill-set.

I would go a step further to say that as you proceed in role seniority, you need to deal with more qualitative KPIs than quantitative ones. For working on the right thing becomes more important than working hard but on the wrong thing.

The CoS translates strategy into principles into tactics into actions, spanning the wide expanse of turning chaos into order, ambiguity into specificity.

In essence, the role of a Chief of Staff is to provide support to senior leadership, co-lead special projects and initiatives, build relationships with key stakeholders, provide insights, facilitate communication, and monitor risk. Above all, the role of a CoS is to identify what matters, because helping the key executive work on the right problem is more important than making them work on the wrong problem. The CoS’s role contains both qualitative and quantitative measures, all of which together help the organization move in the right direction.

As CoS, I’ve been fortunate to be exposed to a variety of business problems in complex and challenging environments. Of all things to remember for being an effective CoS, though, perhaps the most useful one I’ve learned is how to deal with ambiguity. When problems are loosely defined, end-goals are amorphous, and their impact immeasurable, how you operate will reflect your future success. Understanding that the CoS’s KPIs are, by definition, unique, will help you be at ease and effective in your dynamically-evolving role.