What a Chief of Staff Does on a Project

Before you set up an AI for any of this, look at the job it will copy. A chief of staff is the person who makes a senior leader (the principal) as effective as possible. McKinsey studied the role through forums with more than 200 chiefs of staff over five years, and covered it again in a 2024 podcast with senior partner Andrew Goodman. Its finding is that the scope can be purely administrative, highly strategic or anything between, depending on the organization and the relationship.

On a project, you are the principal. This course follows a sample project with one question: should we bring a second supplier into the northern region before the contract renews? In one week, the incumbent revises its lead times and they clash with the quality team's figures. The operations director states a preference that cuts across the agreed scope. A qualification test slips, and an action from yesterday's call has no owner.

None of that is hard analysis. It is flow: information, actions, meetings and deadlines that a good chief of staff keeps moving. That's the work this course hands to an AI.

McKinsey's account gives a chief of staff a set of standing duties: work that repeats every week, whatever the project.

• Information and paper flow. Prepares and filters what reaches the principal, including inputs to key decisions.
• Air traffic control. Andrew Goodman's phrase for managing the flow of the principal's actions and activities, so nothing collides and nothing gets dropped.
• Meeting prep and the record. Makes sure the principal comes to meetings prepared, and keeps a record of what was said and agreed.
• Peripheral vision. Acts as the principal's eyes and ears so there are no surprises. Senior people tend to bring the boss good news, so this includes reporting what is happening on the front line.
• Calendar against the business cycle. Aligns time with the cycles of planning meetings, executive committees and boards, and sets aside time, weekly if not daily, to scan ahead.
• Follow-through and handover. Tracks what was agreed. At a transition, writes a handover plan that documents key past decisions.

McKinsey also describes the chief of staff as an adviser and sounding board who gives candid feedback. Flip the cards to test yourself on each duty.

Every one of these duties already exists in your week, under a project name.

• Status across workstreams is information flow: many updates filtered into one clear picture.
• Actions from calls are air traffic control: each action needs an owner, a date and a follow-up.
• Steering committee prep is meeting prep. A steering committee is the group of senior stakeholders who make the project's key decisions. Its pre-read is the short pack they read beforehand so they arrive ready to decide.
• RAID upkeep is peripheral vision. A RAID log tracks Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Decisions.
• Deliverable deadlines are the calendar against the business cycle, worked back from fixed dates such as the contract renewal.
• The weekly status report is follow-through: what was agreed, what moved and what slipped.

In the sample project, Tuesday's lead-time clash belongs in the RAID log as an issue before it surprises anyone at the steering committee. Thursday's action with no owner is an air traffic control problem. Match each duty to its project version.

A chief of staff ranks everything against a short list of priorities. One chief of staff in McKinsey's forum kept the principal to five or six, split into two kinds:

• Outward-facing: clients, sponsors and stakeholders outside your team.
• Inward-facing: your team, your methods and the health of the project itself.

For the sample project, a project lead's list might be:

Outward-facing

1. A supplier recommendation the operations director can act on without a follow-up call.
2. A steering committee that arrives ready to decide.
3. No surprises for the client on lead times or quality.

Inward-facing 4. Every action has a named owner and a date. 5. The RAID log is current before each milestone.

Anything that serves none of these goes to the bottom. A short list matters even more once an AI is ranking your inbox. If you give it twelve priorities, everything looks urgent.

Another chief of staff in McKinsey's forum kept a three-column list:

• Now: needs you this week.
• Soon: matters, but not this week.
• Never: came up but will not be done. You record it so it is set aside on purpose, not forgotten, and nobody wonders later whether you dropped it.

For the sample project:

• Now: get the incumbent's revised lead times and the quality team's figures into one table with sources, and find an owner for the action from yesterday's call.
• Soon: draft the steering committee pre-read and confirm the new qualification test date.
• Never: a suggestion to also benchmark a third supplier. It is out of scope for this decision. Note the date and the reason.

Your turn. Open your email, calendar and notes from this week. Write down every open item for one project, using the steps in the visual. Keep the list. You'll need it when you write the AI's standing instructions.

McKinsey is just as clear about the role's limits. A good chief of staff:

• Does not decide for the principal. McKinsey advises agreeing scope and decision rights explicitly at the start, then revisiting them as the role develops.
• Does not blur whose voice it is. People respond to a chief of staff because of halo authority, power borrowed from the boss. So the chief of staff must be clear about when they speak for themselves and when they speak for the principal.
• Does not play politics. It sits within the leadership team but stays independent of it.
• Does not isolate the principal. Guarding the principal's time is part of the job, but the leader's office shouldn't become an island.
• Does not make itself the story. As one chief of staff put it, the job is to make the principal look good.

In the sample project, emailing the incumbent to say "we'll keep you on the premium line" after hearing the director's preference would break the first two rules. These limits become the AI's rules in the next lesson: it prepares, and you decide and send.