What is a Chief of Staff?

By Bastiaan Dekker · 2026-10-13 · Perspective

From Churchill’s war room to today’s boardrooms, a Chief of Staff gives leaders more time, sharper decisions and strategy that lands. What the role is and what it means for leaders in Europe.

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History

Older than the modern corporation

London, 1940. While German bombers pound the city, Churchill and his war cabinet work from deep beneath Whitehall. Churchill is the face of the resistance, and behind him stands General Hastings Ismay, his Chief of Staff. Churchill produced a constant stream of ideas, strategy and tactics. Ismay turned that stream into action and held together the fractious relationship between Churchill and his military chiefs, and later he built the same bridge with the Americans. Churchill's private secretary put it plainly: Churchill owed more to Ismay than to anyone else, military or civilian, in the whole war. (1)

Ismay was far from the first. Napoleon relied on a chief of staff too. The role has deep roots in the military and politics. (2) It became widely known through the White House, where President Eisenhower appointed the first official chief of staff in the 1950s, and every U.S. president since has had one. By the end of the century, the role had found its way into the private sector.

Role in business life

From the West Wing to the boardroom

The role was first adopted mainly by tech companies and large organizations, where the Chief of Staff acts as a strategic partner and operator for founders and C-suite executives. Many prominent leaders work with one. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei goes furthest, with an unconventional setup in which his Chief of Staff is his only direct report, to keep maximum focus. (3)

The role is increasingly popular in start-ups and scale-ups as well. (4) Nowadays, leaders of modern organizations, regardless of size, are facing unprecedented challenges and complexity. The Chief of Staff role helps leaders navigate this complexity and drive the business forward. (5) BCG points to the COVID-19 pandemic as a tipping point where the role exploded in popularity. The context in which CEOs operate is far less stable and more dynamic than ever, with more stakeholders and much higher expectations placed on them. (6)

While the role has gained popularity, it's still often misunderstood. That's because its shape heavily depends on the organization, the leader and the context. At its core, it's a strategic generalist role that drives the leader's priorities while guarding their time and focus.

Three profound benefits

The thing I hear most often from the executives I've worked with as Chief of Staff is a sense of calm and headspace once we start working together. They feel back in control, knowing that when they leave the room, it will be taken care of. It's what Ismay gave Churchill. That feeling is hard to put a number on, while the three benefits behind it can be measured quite precisely.

1. Time back to lead

> I can buy anything I want, but I can't buy time., Warren Buffett

Time is the scarcest resource we have, for every human being. I believe that having a chief of staff, as a leader, is one of the closest things to buying time. Research from Harvard Business Review shows that on average 36% of CEO time is lost to firefighting, instead of being spent on strategy and growth. (7) That's a full month, every quarter, of potential time freed up.

2. Faster & better decisions

One of the most important tasks of leadership is making decisions. And yet so much valuable time and potential is lost here. McKinsey found that leaders spend on average 37% of their time on decisions, of which 58% is wasted. (8) In a leadership team of five, that's one FTE of leadership lost every week. A Chief of Staff can play an instrumental role in fixing and owning the decision flow: preparing, filtering, and ensuring follow-through.

3. From plan to result

My personal mission as a chief of staff is to close the gap between strategy and execution. It's crucial work: there are many plans, but few really see the light of day. McKinsey research shows that even top companies lose more than 30% of strategic value between their strategy's full potential and what is actually delivered. (9) Having a single person overseeing and steering all strategic initiatives across disciplines can make a huge difference.

In the summary below, you can see all three benefits side by side.

Untapped potential in Europe

Leaders can greatly benefit from a right-hand person who translates their vision and strategy into execution: someone who keeps a calm head, sees the bigger picture amid chaos, and challenges the leader when needed. Despite these benefits, the role is still relatively unknown in Europe, as opposed to the US, where it's far more established. Most leaders and founders I talk to sense the value of the role, but taking it on full-time can feel like too big a step. That's why I founded Brighthand: to make the impact of a Chief of Staff accessible to more leaders on a fractional basis, and help their strategy actually land.