What is the career path of a chief of staff?
By being a master generalist and individual contributor, many feel that the Chief of staff role can be limiting in terms of career growth options. But that is far from the truth. From what I have seen, there are 3 paths that people take post the Chief of Staff role..
a) Become a Founder / CEO
The CoS role is often a grooming ground for future Founders and CEOs. What better way to learn the ropes and experience the ups and downs of starting up than being right by someone who is going through it all! By being a CoS for an early or growth stage startup, you can get a front row seat to all that it takes to bring an idea to life. And all that experience will come in handy when you want to startup yourself.
b) Continue being a CoS
After interacting with 20+ Chief of Staffs over the past few weeks, I can tell you that no two CoS roles are the same! The responsibilities and challenges vary based on the type of leader, the type of company and the stage of company too. A CoS to a CEO of an early stage company will have a very different schedule / work compared to the CoS to the VP of Marketing at a Fortune 500 company. So, a viable career option is to continue being a CoS at different companies and gain bigger mandates to work on.
c) Move into BizOps/strategy
This is one of the most popular options that I have seen in terms of career path. Many people use CoS as a rotational/short term role to then dive into Strategy or Operations roles. By being a CoS, they gain a broad view of the business and understand its facets. This can come in handy when actually creating a Strategy for the business.
