The chief of staff title carries an intuitive sense of seniority and importance, which is part of why families want it and why candidates pursue it. What it lacks is a standard job description. A chief of staff in one household may be primarily managing the principal’s personal operations across multiple properties with minimal professional crossover. In another household, the same title may involve daily coordination between the principal’s business interests, their family life, a large household staff, and a calendar so complex that it requires its own dedicated management infrastructure. Both people are chiefs of staff. What they do all day looks quite different.
Understanding what the role actually involves in practice, at its best and most functional, helps families calibrate whether they need it and helps candidates assess whether a specific position matches their professional background and ambitions.
The Integration Function
The most important thing a chief of staff does is something that sounds simple and is genuinely complex: holding the whole picture. In a household where the principal has a large staff, multiple properties, significant professional obligations, complex personal logistics, and a family life that intersects with all of the above, the information that affects operations is distributed across many different domains. The estate manager knows what is happening with the properties. The personal assistant knows the calendar. The house manager knows the household. The principal’s professional team knows the business side. Nobody except the chief of staff is responsible for knowing all of it and identifying where the pieces affect each other.
That integration function is what creates the role’s value. The chief of staff who sees that the principals’ planned travel conflicts with a major property maintenance project the estate manager has scheduled, and catches it before it becomes a problem, is doing something none of the individual domain managers would catch on their own. The chief of staff who coordinates between the principals’ professional commitments and the household’s entertaining calendar so that neither one compromises the other is performing integration that produces better outcomes than uncoordinated parallel management would.
What a Typical Week Actually Contains
The specific content of a chief of staff’s week is as variable as the households she serves, but certain categories appear consistently. She is reviewing and managing the principals’ calendar across personal and professional domains, identifying conflicts and coordinating resolutions before they arrive as problems. She is communicating with and directing the household staff team, providing context and coordination that the individual managers need to do their jobs well. She is handling high-judgment correspondence and communications that the principal delegates to her rather than the routine items a personal assistant manages.
She is likely managing at least one project with a longer arc than the week’s immediate demands: a property renovation, a significant event, a staffing change, an operational improvement that requires sustained attention across weeks or months. And she is doing ongoing relationship management with the external professionals and service providers whose work touches the principal’s life, ensuring those relationships are productive and that the principal’s interests are represented in them.
Why No Two Look Alike
The reason the chief of staff role looks different in every household is that it is defined by what the principal delegates, which is itself defined by what the principal finds most demanding and where senior, trusted support creates the most value. A principal whose primary challenge is time creates a different chief of staff role than one whose primary challenge is managing complexity across multiple domains. A principal who travels extensively creates different demands than one whose life is primarily based in a single location.
This variability is part of what makes the role interesting to strong candidates and part of what makes defining it challenging for families. At Seaside Staffing Company, the chief of staff search starts with a detailed conversation about what the principal’s life actually involves and where the operational gaps are, rather than with a title and a template job description, because the quality of that definition is what makes the placement work.
