‘We’re the invisible ones’: the chiefs of staff running the world’s biggest companies

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“You could be the perfect person, but you still might fail,” adds Smyth. “The CEO has to set you up correctly. It’s tricky — [chiefs of staff] have to speak truth to power, lead without authority and all without clear mandates.”

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Many in the position say they act as a filter, ensuring only the right issues land on the chief executive’s desk, and work behind the scenes to keep operations on course. They are often a confidant to more junior employees and a sparring partner for the boss.

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“The one thing that is common to all of their roles is that they are all in service to their chief executive or executive and help the organisation to work better,” says Andrew Goodman at consultancy McKinsey, who advises people in the role. To do well, a chief of staff has to be a high performer, a lateral thinker and have the confidence and ambition to get stuff done, while also having a low profile. They can be trusted confidants but visibility is rare and their ideas often go uncredited. One chief of staff told Goodman: “You have to be willing to mop the floor.”

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British tech stalwart Brent Hoberman’s recent LinkedIn callout for a new chief of staff said the individual should be “entrepreneurial, curious and fast-learning”, but crucially, “low ego.”

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A handful of long-serving figures have come to embody the quiet influence of the position. At JPMorgan Chase, chief executive Jamie Dimon’s chief of staff, Judy Miller, has been a behind-the-scenes constant since taking on the role in 2007. She travels with Dimon and is a sounding board for those who want his time or involvement.

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Some outlive the churn of chief executives, including Andre van den Berg at miner Anglo American.

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Ann Hiatt was chief of staff to former Google Inc. chief Eric Schmidt for nearly a decade, having previously worked as an aide to Amazon.com Inc.‘s Jeff Bezos in the early 2000s. She says each used her differently but in both roles she was a “heat shield…you absorb the stress of the day-to-day so the chief executive can focus on the longer term and the moonshot ideas”.

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Hiatt says the job can be gruelling, which is why some individuals only do it for a short time. “Your time is not your own. I never silenced my phone, which was always within arms reach. There were calls at 3am that required my attention right then. In tech in particular, chief executives can be frustrated by people who can’t keep up with them.”

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Chief executives including at Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Salesforce have relied on chiefs of staff to manage their priorities. European companies such as Unilever and HSBC have used the role to knit together strategies across regions and divisions. At BP, the position is seen as an accelerator for a top executive role.

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Goodman says those who take on the role fall typically into three camps. There are individuals in the early stages of their career who handle preparatory work, such as for meetings, to support the chief executive and help them to be effective. The second group often run their own substantive functions or special projects alongside supporting the chief executive. The third type are those who are later in their careers and who act more as high-level advisers after building up years of goodwill at the company. These individuals will often be “the eyes and ears” for a chief executive.

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But with AI agents set to take on more tasks, there is a question of whether many of the jobs undertaken by chiefs of staff will be eliminated. People in the position say that while mundane tasks relating to planning, scheduling or manual reporting may be replaced, there is a more human side of their job that requires emotional intelligence — from communicating strategy to building relationships and engaging in the diplomacy needed at the highest level to get key decisions over the line.

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Overall, Hiatt says it is a “very weird job” that requires treading carefully. Relationships between chiefs of staff and the executives they report to can fray very quickly if trust is broken or the assistant becomes self-oriented.

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“Your name is not in anything, you don’t get credit for anything,” she says. “You need the smartest, most credible people in the world but also ones who won’t mind being behind the scenes. We’re the invisible ones.”

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© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd

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