Is Chief of Staff a Dead-End Role? What 3,000 Careers Show

0:09Welcome to the Cheapest Staff Podcast. I'm Scott Amenta, founder of the Cheapest Staff Network. Today's a little bit different. I've got my co-founder, Tom Guthrie, here, and we're going to go through the 2026 Cheapest Staff Pathways Report. Tom, welcome. Thanks. Excited to be here. So this report talks about or answers the question that we hear more than any other. Where do I go from here? We tracked the careers of nearly 3 ,000 chiefs of staff to find out. Tom, you've read the headlines. Is it a dead-end role? Obviously not. Yeah, I think it never has been. But I think the path has always been a little bit ambiguous, right?

0:46And I think one of the things we've always said is it is what you make of it. I mean, you have to do a lot of work to make it as impactful as it can be. But I think what we've seen over the last few years and what's obvious in this report is it's starting to shape up into a real pipeline of talent to really interesting roles. Yeah, that's everything from moving into other senior operating positions, COO, VP of operations, heads of strategy, general managers. But also, I think, and we'll get into this, more chiefs of staff moving into founder roles as well and starting a company themselves, which is one of the more exciting points that I'm happy to talk about.

1:21So before we get into all of that, why did we do this? Well, I think this goes back to even when Tom and I were chiefs of staff in kind of that very early generation of chiefs of staff in the private sector. This is, we're going to date ourselves here, Tom, but all the way back in 2016, 2017, and, you know, just generally not understanding kind of where chiefs of staff were going to go as this part of, after this part of their career and whether the chief of staff role was going to be perceived as a long-term position, right? One that we sit in and grow with, or if it was something that was very much a launchpad and a stepping stone into other things.

2:00And so the first version of this report was back in 2023. We talked to and interviewed and evaluated around 400 Chief of Staff alumni coming out of the Chief of Staff Network community. We looked at their current titles. We looked at the titles that they had before they were Chiefs of Staff and what they did after. and the question really that came back then was, is it a dead-end role? I think we, I won't say definitively, but at least started to answer that question of, no, actually, these people are going on to do really incredible things. We didn't have enough data at the time. And so we find ourselves here a couple of years later, we've now looked at close to 3 ,000 chiefs of staff.

2:43We've looked at their dated career histories, almost 2 ,000 moves directly out of the role, plus chiefs of staff that are staying in the position for multiple iterations, sometimes moving companies as well. We've also looked at nearly 2 ,000 job positions with chief of staff in the title, doing some work around scoping. What are the expectations of this role? What are the hiring managers really looking for in this new generation of chiefs of staff? And of course, what are they willing to pay? So why do data career histories matter so much? Well, we can see the actual next move, right? And where people were a few years later.

3:22And so this gives us a really clear kind of storyline of what chiefs of staff are stepping into after that chief of staff position. Why does this come up so much, right? It's not like we hear salespeople or marketing people asking all the time, hey, is this a dead-end job? the chief of staff role, you know, it's very in demand. It has been for a long time. It's an interesting role. Why is this one of the first instinctive questions that people have about the role? Yeah. Why, why does the role feel like a risk quote unquote, for some folks that are thinking about adding this to the resume? I think the first part that you hit on right at the outset of this conversation is like role ambiguity feels like a challenge that needs to be surpassed.

4:07And that is both the internal understanding of the role, right? What is the chief of staff doing alongside their principal CEO or another functional leader versus the external understanding? And I think there's still maybe some broad misconceptions, both within the US and also globally, of how strategic is this role really? Is this an executive assistant or even a personal assistant just just called something else. What is that person really doing that is driving kind of real impact? And I think that is really the next part, right? Is communicating that impact and the accomplishments as a chief of staff can be really difficult.

4:48You know, when you're having to be forced to write down five main bullets of what you did as a chief of staff, you know, two or three years into that tenure on your resume, it can be really tough to communicate that impact when, you know, a lot of those soft skills, a lot of the leverage that you provide to your principal may not be, you know, the final metric at the end of those OKRs, you know, at the end of the year. And so, you know, we're obviously encouraging more and more chiefs of staff to own real outcomes, right, to think of themselves as builders within their organization. But, you know, I think these are the types of questions that come up as the almost insurmountable things that every chief the staff needs to grapple with.

5:31Yeah. I think fundamentally it is a bit more of an entrepreneurial role, right? And that's because you're, you'll be working with somebody who definitionally has to be more entrepreneurial, whether that's a founder or a senior exec, they're not given a task until to execute on things. They are in a seat and said, make this company, make this organization more successful. And by proxy, you're the first derivative of that. So you're tasked with the same thing. And that ambiguity that you mentioned can be intimidating to people. It can make people who are typically highly structured and are used to following a path and used to succeeding and getting gold stars and getting A's and acing their SATs and all this stuff uncomfortable because It's like, okay, what's the test at the end of this?

6:23Or what's the metric that I moved? And like you said, there isn't always one. You have to create those for yourself as a backwards looking thing often, or you just have to make sure that the organization is so obviously successful that your association with it is success in itself. I think that's right. There's also this idea that, especially in the private sector for a role that is still pretty new, right? in the grand scheme of other positions driving organizations forward, that there just hasn't been a lot for even the best chiefs of staff out there to really emulate, right? And those narratives, those career stories provide examples for people to model for themselves and provide examples as they're talking to their principal about getting that raise or sitting in the, you know, really becoming a C-suite leader as a chief of staff to follow as examples.

7:16So as we've seen more of those, I think it's important that that common understanding grows. We're growing this role together. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things we've really been focused on at Chief of Staff Network is demystifying some of this stuff, putting real metrics and stories behind it. That's obviously what this report's about. So what are some of the specific findings here that you thought were particularly interesting? Okay. So I think most important that everyone needs to find out first, which is the good news, 53 % of chiefs of staff that we surveyed leave more senior than they arrived.

7:49That doesn't mean that they're all leaving more senior, right? There's about 20 % that kind of feel like a step down. Now, that may be just a horizontal move. It may be just something that is not as senior by title, but maybe has more responsibilities in terms of P &L ownership or managing a team, right? Things that are not kind of commonly placed on a chief of staff remit. So I wouldn't look at That 20 % step down as a true step down usually involves some kind of broader scope. One in five are holding a VP or C-suite role within the next three years, which I think is really interesting, especially because, you know, particularly in startup, the kind of growth stage ecosystem, a lot of chiefs of staff that we encounter are not very far along in their careers, right?

8:36They may be five plus years into their career. And so that means that this truly can be a launchpad into some real leadership positions after that chief of staff tenure. The other thing that I think kind of jumps out is the jump to VP or C-suite usually comes one step later, meaning not the very next move, but right after that. So the next job you're saying isn't the big one. how should people think about what they're optimizing for immediately post chief of staff role knowing that it could be you know two years later where you really see the benefits accruing you become that exact that you're striving to be i mean i think the most interesting stories and if you've listened to this podcast before there's plenty of them are chiefs of staff that take on projects bigger than the remit of just the chief of staff and owning those outcomes and you know taking over what ends up sometimes being like a small team, a part of the revenue generation, you know, some new business line, those projects typically turn into that next role.

9:47And, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that they jump into that VP or C-suite position, but it does mean scope and ownership over a really critical part of the business that doesn't come, you know, a chief of staff running kind of the principles priorities the changing dynamic of like what you own as a chief of staff is sometimes too quick and when you're given the opportunity and obviously that opportunity needs to align with your own interests but when you're given the opportunity to really own something fully um that is i think the most natural progression for chiefs of staff that are not going to stay chiefs of staff i remember a mentor of mine um talked about how he navigated his career and it was kind of a constant spinning in and spinning out of the core and of the corporate structure of the business.

10:36And he had been in a bunch of big companies and you know, you do your tour of duty in a department. Maybe it's carrying a bag as a salesperson, maybe it's like owning a specific product area or something. And then you go into the corporate function to get a bird's eye view of where the most interesting opportunities are. And so you get executive level visibility and all this stuff. And then you get to spin out again to an initiative that you found interesting or where you think the heat in the business is at a couple steps higher than that. And then you spin it again and out again and in and out again.

11:11And it's that mix that can be really valuable. It's hard to really ascend to the top of a functional role without the visibility and relationships that you build as part of that chief of staff or core level role. But equally, you're never going to get a shot at leading a function as a CMO or a COO or something, unless you have some credibility in driving specific results there and not just making the organization more effective. And it's an interesting finding. You got to think a couple steps ahead. You can't just be thinking short term and think that you deserve to get a C-suite role immediately because you've been in those meetings.

11:51That's right. And I think this applies from the CEO side as well, who's hiring this chief of staff, right? The question is, now I've hired this person, should I be expecting them to leave? Like, how do I have that conversation about what they want to get out of this position and how they grow with the rest of the organization? You know, I think the most interesting finding here, and we'll get into the pathways in a moment, but one finding to call out is like 30 % of the chief of staff in our sample, and it's a pretty large sample, had been multiple chiefs of staff at different organizations. And that trend is only continuing.

12:27And I think what's fascinating is chiefs of staff are not just hitting that 18-month mark and then moving on quickly to something else. They are either staying for longer, three, four plus years, and they're growing as chiefs of staff, as leaders in the role, or they are moving from one chief of staff seat to another chief of staff seat. And what that usually is followed with is larger company, bigger scope, bigger remit, you know, sometimes a multi-time founder or CEO. And that totally changes the dynamic of the position that they were previously in. I would look at that as a step up as well.

13:08Absolutely. Yeah. I think about one of our chapter leaders who went from a more typical role to a chief of staff role within a large financial institution and then spun out to a chief of staff role at a smaller company, but one that was growing quickly and it was a more senior chief of staff role working directly for the CEO. And so comps stepped up meaningfully too, right? And on a title level, that's equivalent. From an organizational level, it's maybe a step down because it's smaller, you know, but from a responsibility level, compensation, et cetera, that's a meaningful step up. And so there are, you know, the title data here is obviously useful, but it's just one part of the picture that's, and it's hard to capture the full thing.

13:56Yeah. And capturing, capturing nuances, uh, within chief of staff titles can be really difficult. And so we, we've done our best to marry, you know, industry organization size, and headcount back to those chief of staff roles so that we can glean whether or not, was this chief of staff to chief of staff transition, a meaningful step change as you just described. And I think for the most part, yes. Yeah. And I mean, I think one thing that I would recommend as you look at this is not to, and this is true with any statistic, is don't view yourself as the average person or as part of the statistic.

14:34You have to think of your own career think of this as like some storytelling that you can do, right? It's here are people that have, some of whom have taken a path that you might want to emulate, some of whom will not have taken a path you want to emulate, but you're forging your own path and you can't exactly pattern match any person's path versus yours. How do you take this data and use it to get you to where you want to go, right? Either in terms of expanding your possibility set, or when you're up for a role, looking at some other examples and saying, okay, they made a similar jump. What do I need to show in order to prove that I can make a similar jump?

15:16Yeah. And since we're talking about this pathway, I'll round off a couple of facts. 83 % take the next chief of staff seat at a new company. And often that's a bigger one. So within that 30 % of people that are moving from one chief of staff role to the next, 83 % are moving to a bigger company. And so we can assume, yeah, as you said, bigger responsibilities, probably more compensation. And I think that the market is obviously paying for that. One other interesting kind of side note is, you know, titles like VP, director, or head title, chief of staff positions, you kind of see these combo titles, often have a medium of 230K in terms of salary versus closer to$174,$180K for a plain title.

16:00And so where they're trying to designate seniority, they're in association with a broad stroke sheep of staff role. I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, but it is a good indicator of where the market is willing to pay. And title is a weird thing, right? It can be important to have a title for internal credibility. Certainly it can be important for external credibility. But if you're optimizing for title, you're not optimizing for the right thing at the end of the day. This is, again, an ambiguous role, but it is what you create out of it that matters. And I don't know any founders or execs that wouldn't be extremely happy if a chief of staff took a few liberties and came back and said, Hey, I went and found us X million or more revenue, or I know how we can really improve our competitive positioning in this market.

16:53Or that thing that took up 20 % of your day, I figured out a way to automate it. There's no reason not to go and do more than what your title or your current set of responsibilities encompasses. Which is the beauty of this role, right? That those responsibilities can be re-scoped and changed on a quarterly basis, if not sooner. From the CEO's perspective. When you hire a chief of staff, should you be thinking about their exit from day one as well? Should you expect them to leave? Are there roles that you should be grooming them to be prepared for over time? How would you think about that, Scott?

17:34My advice to CEOs hiring for this role is to have that conversation early, even in the interview process. I think it's important to understand those candidates' motivational factors for why they want to be a chief of staff in the first place, what they expect to get out of the role. I think that disconnect can often lead to a lot of strain in that principal-chief of staff relationship. And so it's important that your principal cares about what happens to you next, whether that's an internal transition within the organization, whether that's them supporting you in an external transition, if you're looking for a new role down the line.

18:10And this role can be shaped by being very reactive to the problems that come up within the principal's remit or just the organization generally. But the reality is the best chief of staff roles are where the chief of staff can be proactive about the work that they're doing on behalf of that principal. And so proactivity only happens when the chief of staff has their own goal in mind for what matters to them as well. And so, you know, I think early and often is the right recipe here for having those jobs. Yeah, I agree. I think I've certainly seen an uptick in job descriptions and open roles where the principal has been very explicit about like what this, what the chief of staff role can grow into or not.

18:57Right. And I think it's very humane for them to say, Hey, this is a two-year position. You are not going to be at the company after two years, but I'm going to help you find whatever you want to do next after it. Or, Hey, if in 12 months, my goal is for this to grow into a COO role. The only other thing I'd add is you can go into the role with an idea of what you want to do with it, but then the rubber hits the road and you're like, wow, now that I see what being a founder is like, I want nothing to do with that. right? And I've heard that several times. People go in saying, I'm doing this because I want to apprentice under a founder so I can be a founder myself.

19:34And they're like, wow, I really don't want that anymore now that I've seen how the sausage is made. But I've discovered that I really like product. Great. That's a good outcome. And you don't have to remain fixed on that point in the horizon if that's no longer the destination you want to steer towards. Yeah. And you asked if CEOs should be mindful of, are they grooming this chief of staff for particular position afterwards? We talked about one of those pathways, which is chief of staff to chief of staff role. There's six others that we go into in more depth in the report, and I'll name them quickly here.

20:10But I think these are the ones generally that we see chiefs of staff moving into and the ones that CEOs should be mindful of like, all right, where's the energy best spent in terms of what this person grows into beyond chief of staff? So ops and strategy, unsurprisingly, that's 30 plus percent of the audience are moving into other ops and strategy roles. Broad functional roles, that might be general manager, it might be leading a sales team, people ops, this is pretty broad, another 29%. So unsurprisingly, chiefs of staff, many consider themselves generalists. They're usually coming from a background before they were truly doing everything.

20:53So I've seen chiefs of staff go into product management. I've seen them lead sales teams. I've seen them run people ops teams. So 30 % there, not surprising. Another chief of staff role, 16 plus percent. founder role, 7%. So that's interesting. And that's grown a lot since we did this report even three or four years ago. Consulting, 5%. GM, 4%. And investing, joining a VC or another investor arm, 2%. It's small, but I think it's worth talking about. So we talked about chief of staff to chief of staff. Let's talk about operations because that's the big one. That role is typically one from the inside.

21:36So two and three new VPs and heads of ops get there at the company where they worksheet the staff already. So a lot of those moves are internal. I think an interesting example of this is Brian Silberman, a person I love pointing to as someone to emulate. He's an awesome example here. We also previously recorded an episode with him, which I'll link to in the comments. And that episode, frankly, was like a masterclass and how to grow the scope of your role through improved leadership, ownership, over real projects and outcomes. You can grow as a senior chief of staff, but more likely you'll end up going down the operations path.

22:14And in Brian's case, he ended up a COO. And even more interestingly, three years later, after kind of playing that role, he's now CEO. And so that is, I think, an incredible story that's worth looking at in more depth. Yeah, we haven't seen that very frequently, but I think there's no reason we can't see it more frequently. And I think it's good for CEOs to be planning in some way for their chief of staff to be taking over that ops function, right? Especially if that headline title doesn't exist already. So more common in startups, growth stage organizations where they're adding headcount and chief of staff usually plays a role in not just setting the culture, but also doing a lot of the hiring.

22:59When I was chief of staff, I sat in a lot of interviews as we went from like 10 people to 50 people to 100 to 200. And I don't think that's uncommon at all. And so it makes sense as you're building those relationships that you may take over some part of that company as well. If you're a good CEO, you're thinking about succession planning. Even if you have no intention of leaving, sometimes, especially if you have no intention of leaving. And who else knows the business from the perspective that you do, it's going to be chief of staff, a COO. That doesn't make them the obvious right person to take over in every case, but certainly in some cases, it is and it will be.

23:41And you've seen this at some of the larger organizations as well. I think Amazon AWS is a good example of this. So that's one way to get to the top spot is to earn your way to it like Brian's chief of staff to COO to CEO. But obviously the other way to become top dog is to go and start your own thing. And you were mentioning that we've seen a big uptick in that. Break that down for us a little bit more. Yeah. So if we go back in time here to 2020, approximately 2 % of moves chief of staff to the very next thing was starting a company on their own. Which is higher than the baseline, but not. It's higher than the baseline for most positions for sure.

24:24Uh, but lower than I would have liked. We flash forward now to 2025, that's closer to 10%. And, you know, the earliest career route is about eight years experience. So we're talking about people, you know, not, not terribly far along in their career, but probably had this in mind from the outset of their chief of staff experience, right? I'm going to do this chief of staff role. I'm going to learn what it takes to run, um, you know, a real leadership team to grow an organization, regardless of the size, and take all of those how-tos and how-not-tos and apply that to starting my own company. So 97 % are leaving to do it almost immediately.

25:02Very few are founding in-house as entrepreneurs. It's mostly external. That obviously applies to both of us, right? And so you're a founder. What did you take away from watching a CEO up close? how did that change whether and how you decided to take the lead? Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, my thesis for chief of staff roles, even when I was a chief of staff was, you know, how do I get as close to proximity of, you know, an executive team and visibility over like really how the decisions are made that are driving the strategy and execution across the whole business. And I looked at my chief of staff role very much as a road to entrepreneurship.

25:45And I don't think that that played out, at least the way that I expected. I think I was a little bit of an outlier in that regard of like, okay, chief of staff has a path to starting a business. I've heard investors say COS are maybe too pragmatic. They're not risk-taking enough to be great founders. I think that the barriers to starting companies has come way down. And, uh, you know, especially on like the technical side, you don't necessarily need what you need is like strong pragmatism, sound business models, good operations and lean teams and chiefs of staff, like make amazing founders from that perspective.

26:24And so I think especially as like AI is taking over a lot of engineering style work, chiefs of staff can get a lot further as founders today than they could five or six years ago. And that was my biggest challenge at the time as well. I learned a lot about how to build an organization. It didn't mean that I had the technical skills to go start a tech company the next day. I think tying into this is there's been an uptick in the number of fractional chief of staff, chiefs of staff, or chiefs of staff consulting companies that we've seen. And I find that really interesting because on the one hand is like, yeah, this is obvious.

27:01If you've got that skill set, but you want some more flexibility or you don't want to work for a single company, great. On the other hand, you're taking a lot of the risk of being a founder. You have to go sell your own services, collect on that payment, run all the admin, execute on the product, all of that yourself, but without too much upside, without outsized upside, without really a great way to scale. And so to some extent, I think it's a little bit of a failure of imagination of these folks, where I hope that they come to realize like, hey, I'm seeing a distinct problem here that I can solve with something that's more productized or more specific or in a way that can provide more upside, frankly, than just selling my time by the hour of the project.

27:54Which again, like that's wonderful and perfect for some people. But if you're going to take the leap to starting something and you're going to take that risk, some portion of people should want some more upside from that as well. I think that's right. And I think there's like, there's a really awesome opportunity for chiefs of staff to learn an industry or a problem deeply, right? In working with, again, an executive team at whatever organization that is unlike just running a marketing team or a sales process or head of people ops, the breadth of that visibility and the decision-making that needs to go into what the strategy is to approach that problem appropriately is, I think, the best opportunity for any future entrepreneur or founder that is trying to address real problems.

28:47And from that perspective, that's why I think this is such an interesting stepping stone from chief of staff to founder. And so much of what you should be doing now as a chief of staff is figuring out how to productize and automate the parts of the job that you don't have to have your hands on directly all the time. And so if you take that approach to the fractional or consulting work as well, then that I think will lead you down a path to building an organization, building a company or a product that can end up being something that you don't have to be the one delivering every single thing every single day.

29:25Yeah. And I think that's probably where we're also seeing some chiefs of staff going down the investor route as well. Right. because they are building unique insights about a particular job market or industry. And they're now applying that from an investment lens across this kind of subset of problems that they know. I think one of the things in this report that we saw, and we're seeing this frankly in job descriptions too, is that multi-time chiefs of staff are becoming more calm. Why are we seeing that start to come out? I think that a portion of the chiefs of staff out there just really liked the work.

30:01I think it's almost as simple as that. I had a number of conversations at Chief of Staff Connect in New York where that was very much the case. Just, you know, people really like supporting a principle, kind of being number two, second in command, and recognizing that, you know, it's not leadership without authority. like these roles carry real weight and they can drive real initiatives forward and they can actually have real impact. And, you know, as the definitions around this role become tighter, the rest of the world is starting to recognize that as well. And so like, that feels good to have kind of that external rays of sunshine, if you will, you know, beaming onto the role.

30:40Like we see more chiefs of staff being hired globally and that's making the role, you know, more commonplace. Sure. But like that also feels good as a chief of staff because you're now less alone than you were before as one of the few chiefs of staff in this industry or in this geography or in this market. And I think they're also seeing that there are real ways to level up as a chief of staff as leaders, as true C-suite executives. And a lot of that comes not necessarily at the current organization, but sometimes at the next organization, but that's okay. It's actually, in a lot of cases, less risky for a founder or a CEO hiring the first chief of staff to hire someone that's already done the role because they come in with a perspective and an understanding of what makes this position work versus someone that is, you know, doing it from scratch with a CEO that's also doing it from scratch.

31:33And so this generation of chiefs of staff, like it's great to see them doing it again and again and again. Okay. I know I could talk about this all day. I know we both could. And let's give folks a few surprising facts and then how you use this report. Yeah. So a couple of things that jumped out to me that I thought were interesting. One is like staying put beats leaving. So 61 % of people step up when they stay versus 48 % when they leave. And that's against the usual advice of like, you should jump companies every couple of years. It's better to stay put longer in these roles. Two is like tenure matters, right?

32:13So just kind of following that same train of thought. Two to three years is kind of the sweet spot where 57 % are stepping up versus 38 % who leave inside a year. So again, like stay put, do the role for longer. Don't feel like you need to go in 18 months. There is no time constraint here of, you know, like you will, you know, flatline or there won't be any growth after that two-year mark. That is not the case. Chiefs of staff are finding ways to grow their scope, to increase their leadership capacity. And a lot of that comes from trust and relationships and your principal opening up the floor more for you to actually have real impact.

32:54Very rarely does it happen within a year. It's hard to get real things accomplished in 12 months. The last one here, which is interesting for anyone looking for their first chief of staff role, is the consulting myth, let's call it. 27 % of job postings to ask for consulting experience. The reality is only 7 % of the chiefs of staff that we see are actually coming from consulting backgrounds. And so, yes, it's important. I think, you know, more from a mindset and like a first principles approach to solving problems, right? Like having a consulting background, that is the training, right? Like right at a college, in those organizations, it comes with a certain pedigree and a way of doing things that I think is unquestionably a good thing, it doesn't mean that it isn't a mandatory thing, part of your resume to go get a chief of staff role today.

33:46Operations is the real on-ramp. So doing things around strategy and ops tend to be better on-ramps for getting your first chief of staff role. I've definitely seen that. When we talk to principals about what they want, many of them start out with a consultant would be interesting, but almost all of them say, I want somebody with operating experience. I want a former chief of staff. I want somebody who's been at a startup before if they're a startup chief, a CEO. The consulting thing can be nice, right? It can be a good baseline, but it's not going to do the job. And I think there are other skill sets that matter more here.

34:22I'll link another episode in the bottom here, a conversation that we had with Rahul and Lauren about what makes a great chief of staff and what are the soft skills that you really need to have in your repertoire are in that interview process, but more importantly, in the role itself. And yeah, I think consulting is an indicator of having kind of those skills, but it's not the end all be all. Yeah, different ways to prove it. Okay. Give us some quick takeaways on what we should do with this report. So for anyone in a chief of staff role, give it more time. Give it at least two to three years. Don't feel like you're rushed to leave.

35:00Give it an opportunity to either open up new opportunities within your organization and kind of follow that staying route into another ops or strategy role, or consider moving into another chief of staff position externally. Definitely look inside first. That's where the biggest jumps tend to happen, at least the biggest jumps immediately after the chief of staff role. And tell your principal what you want. Tell them early. Tell them in the interview process if you're interviewing right now. I think, again, it's important to have those expectations set up out front. Last but not least, own something, the project really becomes the resume.

35:36And the more that you can point to real outcomes, to real metrics, the easier it is to explain and have others externally recognize the value and the impact that you had as a chief of staff. And then I think to principles, here are a couple of things I would keep in mind. One is because this role is so tied to you and tied to your success, you've got to make sure that you're having that discussion early and often about what the chief of staff is getting out of it and wants to get out of it. Maybe it's in your head that if they say that they want to leave three years from now, you're going to make six calls that you know will get them something interesting.

36:18Better to just verbalize that and say, okay, the day you tell me that you're thinking about going, we're going to start a 90-day clock. I'm going to make these calls during the first week and we're going to set you up for what comes next if it's external. That doesn't mean that you have to constantly be on tiptoes trying to figure out for them what their next career move is. But if you take someone on in this capacity, you are mentoring them by definition. You're helping them figure out how to turn this into something bigger and better, hopefully, because you're asking them to give a one-on-one selves to you.

36:57That's right. The mirror to what you were saying, Scott, if you want somebody to take on more and bigger and better, give them something to own and actually let them own it. Don't have them be a quasi-owner and then pick on everything. Give them guidance, give them feedback, certainly, but you've got to let them fail and then flounder around a little bit as they figure out, hey, this is something that I can take from end to end. Because if you have somebody who's both attuned to you, knows the organizational context and can take an ambiguous problem and just go and own it from beginning to end, that's an incredibly powerful weapon to have in your arsenal.

37:42Yeah. So I would say give people more room to run and be explicit when you're saying, hey, I want you to go looking for problems and go looking for new things. And if you bring me something that's outside the current scope of your role, but is going to make the company better, that's the most exciting conversation that we can have. So the full 2026 Pathways Report with all seven pathways and real member career routes is available now on our website, chiefofstaff.network. You can find it along with our events, programs, and membership. and uh yeah thank you tom for joining great to be here thank you all for listening we'll see you next week