<aside> 👋 Check out my new site CoachingFounder.com for the most up to date version of this article, my latest resources, Notion Templates, and more!
</aside>
Help Execs Prioritize Work | Coaching Founder
The more successful your Exec and startup are, the more they're going to be pinged. Everyone is going to want something from them, and that means everyone wants something from you as the Chief of Staff. And pretty soon, it can be difficult to discern what is actually urgent and important, and what is not. It is your job, therefore, to help your Exec filter the signal from the noise.
These requests tend to fall into these buckets:
<aside> 👉 As previously discussed in other writings, a CoS's main responsibility is to become an extension of their Exec. This means learning how to think like them, make decisions like them, and prioritize for them. In terms of the startup, your brain essentially becomes a clone of your Exec's.
</aside>
When I first started working for Matt, I knew I was in the presence of someone who was smart and ambitious. Like many founders, Matt had (and still has) huge undertakings and goals — and because it's impossible for one human to do it all on their own, he hired a Chief of Staff (hello 👋)
Within a few months of joining Matt, I realized I was getting pulled in a million different directions. There were many priorities that fell on Matt's plate that now fell on mine. My day-to-day as an early CoS meant juggling everything from his Inbox (which had hundreds of unread emails with no response), to becoming the catch-all for all internal questions related to Operations, HR, and People, to scheduling his many coachees in an impossibly full calendar.
And to make matters more complicated, just as I was hitting my groove, Kate Clark put out a wonderful article on Matt's coaching. So...for all my Inbox Zero efforts, Matt's inbox became flooded overnight. 😬
If Matt was busy before, now he was slammed: everyone wanted Matt to coach them, were seeking advice, or had an "interesting + can't miss" project they wanted him to be a part of. (/s intended.)
Darn you, Kate! But also, thank you for a great article. :)
Simultaneously thrilled for Matt's well-deserved press while throwing myself a mini pity party, I pulled it together. I had to figure out how to help Matt pay attention to the right things (which meant how to make me prioritize the right things.)
Up until then, my main focus was on improving the Mochary Method software and helping Matt guide the company (along with everything else listed above.) And now, just like that, we were focused on freeing up Matt's already-insane schedule. We also had to jump into action quickly and create group coaching sessions to accommodate the even-bigger demand.
And that's all the reactionary, "catch-everything-before-it-falls" stuff. When Matt is on a roll, he's really on a roll ... and so, on top of all this, Matt's ideas continued pouring in on how he was going to turn Mochary Method into a full-fledged, hundred-billion-dollar empire. I felt myself being excited and overwhelmed at the same time.
A good friend of mine, Kaveh Hosseini, once gave me this powerful advice: "Do not react: respond instead."
The key difference between reacting and responding is simple:
Reacting means you're attending to the thing that is loudest. You're not giving it much thought beyond the hysterical voice in your head screaming at you that you're going to die if you don't take care of it right then and there. You go in order of whichever voice shrieks the loudest in your mind.
Responding means you insert a mindful pause in your actions. Pausing isn't doing nothing. You're pausing. That's doing something. But you're creating the space you need in order to calmly figure out whether it's actually an urgent priority, or if your amygdala is just screaming at you.