Chief of Staff, CEO

About this role

Job Description:

We believe in bold ideas, diverse perspectives, and the drive to transform knowledge into impact. Here, your curiosity fuels progress, your voice shapes innovation, and your ambition helps redefine what’s possible within science and learning. We are a culture that obsesses over impact, challenges, and drives what’s next to power infinite possibilities for our customers, colleagues and society at large.

About the Role:

The Chief of Staff to the CEO is one of the most consequential and demanding roles in the organization and one of the most distinct. This is not a traditional leadership role with a defined team, a clear mandate, or visible deliverables. It is a role built on influence without authority, on making others more effective rather than being visibly effective yourself, and on operating with the full trust of the CEO in a highly matrixed, fast-moving environment. The ideal candidate is a high-potential leader who is intellectually curious, politically astute, and genuinely energized by the challenge of working through others to drive outcomes that matter at the enterprise level. 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Coordination and Administration  • Assist in managing the CEO’s agenda, ensuring focus on highest-priority areas.  • Develop agendas for CEO-led meetings: ELT meetings, quarterly meetings, off-sites, etc. Work with CEO to identify key themes and topics and solicit input as needed from key stakeholders. Disseminate information to participants and coordinate follow-up.  • Coordinate other CEO-led events and activities. Assist in developing content and agenda.  • Coordinate board preparation; develop and disseminate materials; involve key stakeholders (among the ELT and others) as needed.  • Ensure all materials shared with the CEO are synthesized, accurate, and current — always go to the source owners to verify information before distributing. Avoid relying on prior or undated materials. 

Strategic Project Management  • Lead and manage high-priority strategic initiatives on behalf of the CEO and executive leadership team, serving as project sponsor or direct project lead as appropriate.  • Drive cross-functional strategic projects that span multiple business units, ensuring alignment with corporate objectives and timely delivery of outcomes.  • Support the ELT in annual and multi-year strategic planning processes, including facilitating planning sessions, coordinating input from business units, and synthesizing strategic recommendations.  • Identify and address critical organizational challenges that require CEO-level attention, developing action plans and mobilizing resources to drive resolution.  • Track progress on enterprise-wide strategic initiatives; create executive dashboards and provide regular updates to the CEO and ELT on milestone achievements and risk mitigation.  • Partner with business unit leaders to accelerate transformation initiatives, remove roadblocks, and ensure strategic alignment across the organization.  • Conduct deep-dive analyses on strategic opportunities — including market entry, partnerships, M&A targets, or new business models — preparing executive-ready recommendations.  • Serve as the CEO’s representative on select strategic workstreams, committees, or task forces, ensuring CEO priorities are reflected and progress is maintained.  • A note on operating mode:  • The Chief of Staff role is most powerful when it works – and wins – through others. Unlike a project owner with direct authority, this role operates through influence, facilitation, and relationship. The instinct to drive and own outcomes must be balanced with the discipline to let others lead — surfacing their thinking, giving them credit, and sequencing decisions so they land at the right moment, through the right voice. 

Research  • Coordinate background material and arrange briefings with CEO on important external meetings (investors, strategic hires, industry figures, etc.), working with Investor Relations, Business Heads, HR, and Corporate Communications.  • Identify internal and external trends and events the CEO should be aware of, and prepare or coordinate background material as appropriate.  • Ensure all information provided to the CEO is synthesized and summarized in a way that is accurate, reliable, and easy to consume — go directly to source owners to verify currency and correctness. 

Relationship-Building  • Maintain ongoing, positive relationships with all ELT members and other important stakeholders.  • Ensure that the chief of staff role is apolitical — exercise judgment and discretion in disseminating information. Exercise confidentiality regarding privileged information.  • Be seen as helpful and collaborative at all times; avoid assuming an unhelpful gatekeeper role.  • Invest heavily in building relationship capital before it is needed. Early time spent in genuine, non-transactional engagement with ELT members pays dividends when influence is required later. Logic without relationship gets nowhere in a peer-influence environment.  • Be explicit and disciplined about which mode you are operating in when engaging with senior executives: acting on the CEO’s behalf, offering your own perspective, or facilitating. Conflating these modes creates confusion and erodes trust.  • Practice active listening as a core competency. When receiving feedback that differs from your perspective, pause, ask clarifying questions, and seek to understand before responding. Curiosity and openness are professional strengths in this role. 

Advisory  • Provide counsel to the CEO on critical business decisions and organizational challenges.  • Feed organizational intelligence back to the CEO as appropriate.  • Develop strong judgment about what to escalate vs. what to handle or redirect. Calibrate this explicitly and continuously with the CEO. Escalating too much reduces your value-add; escalating too little risks overstepping authority. Ask regularly: “Would you have wanted t

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