Welcome to my 4th newsletter. Thank you to my early supporters 🎉

Your CEO dedicates less than 1% of their time giving you formal feedback on your performance (cc: HBR). So how do you become a high performing Chief of Staff without a clear development path?

That’s where self-evaluation and self-coaching comes in (to start). In this newsletter, we cover the 5 performance focus areas that you can drill down on.

Invest some time in personal development to self-reflect, evaluate your performance and define your unique path to becoming an A-Player Chief of Staff.

Hard Skills

Hard skills are the backbone of an amazing Chief of Staff.

Consider the following standard set of hard skills for a Chief of Staff: Data Analysis & Research, Problem Solving, Strategy, Technical Knowledge, Company Performance Management, Project Management, Time & Energy Management, and Communications Management.

Once you’ve mastered the hard skills listed above, consider more advanced hard skills such as Executive Team Management, Change Management, Investor & Board Management, Financial Management, Culture Management, and Executive Coaching.

How would you rank yourself?

PS I’m being controversial here, but I am arguing that Problem Solving and Time & Energy Management are both hard skills that have a science to them. They can be systematically taught.

Soft Skills

Soft skills arguably are more important to your performance because you are using soft power every day as a Chief of Staff to achieve change in your organization. They also can have an outsized impact on your performance since you must frequently persuade multiple stakeholders to collaborate better, communicate better and rally around a common goal.

Soft skills to consider include: Teamwork, Adaptability, Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Empathy, and Relationship Building.

How do you stack up against each soft skill? Are you a 1 (Novice) or a 5 (Expert)? Any surprises?

Leadership Traits

The best Chiefs of Staff exhibit different leadership traits. And your job is to figure out when to use them to your advantage. Ask yourself, how often are you…

Optimistic, Accepting, Loyal, Understanding, Trustworthy, Inspirational, Confident, Critical Thinker, Compassionate, Reliable, Passionate, and Curious?

Rate yourself on a scale of 1 (Never) to 5 (Always). And identify your spikes. These are clues to your unique brand of leadership.

Wellbeing

Smart Chiefs of Staff know that in order to reach maximum performance, they have to take care of themselves before they can take care of everyone else.

How well are you looking after yourself? Evaluate yourself on the following:

Physical Wellbeing: Exercise, Nutrition, Sleep, Water, Stress, and Outdoor Activities

Mental Wellbeing: Mindfulness, Positive Thinking, Social Relationships, Hobbies & Interests, Coaching, and Meaning & Purpose

Spiritual Wellbeing: Alignment, Gratitude, Community Service, Personal Development, Spirituality, Ethics, and Self-Reflection

Remember the evaluation scale is 1 (Never) to 5 (Always). Be honest.

On the Chief of Staff job

Finally, the last section. Here are very specific Chief of Staff-related items to consider:

At a high level, do you have clarity on your vision for the role, your unique value, and your Zone of Genius?

Re: your relationships, how strong is your Team Trust, Manager Sponsorship, Manager Trust, External Stakeholder Trust, and Personal Advisory Board?

Now look at your execution, how good are you at Saying No, Self-Regulation, Balance, Productivity, Blending Strategy & Ops, and Creating Systems?

Considering your own personal development, how much confidence do you have in your own Roadmap to High Performance, Development Path, Career Path, and Life Path?

Answer these last set of questions on the scale of 1 (Low) to 5 (High).

Whew. You’ve made it.

Take stock of your answers and see where you have scored yourself high or low. Identify a few areas that you want to improve on to give yourself a pathway to high performance.

You’re done…for now.

As a next step, go around to colleagues and your boss to get their assessment on your assessment. Verify where they think you are strong and where you need to improve.

Get in the habit of asking for feedback after every deliverable, meeting, or task.

Revisit this assessment every 3-6 months to see where you are getting better or where you are falling short.

And as you probably know, achieving high performance is a game of continuous improvement.

Just ask any top performer, they have to be a student of the game they are playing. They have to continually seek out new development opportunities to improve.

Remember, you want to be doing short development sprints to focus on a few key areas at a time.

Thanks for reading folks! Looking forward to hearing about your path to high performance.

I’m developing a High Performance Assessment

You’re probably not surprised… but I’ve been working to create a standardized assessment to make it easier for Chiefs of Staff to improve their performance on the job.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just completed a 360º Performance Diagnostic — a Typeform questionnaire that covers the 70 self-evaluative questions on 5 topic areas that we just covered above.

And after that, I'll be designing the Performance Scorecard & Problem Spot Heatmap to see where you ranked yourself low and high.

Interested in getting early access to my assessment? Reply PERFORMANCE to this email and get on my waitlist.

You’ll join 30+ folks that raised their hand saying they want to become a high performing Chief of Staff.

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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for next week’s edition.