The Chief of Staff: The Seat With No Authority and All the Access

The chief of staff role has become the fastest-growing seat beside the chief executive in Gulf corporate platforms, and it is also the seat JOH Partners is asked to explain most often, because the title tells a board almost nothing about what the person actually does. Unlike a chief operating officer or a chief financial officer, whose remit is reasonably legible from the name alone, a chief of staff is defined by proximity to one principal rather than by a fixed scope of responsibility, and that single structural fact is what makes the seat simultaneously the fastest route into a group holdings platform's executive committee and, when built badly, a two-year cul-de-sac with an impressive title and no real trajectory attached. This piece sets out why the gap between access and authority is the central design question for the seat, and what separates a chief of staff mandate that develops a future operating leader from one that quietly stalls a strong hire.

Why the chief of staff role resists a standard job description

Every other senior title beneath a Gulf platform's chief executive describes, imperfectly but recognisably, a scope of work. A chief financial officer owns the numbers. A chief commercial officer owns, or is meant to own, the revenue line. A chief of staff owns none of that in the formal sense; the role exists to make one specific principal more effective, and the actual content of the job, strategic advisor, internal fixer, gatekeeper, project owner, or some blend of all four, is set entirely by what that principal needs and how they choose to use the seat. Two consequences follow from this, and both matter to a board or a principal deciding whether to create the role at all.

The first is that a title-only comparison between two chief of staff appointments is closer to comparing two different jobs that happen to share a name than comparing two versions of the same job. The second, and the one JOH's own search and advisory mandates surface most often, is that the honest way to structure the role is not to ask what a chief of staff does in general, but to decide deliberately what this principal needs this seat to hold, and to write that decision down before the search begins rather than discovering it eighteen months into the appointment.

Every other senior title tells a board roughly what the person does before they ever walk into the room. A chief of staff tells the board almost nothing until you know whose office they sit closest to, and what that principal has actually decided to lend them.

Access without authority is the design, not a flaw

The feature that makes the chief of staff role distinctive, near-total access to a principal's calendar, decisions and unfiltered thinking, combined with essentially no formal authority over anyone else in the organisation, is frequently described as a weakness of the seat. In JOH's reading it is closer to the point of the seat. A role built around a genuine decision right over a function would be a different job with a different title; the chief of staff exists precisely because certain kinds of value, seeing across silos, catching what a busy principal misses, holding a project no single function owns, cannot be created through formal authority and can only be created through trust and access, deliberately extended.

The difficulty is that access without authority is also the exact combination that makes the seat easy to misuse. A principal who treats the chief of staff purely as a scheduling and logistics function has created an executive-assistant role with an inflated title, and the person in it will be priced, and will eventually leave, accordingly. A principal who genuinely lends the seat a decision right on defined matters, sign-off on a category of spend, ownership of a specific cross-functional initiative, the mandate to represent the principal in rooms they cannot personally attend, has created something closer to a proving ground for a future operating leader. The title on the organisation chart looks identical in both cases. What differs, and what a candidate assessing the role should establish before accepting it, is what has actually been lent.

The two tiers, and why they price and progress differently

JOH's search and advisory work across the region consistently surfaces two structurally different chief of staff mandates, and boards that conflate them tend to misprice and mis-scope the seat. The first is chief of staff to a function or business-unit leader: a role focused on coordination and delivery support for a single leader, without a wider strategic remit across the platform. The second is chief of staff to a chief executive or group principal, which routinely carries cross-functional influence and strategic exposure comparable to a divisional director, even without formal authority over a team of any size. Our benchmark of chief of staff compensation, which sets out both tiers separately across three markets, is a useful reference point for boards pricing the seat against the wrong comparator, a mistake JOH sees often enough that it distorts hiring decisions at the outset.

JOH's research into the seat's rise across the region sets out the Gulf dataset behind that growth in detail; this piece focuses on the role definition and the reporting-line argument rather than restating those figures. The gap between the two tiers is not simply about seniority of the leader supported. A chief of staff to a mid-sized divisional head with a genuine strategic remit can reasonably outprice a chief of staff to a CEO whose own version of the role is closer to scheduling and logistics. The honest question a board or a candidate should ask is not who the principal is, but what the principal has actually decided to delegate, and whether that delegation is durable enough to survive a change in the principal's own priorities.

A chief of staff to a CEO whose job is scheduling is not a more senior role than a chief of staff to a divisional head who has been handed a genuine decision right. The title tracks the principal. The value tracks what was actually lent.

Why the seat is either a fast track or a dead end, and rarely in between

JOH's mandate experience across the region points to a pattern worth naming plainly: the chief of staff seat produces unusually binary outcomes. Where the mandate is structured with a defined trajectory, explicit cross-functional exposure and a genuine next step discussed at hire, typically an operating or divisional leadership role, the seat compresses years of exposure a candidate would otherwise accumulate slowly across multiple roles into a much shorter window, and the appointment functions as a genuine accelerant to the executive committee. Where the mandate is structured without that trajectory, the seat tends to stall. The person builds deep institutional knowledge and a close working relationship with the principal, but no external market comparator for what they have actually learned to do, and no internal function willing to receive them because they have never carried line responsibility for one.

This binary outcome is, in JOH's reading, almost entirely a function of design decisions made before the search ever starts, not of the individual hired. A strong candidate placed into a poorly structured mandate will still generally deliver competent coordination and support; what they will not do is develop the operating credibility the title implies they are acquiring, because that credibility only accrues where genuine decision rights have been extended. JOH's earlier work on the chief operating officer role sets out the adjacent seat's very different authority structure; the comparison is instructive precisely because it shows what the chief of staff role is not, and what a board is actually choosing between when it decides which of the two seats a given mandate calls for.

What boards get wrong when creating the seat

The most common structuring error JOH sees is creating a chief of staff role reactively, typically after a principal's own workload has become unmanageable, without deciding in advance what the seat is meant to hold beyond relieving that immediate pressure. A role created this way tends to default to the coordination-and-logistics version regardless of the seniority of the person hired into it, because nobody has decided otherwise, and the absence of a decision is itself a decision. The second common error is treating the chief of staff as inherently temporary, a stepping stone role with no defined shape of its own, which produces high turnover in the seat and, more damagingly, signals to the market that the role does not develop genuine operating capability, making it harder to attract strong candidates for the next appointment.

The boards and principals who get more consistent value from the seat, in JOH's own engagement experience, decide explicitly at the outset whether the mandate is a genuine proving ground or a defined support function, size the authority and the compensation to match that decision honestly rather than pricing a support role at operating-leader levels, and revisit the decision on a defined cycle rather than letting the seat's scope drift silently with whatever the principal happens to need in a given quarter. JOH's work building Chief Strategy Officer leadership for a sovereign-adjacent Saudi investment platform illustrates the adjacent discipline at a seat with a closer formal remit: defining what the role was actually being asked to consolidate before the search began, rather than discovering the answer through the first eighteen months of the appointment, produced a materially cleaner mandate and a faster path to genuine impact for the person eventually placed.

Boards wanting continuous visibility into how a chief of staff mandate, and the wider executive layer around it, is actually functioning between the principal's own informal check-ins increasingly use platforms such as Board Pulse to track those signals on a standing basis rather than reconstructing the picture only when a departure forces the question. Adam Malouf's account of transforming organisations across Dubai, Australia and beyond touches a related discipline from an adjacent seat: leading across functions and cultures without formal authority over all of them depends on the same currency a strong chief of staff trades in, earned trust rather than positional power, and that currency has to be actively renewed rather than assumed to persist once granted.

What a well-built mandate looks like from the outset

A chief of staff mandate that develops genuine future operating leadership tends to share four features, in JOH's reading across its own placements. It names, before the search begins, at least one category of decision the seat will genuinely own rather than merely coordinate. It attaches a defined period, typically eighteen months to three years, after which the trajectory conversation happens explicitly rather than being left open-ended indefinitely. It gives the appointee visible standing in front of the executive committee on the specific initiatives they are leading, rather than keeping their contribution invisible behind the principal's own presentation of the work. And it prices the role honestly against the tier it actually is, the coordination tier or the strategic-exposure tier, rather than defaulting to whichever number keeps the principal's own reporting line looking simpler.

Groups that build the seat this way get a genuine pipeline benefit: a person who has seen the whole platform through the principal's own eyes, tested against real decisions, and who is ready for a defined operating role when the trajectory conversation arrives. Groups that create the title without making these decisions get a capable coordinator who eventually leaves for a role that gives them the authority the chief of staff seat never did, taking with them institutional knowledge the group spent two or three years building and then failed to retain.

Where this leaves a principal deciding whether to create the seat

The chief of staff role is not, in itself, a governance risk or a talent-development guarantee; it is a structural choice that behaves very differently depending on how deliberately it is made. A principal who is honest about what they are prepared to lend, and a board that prices and reviews the seat against that honest answer rather than against the title alone, get a role that develops real capability. A principal who creates the seat to solve an immediate capacity problem without deciding anything further should expect, and budget for, exactly what that decision produces: competent support, high turnover, and a role the market will continue to under-price because the group itself has never decided what it is worth.

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Key takeaways

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JOH Partners is an executive search and senior executive recruitment firm advising boards, family groups and sovereign-adjacent platforms on chief of staff, chief operating officer and senior executive-office appointments across the GCC, the UK and Singapore. Boards wanting continuous visibility of how the executive-office layer is actually functioning can request a Board Pulse demo, or engage a partner for a confidential conversation about structuring or filling a chief of staff mandate.