The Chief of Staff Role, Applied to a Creative Director's Week

A chief of staff is a senior aide whose whole job is to make one leader, called the principal, as effective as possible. The clearest public account of the role comes from McKinsey. It is based on forums held over five years with more than 200 chiefs of staff, plus a 2024 podcast with senior partner Andrew Goodman.

Five duties sit at the centre of that account:

1. Information flow. Prepares and filters what reaches the principal (the "paper flow").
2. Air traffic control. Goodman's phrase for managing the flow of actions and activities so things don't collide.
3. Meeting preparation and the record. Makes sure the principal walks in prepared, and keeps a record of what was said and agreed.
4. Follow-through. Tracks what was agreed until it is done.
5. Peripheral vision. Acts as the principal's eyes and ears so there are no surprises. Senior people tend to bring the boss only good news, so a good chief of staff also reports what is happening on the front line.

Depending on the organization, the role runs from administrative to strategic. Here's an example. A CEO's chief of staff reads the board pack first and flags the two slides that contradict last quarter's plan, so the CEO doesn't find them in the meeting.

McKinsey's account adds four more habits beyond the core five.

• Calendar against the business cycle. The chief of staff lines up the principal's time with the organization's planning cycles. McKinsey suggests setting time aside, weekly if not daily, to scan the horizon for important events. For you, the horizon might be a client's annual planning season or a launch date that every review round has to reach.
• Five or six priorities. One chief of staff kept their principal to five or six priorities, split into outward-facing (clients, the market) and inward-facing (the team, the studio).
• A now/soon/never list. It has three columns. The "never" column records things that came up but won't be done, so they are written down and not just forgotten. For example, a client floated a second illustration style in round two and then dropped it. Put it under "never" with the date, and it won't come back as "didn't we agree to explore that?"
• Candid sounding board. The chief of staff gives honest feedback and challenges the principal when it's needed.

An AI can do some of this, such as keeping the lists and scanning the calendar. Candor about the work itself stays with your people.

Now translate the role into the work you already do. A creative lead's week is mostly coordination around the work: review rounds across many assets, client presentations, internal critiques, vendor deadlines and stakeholder notes that contradict each other.

Each duty has a creative version:

• Information flow: which review deadlines are close and which assets are waiting on approval.
• Air traffic control: ordering review rounds so approvals land before vendor lead times run out.
• Meeting preparation and the record: prep notes for the client presentation and the internal critique, plus a record of what was decided in the room.
• Follow-through: the recap after a round, with every revision given an owner and a date.
• Peripheral vision: a vendor date that is quietly slipping, or a photograph nobody is sure you're allowed to use.

None of these items is the idea itself. They are the paperwork around the idea, and that paperwork is where ideas often get worn down. As this track puts it, ideas rarely die in the concept room. They die in the revisions.

McKinsey is just as clear about the limits of the role.

• It does not decide for the principal. Scope and decision rights should be agreed explicitly at the start and revisited as the role changes.
• It does not blur whose voice it is. People answer a chief of staff's calls because of a borrowed halo authority, meaning the authority comes from the boss and not from the chief of staff. So the chief of staff must be clear when they speak for themselves and when they speak for the principal.
• It does not play politics. It sits with the leadership team but stays independent of it.
• It does not isolate the principal. Guarding time is part of the job, but the office must not become an island.

In creative work, blurring the voice is the most dangerous of these. Suppose a vendor gets an email saying "we're going with the warmer grade" and nobody can tell whether you decided that or your assistant guessed. You now have a decision you never made, and the vendor is already acting on it.

In this course you'll set up an agent: an AI tool that does recurring work on a schedule, reads the apps you connect (such as email and calendar) and keeps records. One rule runs through every lesson:

The agent prepares. You decide, send, book, share and confirm.

The agent may read, summarize, draft, and propose log entries marked "proposed". Anything that leaves the studio waits for your explicit yes on the exact text. That includes feedback to a vendor, a recap to a client, a calendar change and a shared file.

There are three reasons for this rule:

1. Clients and vendors hear you, not a tool. Your voice carries your authority, just like halo authority.
2. Some actions can't be undone. For example, creating or changing a calendar event in Microsoft 365 automatically sends notices to attendees.
3. A draft is not permission. OpenAI's own help page says that asking an agent for a draft does not authorize it to send the draft. Treat every draft that way.

Take a worked example. After Tuesday's critique, the agent drafts a recap with six revisions and their owners, labeled "DRAFT for you". You change one owner, delete a line that sounded like a promise to the client, and send it yourself.

Andy Hood is VP of emerging technologies at WPP, a holding company that sells AI-enabled services. In a 2025 interview with Outgrow, he urged people to learn agents above all. He described an agent as a model given specialist knowledge that works inside the team. In his words, agents "become part of your team". He used the example of an expert cook joining a cooking campaign, which he himself called a poor example. His point was that specialists used to be busy and hard to book, and now you can build them. (This is drawn from his interview captions, so treat the details as approximate.)

This course applies Hood's idea narrowly. Your agent gets one specialist job: coordination. That means the brief each morning, prep before meetings, consolidated notes, follow-up drafts and the logs.

It does not get the idea. Choosing the route, judging whether a frame still holds the thing that can't bend, and deciding when work is ready to carry the brand's name all stay with you. The agent clears space around the idea so that you have more time to protect it.

At the end of the two-week trial, you'll decide whether each routine is worth keeping. One measure is time: your own estimate of the minutes you spend on triage and prep, compared with a starting point. That starting point is called a baseline, and you need to record it now, before anything is set up.

Use the sliders to estimate a normal week:

• Review rounds per week, counting every asset round you run or sign off.
• Coordination minutes per round. Count chasing approvals, gathering notes from email and comments, and writing the recap. Leave out the creative judgment itself.
• Other coordination minutes per day. This covers inbox sorting, checking vendor dates and hunting for the current version of a file.

The starting values (6 rounds, 30 minutes each, 30 minutes a day) come to 5.5 hours a week. They are only an example, not a benchmark. Set your own numbers honestly and write the result down. On day 14 you'll compare against it, and only your honest number makes that comparison useful.