[upbeat music] Hey friend, it's Scott Amenta here, the founder of the Chief of Staff Network. I'll be your host on today's episode.
We help chiefs of staff through the three Cs: cohorts, curriculum, and community via Slack, cohort-based programs, live events, conferences, and more.
You can learn more about our membership events and courses at chiefofstaff.network.
Today, I'm joined by Dora Nagy, former chief of staff to the COO at SoftBank's hundred billion dollar Vision Fund, and now an executive coach helping CEOs and their teams scale effectively.
Dora's career has taken her from Google to building out global operations at SoftBank, to now advising leaders on what she calls the CEO operating system.
In our conversation, we explored her journey into the chief of staff role and how she now coaches leaders and chiefs of staff on scaling teams, driving accountability, and navigating conflict.
We also dug into one of the frameworks Dora will be leading as a workshop at Chief of Staff Connect London this November, the drama triangle.
This is a powerful lens for understanding unhealthy conflict dynamics and shifting them into growth opportunities.
Whether you're wrestling with OKRs, operating models, or the people side of leadership, this episode is packed with wisdom you can put into practice right away. Let's jump right into it.
All right, Dora, welcome to the podcast. So great to have you here. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here and speak to you. I'm excited for the conversation today.
You've got a very interesting background, both as a chief of staff and now as an executive coach.
I was hoping maybe we could start with you just walking us through some of your past experiences and kind of what led you to where you are today. Sure thing.
So, you know, if anyone looks at my LinkedIn, they would think, "Okay, you had this like very grand plan, and you really architected your career." And I get that feedback sometimes, and that's absolutely not the case.
So what I always knew is that I'm a generalist, even back then when we didn't have a term for it. But I just didn't feel like I have passion for a very specific area.
So I went into marketing first because I figured no matter what I do, I can work for any company. At least most companies need some marketing, so if I do marketing, I can apply anywhere, I can work anywhere.
But I didn't have passion for any specific industry or any specific area within marketing. It just seemed generic enough so I can get going.
And I was sort of lucky enough that my very first job out of college was Google. That was not intended, so I thought I would work for L'Oreal or Procter & Gamble. That's where I did my internships.
But we had this sort of financial crisis, and nobody was hiring. So I was literally applying to everyone, everything, I think from washing machine producer to tobacco companies, and like literally nobody was hiring.
And I was applying to some sales jobs at Google, like very few places that still hired, and I got rejected like three times. And the fourth time someone said, "Hey, why don't you think about marketing?
Because clearly you have done the studies, and we have a program which we run every year. We hire maybe forty people globally, and that's an accelerated program for sort of future leaders in marketing."
And so I said, "Okay." I was desperate, so I was like, "Okay, why not?" So I applied, and somehow I got in, which was quite a shock to the system.
Honestly, I thought at first I was like a diversity hire or something, and I was really, really worried that someone's gonna find out and I'm gonna be out of a job within a year.
So it was really like high intensity, high stress for the first year, and then I stayed on. I got good reviews. I was able to move from London to New York and then from New York to San Francisco.
So I was at Google for five years. It was not planned. It was like literally nobody hiring.
Okay, this marketing thing sounds good, and now I'm just gonna get into this rotation program where they help you go to a different team, different geo.
And since I didn't have that much passion for marketing, I got pretty bored. So within my Google time, I was like, "Okay, where can I go within the company that's different than marketing?"
And I landed in this team, which was the global strategy and ops team for the business organization, which at the time was basically everybody except engineers and lawyers.
At the time, it was like sixty billion revenue, something along those lines. You had like sixteen thousand people.
And I spent sort of two years there, which was like super interesting and surrounded by management consultants and very different vibe than marketing.
So I had a great time there and super enjoyed it, super, super good learnings.
And then what happened is, for those of you who sort of know the story of SoftBank and the Vision Fund, the chief business officer of Google got recruited by Son Sunt, the CEO of SoftBank, and he said, "Okay, why don't you come over and build out the investing arm of SoftBank?"
He had been doing that for a while, but more as a passion project, so there wasn't really a big, full-blown team helping him.
And so when the chief business officer of Google left to join him, there were about four or five of us going with him.
And so we sort of started building this SoftBank thing, like the machine behind the scenes, first in California and then in London when the Vision Fund was announced, which was the big hundred billion dollar fund, which was the biggest fund ever.
I think to this date, that's the biggest fund that was ever created. And so I sort of followed my curiosity. I thought it was a great opportunity.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but it just sounded like a really cool opportunity to go and build something from scratch with the big bank accounts right in the background.
So unlike startups where you do the same thing, but you got broke as a startup, you're building things from scratch.
Here, at least we knew we had some money in the bank, so [chuckles] that was quite helpful.So I did that.
I moved to London when the Vision Fund was born, and that's what I was doing sort of this like chief of staff crazy role, where one day I was doing partnerships with the UK ecosystem, the next day I was doing brand building the next day I was working with our tax lawyer about the entity structure of the company then I was running dinner series for the top founders and ecosystem players in the UK.
So that was a lot of fun. And you had the opportunity to now wear a lot of hats. Were they calling it a chief of staff at the time? What were they kind of billing it as?
We didn't have titles on purpose for the good first sort of year and a half, two years, because we didn't want people to get too hung up on titles, especially on the investment side of things, because as you can imagine, there are a lot of egos, a lot of personalities, but eventually that became the chief of staff role.
And it was a lot of fun, as you say, lots of different hats, lots of different projects, flying to Tokyo once a month for a year, year and a half for a week. So lots of good opportunities.
And I stayed there for about three years and it came to a point where it felt like it wasn't sort of the culture that I joined like three years before.
To me, it felt like more like an investment banking culture, which it wasn't really something for me. And so I decided to leave without knowing what I'm going to do next or having any other opportunities.
What happened is I was invited to a really cool fundraising event. So Richard Branson, for those of you who don't know him, is one of the most well-known billionaires in the world.
He has a charity in the UK supporting young children, young students, and the way they used to fundraise is they would go on these like insane five-week-long trips with like other people.
Could be entrepreneurs, founders, regular people like myself to raise funds. And it was all about mental toughness. So mental resilience.
Therefore, you kind of hiking for ten, twelve hours a day or cycling on the Tour de France, famous routes, et cetera, and all coming down to sort of, yes, physical toughness.
You have to have that, but it's more about how you're coming over your own limitations, your own mind, and just pushing through what you think is impossible.
And you end up truly cycling for a week, twelve hours a day, all uphill, no downhill. [laughs] So it was an amazing opportunity.
And as you can imagine, you have founders, entrepreneurs, business owners, and when you talk to them all day, you know you are in the pain together every day for like five weeks. You start to create relationships.
And then after the trip, what happened? You know, it wasn't planned, but they started reaching out to me and said, "Hey, I remember you mentioned that you used to run OKRs at Google. Can you help with mine?"
Or, "Hey, I have a chief of staff. Like, would you be open to coaching them?" That's how I fell into it. The past seven years, I built up my coaching and advisory practice and of course evolved it, changed it.
It's never something where you kind of quote-unquote, arrive and you know the answer. The market changes, the founder's needs changes, the chief of staff's need changes.
And so I evolved it into the current coaching and advisory that I have today. And I know one of your kind of current focuses is this concept of the CEO operating system.
Can you give us a brief description, overview of kind of what that looks like? How do you define this operating system?
The thing I help founders the most with, in fact, are the things that they would expect their chief of staff to do really well.
So either they already have a chief of staff and I work with both of them, helping the chief of staff, especially if they're doing it for the first time, or the CEO doesn't have a chief of staff, but they start to feel the pain points and the issues and the stress that they really, really need some help with.
And so either they hire in a chief of staff or they bring me in, or they have a first time chief of staff or an inexperienced chief of staff and bring me in to help them with these things.
And so the essence of it is like, okay, the founder is trying to scale. They have a product, they have a product market fit. They have maybe twenty, thirty people. They start to form a leadership team.
And now it's that sort of inflection point where they need to start scaling. So they need to leave the early stage chaos behind and start to operate like a grown-up business.
And it's a very difficult time for any CEO because they need to basically move from what I call like, okay, running a family-run restaurant and move towards a restaurant that can get a Michelin star.
Both are good and both are awesome, and you can have fans and loyal customers, but it's a very different way of running the business and operating.
And so the CEO operating system basically just includes those three big areas that I find are always the areas, ninety-nine percent of the problems come from those three areas, and the first of them being people.
So I believe that actually like ninety-nine percent of business problems are people problems at the end of the day.
If you look really, really deep, you might be solving a superficial problem or putting a Band-Aid on things, but it's people, it's the underlying problem, which, by the way, can include the CEO as well.
So sometimes the CEO is not there where they need to be in terms of managing their own team, managing their leadership team, how they run and operate as a CEO.
That needs to evolve because otherwise everything else just, you know, problematic and chaotic and it comes back to how the CEO actually runs and operates their own team. So the first pillar is organization and people.
The second pillar is how they move from strategy to execution. That can include OKRs or if they use rocks and pebbles or whatever they want to use.
I see time and time again that there's a really messy place there where they have a beautiful pitch deck, usually what they raise money onAnd they're not really sure how to execute and how to get the results they need to get to or how to get to those as fast as they would like to.
So there is something broken in that execution path, which can include priorities keeping people accountable to priorities and so on and so on I like using OKRs in that mix, but other things can be great as well And then the third pillar is the operating model.
So it's just basically how they run and operate, which I think most chief of staff listening to are familiar with It's the cadences, the rhythms, how you do weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, so that you create a very scalable, structured rhythm for the business which then helps them eliminate unnecessary inefficiencies and chaos and low quality conversations and decision making.
So OKR's operating model and org, which is people, these are the three pillars of this operating system. And I find that most problems, as I said, come from one of these areas, which are also intertwined.
So for example, you can have the best OKR system and you can have a relatively good operating model, but if you don't have the right leadership team or you don't know how to get the most out of them, the other two are not going to help you to scale your company.
Or you can have an amazing leadership team. You are great at hiring. You spend time with your people. They love you. They do, you know, everything, go above and beyond, awesome team.
And you have good, efficient operating system.
Like, you have those rhythms and the meetings are efficient and you have your annual planning, but you're just not able to articulate the execution, so you can't put strategy into practice and again, you're not going to achieve results Yeah, so it's not necessarily a, a pyramid where people are at the bottom, execution or OKRs are, are kind of next step and operating model's at the top.
It's more like a flywheel, right? And if any part of that flywheel is broken, it all kind of collapses. Yeah, exactly.
It's very intertwined You started by saying that people on one hand do feel like the most common area where organizations fail initially. What do you think that is kind of stemmed from?
And is that people at the leadership end of the organization or is it people kind of across the board in your experience? It's across the board.
So there is this principle called the Peter principle, which basically says that everybody rises to their level of incompetence.
What happens then is because you have had people with you for a while, you just keep promoting them and keep putting them into positions where they're just not competent anymore and maybe they're not comfortable growing and maybe they don't have the capability to grow as fast as the business needs them to grow.
And so that can be true at the leadership level, the middle management level, and the individual level as well.
And so the job of a good chief of staff and a good CEO is to recognize when somebody reached their limits and then make a decision on whether they want to help the person to grow.
Do you have the time, the resources to coach them?
Or you need to bring in someone else, whether it's internal or external, so that you can put the right people into the right seats, i.e., they are capable of doing the job that's required of them now here in this context, not six months ago, twelve months ago, but today.
And it's a very painful thinking process because you have good friends who were there from the beginning. You have people who are loyal, but they're not competent to do the job that the business now requires them to do.
And sometimes that can also be true for the co-founder. So the co-founder might not be able to deliver what the business needs of them, and sometimes it can be also true for the CEO.
And that's the job of the CEO to realize, you know, am I still the right person for this business, or what kind of coaching or support I need so that I can fast-track my learning because the business needs me to operate at this much higher level than what I've been used to operate.
So I think it's across the board and it looks different at different levels I think particularly for the types of companies that you're working with, you know, as you said, that are moving from this early stage, maybe scrappy mindset of just get it done to, hey, we need to figure out an operating model that is sustainable and will actually take us to that forward trajectory that we expect and our investors expect.
I've seen this firsthand as well.
When organizations are outpacing or outgrowing the employees that they initially hired, it is a really difficult thing to recognize and even more difficult and challenging to actually swallow the pill and actually make the change, whether that's, you know, trying to uplevel those employees and really get them on board or even harder, parting ways with them.
In some cases, losing that institutional knowledge or potentially losing cultural fixtures in an organization, right?
People that were there early are typically the ones setting the tone and culture of the business, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will or should be there forever.
Yeah, I think it's interesting that that's one of your kind of core areas is, you know, how to address that because there's never a clean solution. It always is painful in the end Yeah.
And you know, my preference is always first to try and find them a place in the business. Most of the time there is a role that they can do well, that they're happy about, that they're competent in, they enjoy.
That's always the first question, like, can we find them a home in the business?
Mostly maybe ten, fifteen percent of the situations where there's really no place for them, especially if they're not self-aware enough and they think they are operating at a much higher level, so there's a lack of self-awareness.
There's a bit of harsh truth moment there to show that they are not. But I would say eighty percent of the time there is some place for them in the business.
And as you said, they have the culture, they have the attitude, they have the knowledge.
Sometimes we underestimate the value of those thingsIt sounds like in your capacity as a coach, you're also working a little bit like a fractional chief of staff, right?
So whether that CEO has an existing chief of staff or not, you kinda step in to basically show them, "Hey, here's what good looks like in terms of a chief of staff working with you."
What does that kinda look like in your experience? What are the first things that you try to do, not just in the coaching capacity, but as this pseudo chief of staff within the companies that you're working with?
So I think about coaching as a toolkit. Sometimes it's over-mystified. What is coaching? It's a toolkit, basically. Anyone can use a toolkit. Um, you might be a pure vanilla coach, and that's what you use, and that's it.
Or you might be sort of the other end of the spectrum, which is the advisor mentorship, where you use the toolkit of the coach, plus you can also offer other things because you've been there, done it, got the T-shirt, have the pattern recognition, have the playbooks.
You can fast-track the learning.
So while pure vanilla coaching would never give you best practices or, you know, here are the three ways to really do an offsite or OKRs for you, they would lead you to come to your own answers.
But sometimes people don't have their answers 'cause they never done it, so that's when you swing more towards the advisory mentorship end of the spectrum, where they come to you because they want the fast-tracking learning.
They don't wanna sort of experiment and trial and error. Like, "We don't have time. Like, just give me... Okay, how should I run my one-on-ones?" Or, "How should I run my leadership meeting?"
And so first and foremost, I come in as an advisor and mentor to the founder, CEO, and the chief of staff, so I don't take ownership of anything.
It's still only chief of staff who's executing or it's still a CEO who's executing. 'Cause I want to teach them how to fish rather than give them the fish.
So you act as more of a sounding board for ideas and hard conversations. Right. And I can steer, and I can give options, and we talk it through on how you apply it to your business, but I need them to be self-sufficient.
So I fail if the answer is that it's me, like I'm the crutch, I have to do stuff. Now, sometimes for various reasons, we don't succeed, and that's when I need to get more involved.
So occasionally, if I have the capacity, I can take on what you would refer to as a fractional chief of staff, but I do take some ownership.
So I want them to learn how to fish by watching me how to fish and then fish together so they're able to learn it. For example, you have gazillion books and YouTube videos and blog posts about how to do OKRs, right?
Like, up to your eyeballs. You can read those, watch those all day long.
But if you've never seen it in action, like how does it actually work, it's very hard, if not impossible, to do something that's light touch, that's practical, that's appropriate for that size and for that leadership style and the leadership team.
So I have to show, and I have to do it with them to be able to really nail that. In that scenario, I just make sure that there is a solution for the BAU, for the ongoing, 'cause I cannot be the solution.
So I'm architecting, launching it with them, setting it up, tweaking it, but then they have to go and run with it. I don't disappear.
I'm still there as a sounding board, but I'm not the sort of BAU sort of ongoing support. I honestly, nine out of ten, I suggest if they don't have a chief of staff, that they hire one, chief of staff or equity one.
And since we're moving into that kinda next part of the flywheel execution here, in your experience, what's the first part of failure for OKRs? Is it the implementation of the OKRs?
Is it the writing style of the objectives and key results?
Is it the sheer thought of, "Hey, we're doing OKRs, and therefore every person, every team company-wide should have OKRs," and so we go overkill and have actually too many goals that we'll never, you know, follow and achieve?
All those things happen. I see them, uh, every time. I think the biggest one that people don't think about is the lack of strategy.
So oftentimes I see some pretty slide decks that I would call more like a vision, articulation of vision, but it's not strategy.
So if they have clear strategy, which is usually sort of you can understand the three to five-year horizon and what I call the growth pillars, like what is actually gonna drive growth in the business so that you are on track to achieve your vision, if that is not thought through, then we shouldn't even think about OKRs.
Because OKRs will fail from, you know, day one because the strategy is not clear.
When the strategy is clear and it's not, "Yes, we do ten things," but instead, "Okay, these are the three things, the three growth pillars that's gonna help us win in this game," then OKR is almost like write themselves.
And then, yes, of course, you have these typical pitfalls around way too many and, like, overcomplicating them and trying to do this sort of waterfall type of OKRs, which is a cascading- Organization to team to individual.
Right, which is very rigid. I don't recommend. Or they wanna bring in some software, which is diverse idea if you do it for the first time. Like, I've see those time and time again.
'Cause if you don't understand the spirit of OKRs, you can't do OKRs well. And, you know, at Google, we never even used a OKR software, like, ever.
And it was more important to understand the spirit and what it's used for and that the leaders are comfortable with it than all these, like, technical details and the tool, et cetera.
But to answer your question, I think it's the strategy which people don't often think about, and then sometimes it goes further, which I have had this experience, you know, talking to the leadership team and learning that actually nobody believed that there was a product market fit.
So if you don't have that, it's hard to create a strategy and therefore hard to create OKRs. Chief of Staff Connect is back this October in New York City, and for the first time, this November in London.
Join over a hundred and fifty chiefs of staff from leading companies for two days of workshops, case studies, and peer-to-peer learning.It's the only conference built exclusively for chiefs of staff designed to help you sharpen your toolkit, connect with peers who understand your role and leave with practical strategies you can put to work right away.
Tickets are available now on our website, chiefofstaff.network. Look for the link in the description below. I hope to see you there.
From a people perspective, how do you get buy-in for the organization starting to use and adopt OKR?
So if this company is using this framework for the first time, very often convincing kind of the rest of the team to start recording their results and have things that they can measure in terms of their impact.
Beyond the executive team, what's the strategy to kinda get the rest of the organization bought into using this tool or this methodology, I should say?
The real answer is that they don't have a choice because [laughs] if the CEO- That, that's a good answer, not [laughs] Sorry, it's not democracy and dealing with feelings and, you know, people don't like change, right?
Do you think it's worth saying that explicitly? Would you advise a CEO to- So I always say that here is the best answer I have as a CEO, you know, for various reasons, I believe in this.
If you have a better answer, please pitch me a better answer. Because that empowers people to...
I don't know, maybe they come back and say, "Okay, we read this in whatever the EOS system, and we're gonna use rocks and pebbles," which by the way, pretty much the same as OKRs.
But I always like this approach of like, here is the best answer I have. Team, if you have a better answer, come to me with a better answer. Pitch me a better answer, and then we can have a conversation.
And so typically, if the CEO wants to do something, then it's the question of bringing the leadership team on board, and they're, you know, I speak to them one-on-one. We have team conversations.
We identify what's not working, or something is clearly not working in terms of execution. They are not getting results. They don't know what's actually going on in the business. They don't have clear priorities.
They have way too many priorities. There's no accountability, and so something is clearly not working. That's why they have this instinct that, "Ooh, maybe we should do something.
Maybe it's OKRs, maybe it's something else, but we should do something."
So first, I speak to the team individually and collectively understand what are the pain points, what are the issues, and then I try to think about how to use OKRs, or I can use rocks and pebbles or SMART goals.
I mean, there are only so many options here.
We're trying to get to the same results, which is clarity on priorities, better accountability, delivery of targets, understanding why targets are not delivered, creating that sort of ownership mindset in the team.
And if we achieve it with OKRs, great. If we achieve it with SMART goals, great. We will make a call which one to use. But usually, it's pretty clear and understood that as a business you do need to deliver results.
You do need to execute, so nobody would really argue with that. Which methodology we use, which frame, framework we use, I'm flexible. We can have a conversation. It's usually pretty straightforward.
Nobody said that, "Well, I don't want to have accountability," right? "I don't wanna have ownership," or, "I don't wanna be held accountable of certain targets." Yeah.
And I think also people appreciate and sometimes enjoy just having clarity in terms of, [laughs] "Hey, I'm showing up to work, and we're working in a common direction on common goals, and my decision-making in terms of how I'm going to achieve those goals, you know, gives me enough flexibility to keep the job interesting.
But at least I know that we're all kind of tracking and heading in the same direction," versus, "I work on this thing, and three weeks later, I hear about this other team working on the same thing, and we've never collaborated," or, "They're working on something totally different [laughs] with a totally different goal that actually is opposed to the goal that I'm working on.
And so now these two things have no alignment." That's the worst feeling.
People deserve to know, like at the end of the day, if someone comes to work and spends the majority of their time at work with their colleagues and their boss, like they deserve to know what are the three things they should be focusing on for the next three months, and they need to know how they're going to be evaluated and appreciated.
So I often work on performance management approach, implement that and working it out, okay, how to embrace performance management and setting goals, setting clear expectations.
That's the basis of any performance management.
So if the CEO is struggling with not being able to keep people accountable or not seeing the results they want to see or say, "Oh, the team is not performing," it all comes down to expectation setting, and one of the tools we use for expectation setting is the OKRs or the SMART goals in that sort of quarterly rhythm.
So it all comes down to the expectation setting, and people wanna know that. They de- they deserve to know that as well. And then last but not least, that leads itself into the operating model.
So when you think about the business's operating model, again, do you start with the executive team, and are you really focused on, hey, how is communication flowing from CEO to senior leadership team and then across, distributed across the rest of the organization?
Or is it more about here's the types of meetings that we have in terms of who's engaging where and on what topics throughout the week, month, quarter, year?
How do you kinda think about where to start focusing on an operating model for a business? And that obviously is dependent on size and stage, et cetera. Anything I do, I go for eighty-twenty answers.
And to answer your question, it's both.
So I primarily work with the leadership team because one thing I believe firmly is you can send people to any training and get them coached and do an online course, whatever, when it comes to how to run and operate.
But ultimately, they're gonna copy exactly what they see from their boss.Right?
Whether it's one of the leadership team members or it's the CEO, people always copy what they see, how they are being treated, how they are being given feedback, how they have those one-on-one conversations, et cetera.
So that's why my focus is always CEO plus their leadership team, and I want to understand what's going on there.
Because if we nail it there, whether it's a meeting cadence or OKRs or whatever performance management, then it's gonna trickle down, and we're gonna have good qualities throughout the organization.
So if you don't know how to run a very good one-on-one as a CEO or as a member of the leadership team, your direct report will not know how to run a good one-on-one with their own direct report.
So it's all just like trickles down. In terms of the operating model, this is one where, you know, most of the things I do is sort of like, let's not reinvent the wheel.
Like, other teams, other CEOs had this question before. There are so many answers and approaches to this. In my approach, there are, like, five meetings that any leadership team needs to get right. That's it pretty much.
And we start from there, and I understand what they currently have, what's working, what's not working, and I make sure that even within those five that are the most critical ones, that they run those really, really well.
There are different flavors to things. We can tweak things, but it's not something that clean slate, let's reinvent the wheel, and that sort of idea about how this should look.
I'm sure you probably have a blog post or, or something on your website about this, but can you at least share what are the two most critical out of the five?
So one is the, what I call the leadership team meeting every Monday, ideally Monday, which is more focused on tactical stuff, so checking in on KPIs, red, amber, green on OKRs, just a pulse check on what's actually going on to be able to capture issues sooner than later.
And that's the opportunity to check on priorities and issues, concerns, get the week going, get clarity on how the business is doing, how the leadership team is doing, which is a very tactical pulse check-y thing, which I think is one of the most important meetings, which I separate from the more strategic meeting, which I call a deep dive.
So ideally, that's also a weekly deep dive with a schedule that's prepopulated with rotating topics where you as a CEO and a chief of staff with a handful of members of the leadership team, whoever is appropriate to attend, can go through...
Usually there are six to eight topics in any business that are the most important strategic topics. You don't have time to go into it on Monday. You don't want to sort of scramble and here and there make some time.
You know when it's coming. People prepare, for example, your go-to-market strategy, and you know that you're gonna have a deep dive into that, say, every five weeks or every six weeks, for example.
And so that separates the strategic conversation, like big strategic decision, insights, learnings, should we pivot our approach or not, from the tactical pulse check on how the business is doing and how we're doing as a team.
So I think those two, if they nail it, that sort of solves, again, 80/20 answers. Like, that solves most of the issues that I see from time and time again and frustrations that the CEO and the leadership team has.
I love the idea of separating those two concepts because it's very easy to walk into that Monday meeting, start talking tactics, right, start talking about KPIs and where we sit kind of across different projects, and then all of a sudden go down a rabbit hole of one of those [laughs] projects, and that ends up eating the entire time, and then you don't get to the other seven things on the agenda.
And then it's like, well, do we set more time, or we'll just revisit this next week. And that can happen too often, and then, you know, the important things kind of fall by the wayside.
And then you never really set that time, right, to actually go deep on the strategy but make sure that you're revisiting that often enough.
And you might, uh, go into a topic that's really relevant only to three out of the 10 people in that meeting, and you're wasting the other seven people's time 'cause it's just not relevant for them. You know, you...
I'm sure you've been in meetings where product and eng start to talk about something, and it's not relevant for the rest of the group. More often than not, yeah. [laughs] And you have no idea what they are talking about.
And if I'm in, like, customer support, I'm like, "Guys, just, just tell me what you decided. Like, [laughs] I'm just gonna go on Slack and do something else."
And I think probably with all of the AI, you know, note recorders today, more and more often you can actually have those people opt out of that meeting if it's not relevant to them and still make sure that they get the notes and the input that they would've gotten anyways had they sat there for 45 minutes to an hour.
I used to like the idea of having, in some meetings, more of a revolving door. So people were invited, but they only really needed to be there if it was a topic that they were going to weigh in on or present on.
And so it gave people the notion that they were part of that meeting without wasting their time and kept this idea of like, "Oh yeah, I'm still part of that leadership team or, or that next level down, but I don't need to be there every week," right?
"I'm there when it's important to me, and I'll still get the notes and the feedback after the fact." To me, it's important to have that approach, right, and apply that approach to pretty much all the meetings, right?
If you don't contribute, if you don't need to speak, if you don't need to present, you're not expected to bring value, you don't need to sit there, right? Just get the notes.
And I think it's also important to have at least one hour every week where the CEO gets all their leadership team into one room. Pure accountability. What are you up to? You know, what's your concern?
What are your priorities are?
That sort of reengineers, like, what I call accountability moments into the operating system, so people learn that they need to share, you know, what they are up to, what they're struggling with.
One hour a weekYou know, it's pretty small compared to whatever forty, fifty, sixty hours you have in a company.
So I always suggest that for the CEO that for one hour a week get the leadership team together but then we architect the agenda in a way that's actually useful for everyone, so we don't do sort of railroading into some product feature discussion Yeah, and those accountability moments, as you call them, are important to do both as a group, but also in your one-on-ones.
But if you only save those conversations for one-on-ones, the context gets lost to the rest of the audience who may need to have some input or some visibility.
And so I think you're right, it's important to at least have that one meeting where people are expected to talk and present and share both challenges and successes kind of along the way, because otherwise that communication breaks down very quickly.
Exactly. And also, people don't like it when they are thrown under the bus. So imagine the product is not delivering, but actually the real reason is because their dependency in Eng is not delivering.
So unless you have them in the room all together, it might just look like, oh, product is thrown under the bus here, and they're just waiting on their dependency, that they don't have the opportunity to share with the group that's what's actually happened.
I love that we've gone through the flywheel here of the CEO operating system, and as you said would happen, we've ended back on people.
And I'm curious, and I know you'll be talking about this more at Chief of Staff Connect in London this November, but going back to how people are working together and, you know, this notion of accountability, it's obviously not all easy, right?
It's not all kind of sunshine and roses every day. People are not going to agree with each other all the time.
Talk to us a little bit about conflict resolution and your approach to hearing kind of difficult situations between CEO and team, between two executive colleagues.
How do you kind of coach folks through navigating those situations? It's hard, right? Because we are not machines. We don't run on an algorithm that we can all understand and then work with. It's tough.
I sometimes end up mediating also between co-founders or CEO and an executive, and there are different approaches because we all have our own mindset and baggage and narratives. We all create our own narratives.
It's combination of EQ and IQ, right?
So I have some tools in the toolkit, like the drama triangle I'm gonna bring to the Chief of Staff Connect, which I really enjoy using because it's applicable for, you know, personal life and also professional context.
But, you know, I would say that most of the time, fundamentally the issue is that we all create our own narrative about ourselves and about the actions of the other person.
You can have same thing, you know, objectively speaking, the same story, what happened, the same situation, and the two people will have a different recollection of what actually happened and what they made that thing mean, right?
So if somebody, I don't know, doesn't text me back within twenty-four hours, I might go into a spiral and be like, "They don't like me anymore. They think I'm an idiot. They don't wanna work with me," whatever.
And I'm just creating this narrative in my mind which, you know, fundamentally goes back to my own issues. Like it's more about me projecting my own insecurities.
It has nothing to do with the other person and the fact that they were literally on a flight and just trying to come up for air and, you know, they have a hundred unread messages and WhatsApp pings.
So most of the conflict I see is because of the narratives that we create, so a lot of the times my work is to unpack the narrative and understand what made them get to that conclusion or to that narrative and then try to bring them closer together.
Now, the drama triangle, which we're gonna talk about at Connect, is something that comes from therapy actually, because it's super applicable to day-to-day life.
And the idea is that usually unhealthy conflicts, like conflict that's very hard to resolve, you don't really get to a resolution, happens when people take on one of the three roles in the drama triangle.
One is the victim. It's called something different, so depending on what you look up, but I use the terms victim, villain, and hero.
So the victim is the one who thinks that everything happens to them, life happens to them. They are not getting what they think they should be getting.
There's a bit of entitlement sometimes, and they feel very powerless in the situation. The villain is who... You know, the attacker or someone who makes the victim suffer.
And then the hero is the one who sort of comes in and solves the solution, but it's usually a very temporary solution, and the only way they can solve the solution is by them coming in, saving the day, and they usually love the role.
They love being the hero and being needed and feel like they are the one solving it.
So personal life or, you know, non-work example would be if you think about some unhealthy family dynamics where maybe one parent is sort of the villain, where they always in the wrong mood or they're stressed or irritated and everybody around them, you know, have to like tiptoe around them because everything is about them and their mood, and they, you know, yell at maybe one of the siblings or the other spouse, or they're just being really difficult to deal with.
So they kind of have this villain role sometimes and, and they stick to that role for many, many years even.
And then you have maybe someone they take their anger out on, maybe one of the siblings that's always, you know, they are the black sheep. They can't do anything right.
Like, they are the sort of victim in the dynamic, and there m- might be another sibling who's the hero, who comes in and smooths things over and, like, you know, talks them through things and just restores the peace.
But it's a repetitive dynamic because the real resolution never arrives.
There's a sort of temporary relief because the hero comes in.So just bringing this up because that could be a dynamic that you've seen, you know, in your own life or other people's life, and as long as people are in their role, so the victim, the hero, or the villain, they're not able to get out of that role, the issue gonna continue.
It's gonna be exact same conversation, different topic, but it's the same conversation, the same dynamic, and there's never a resolution in this.
The reason I like this because especially when I think about chief of staff and the workplace, so the workplace also has this dynamic.
So an example would be where, say, the CEO is upset that the product lead is not delivering, and the roadmap is way behind. It's not getting the results they want. Maybe the person is incompetent.
They should fire the head of product. It's just not working, right? So that's the villain.
The head of product goes into the victim mode, potentially, if it's an unhealthy dynamic, and says, "Well, I can never figure out what the CEO wants. They change their mind all the time.
They change the product all the time. There's nothing I can do to deliver because I'm looking at goalposts that's moving, like, every two weeks." Right?
So they get into this victim mindset, and then we might have a chief of staff in the mix, right?
The hero who sort of wants to come in and save the day, and then they will go, I don't know, work out a new product roadmap, or they just take it on, and they just put it together, maybe get some input from the head of product, but it's them coming in, saving the day.
The reason why I wanted to bring this to the Chief of Staff Connect is because I see often chief of staff having to deal with this type of dynamic at the workplace, so first thing is to recognize, and maybe I'll talk about how to recognize and understand this is what's happening.
And then second, I see chief of staff often taking on the hero role, which, yes, gets to some immediate solution, but it's actually not gonna create lasting change because the answer is always that the chief of staff steps in and save the day, and, you know, they do everybody's work at the [chuckles] end of the day.
So I really want to unpack this at the event and see, okay, how can chief of staff navigate this type of dynamic so that they can help the company and help the principal at the end of the day, not just a temporarily quick fix solution, but a more longer term solution.
Yeah, I love that. We recently released a framework for chief of staff archetypes, which you may have seen, and one of the archetypes that we identified is the Swiss Army knife, right?
The person that kind of can wear many hats, has lots of tools in their repertoire, right, can kind of step in and fill gaps or solve problems that first sight seem out of their domain, but, you know, they're good enough at to go fix.
And the shadow version of that archetype is the plate spinner, right?
The person that is spinning too many plates and is trying to solve too many problems, and as you're saying, kind of is trying to be the hero everywhere. That's a really dangerous path for chiefs of staff, right?
And it can be hard to recognize, I think, when you're acting like the Swiss Army knife, right, kind of the, the positive version of the archetype and actually, you know, able to solve the problems, but sometimes shifting into that shadow mode of maybe playing hero too often.
And what's interesting about this framework, the drama triangle framework, is the reality is the villain and victim wouldn't necessarily exist without the hero, right?
It is a perfect triangle because without the hero, the villain has no one to kind of step in, and the victim has no one to step in to solve.
And so you could potentially argue that, like, if the chief of staff wasn't always hero or, or someone else kind of stepping in to solve the problem, maybe that villain/victim archetype totally goes away as well.
Anyways, will be very interesting to kind of hear some other folks' stories about them potentially playing hero or being victim or being villain in some cases at Connect.
And people switch, uh, roles, by the way, so that's when it gets even more interesting, when the victim becomes the villain and the villain becomes the victim and the roles will switch.
And sometimes the chief of staff also has to become the villain, right? If you know the sort of good cop, bad cop, like that's more known in the chief of staff circles, how they play that with the principal.
Sometimes the chief of staff can slide into being the villain in the situation, so that's also gets quite interesting. And you don't always need three people for the three roles.
Sometimes people are enough, and they switch hats depending on how the conversation goes. Interesting. Yeah.
So even in a single situation you can wear multiple hats kind of depending on how that conversation is transitioning. I'm excited to learn more, Dora.
This is a really cool tool and, again, applicable to personal life as well.
You know, when you get stuck in the same conversation, the same argument over and over and over again, chances are there is some drama triangle dynamic happening there. We've talked about the operating system.
We've talked about the drama triangle. A lot of this conversation has kind of centered on people.
Before we break here, is there any kind of parting words that you would give to a chief of staff in terms of identifying patterns, shifting team dynamics towards empowerment and alignment of their teams?
What is the thing that you try to leave the CEOs that you work with or the chiefs of staff as, like, the main takeaway for how to be better at their roles?
I think especially now that, you know, more and more chief of staff are comfortable with using AI and have a lot of tools at their disposal, a lot of the stuff we talked about, even in the operating system, the, the OKR execution stuff, the operating model, those things are very playbooky, very tool kity.
It's not rocket science. I think where things get more tricky is the people side.
And so I see that the biggest difference between a good chief of staff and a great chief of staff is how much the chief of staff can lean into the people dynamics, how much they can tell the truth to their principal, which is something that nobody else will tell the principal.
So developing that sort of sense for what's not being said, what are the underlying dynamics, I think those are going to be even more important in this world where you have all the toolkits, all the AIs, all the playbooks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Any good chief of staff can have access to those things and do those things. It's the soft things that are the hard things. I think that's gonna differentiate a great chief of staff from a good one.
It's an excellent answer. Dora, it's been a real pleasure on this podcast with you. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and I'm excited for Chief of Staff Connect in November. Thank you for having me.
And yeah, it's coming up soon. Yeah. We'll do this again sometime soon. Sounds good.
[upbeat music]