[upbeat music] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Chief of Staff podcast. I'm your host for today, Scott Anenta, founder of the Chief of Staff Network.
Today's guest is Marlen Heyske, chief of staff at Enpal, one of Germany's few renewable energy unicorns, and a company that has become a defining name in the European clean tech landscape.
Marlen's path to the chief of staff role is as unique as many others we've heard. In this conversation, we get into what it means to operate as a chief of staff inside a growing company at serious speed.
Marlen also shares some hard-won lessons around perfectionism, patience, and knowing when to plant a seed versus when to push hard.
She's been an early and incredible advocate for the role in Germany, and someone I've been wanting to get on the show for a while. This conversation did not disappoint. Let's get into it.
Marlen, welcome to the Chief of Staff podcast. So nice to have you here. Thank you so much for having me, Scott. It's an honor.
[chuckles] If I hadn't moved, we could have done this in person in Berlin, so I, I'm sorry that I've left the city. That's true. I mean, today the sun is also shining in Berlin, but I understand moving to Mallorca.
[chuckles] The, the winter dynamics in Berlin definitely, uh, is a forcing function, but honestly, I w- I will stand by saying there's nothing better than summertime in Berlin. That is true.
I am also quite excited for that one. [chuckles] While I'm sweltering in the heat over here, you can enjoy the city. But I will see you in July for Connect, so that will be nice. Correct. Also super excited for that one.
All right. Well, I'm excited to talk a little bit more about your career history and your path to Enpal, so let's kick it off.
You've moved through some really different environments from what I've seen on your profile, including academic research, venture building, and you're now at Germany's biggest energy tech company, Enpal.
Take us back to the beginning. What did you study? What did you think you were gonna do with it?
So maybe to go all the way back, like, looking at the first couple of jobs that I had while, you know, still being high school, et cetera, I always already knew that I loved working with people and supporting people.
So whether tutoring or whatever the heck it was, I really enjoyed this aspect of helping people, supporting people, enabling them to do their best.
I then went abroad for a year, and when I came back, started studying socioeconomics, which is quite unique to the University of Hamburg in this case. It's a mix of business, sociology, economics, and law.
Some people say it's for the people that don't know what they wanna do, but I felt like it was more for the people that are generalists and that are curious about various things.
The purpose was also a little bit to educate the critical thinkers and really also see the maybe differences that you sometimes have from theory and business versus the theory and sociology, because there are some contradictions.
So really enjoyed getting this broad overview of how society works.
And throughout my university experience, I already had the chance to also work in various environments, so going from teaching students at high schools how to fight without killing themselves necessarily, so, like, anti-violence communications, et cetera.
That was super fun, doing social skills trainings effectively in schools. I was at Greenpeace for a while in their department for fundraising.
I then did a one-eighty and went to an HR consultancy, so kind of going from the Greenpeace environment, where it's, you know, a bit more relaxed, and then suddenly having to wear a suit to work because you are at an HR consultancy.
And so also, again, tied to getting this broad overview and getting to know what actually is out there, what could I be doing with my life?
Always enjoying being close to humans and working with people and creating structure, and again, enabling people to do their best work.
But I will also be entirely honest, I never really had the big goal of, "That's what I wanna do."
I always knew what I liked and what I enjoyed, but I was never someone who said, "I wanna be CEO," or, "I wanna go in this field or this field." That was never me.
And then the year before I actually graduated university, I got to do an internship at eBay in Silicon Valley for a little while there with other students as well.
This was in their internal IT department, and I essentially worked with other students on different projects.
And I, back then, looked at their leadership team for the internal IT team and kind of checked, "Okay, who can I identify with, and who's doing something where I feel like that's fun, that's cool, they have impact, and it also goes along with my strengths and with my weaknesses?"
And that turned out to be the chief of staff of the CIO that I just kind of related to. Had a conversation with her as well, trying to get to know, like, what is her job actually?
Because as you will also know, the chief of staff role can mean various things.
Did my own research also in what this role means, and went back to university to kind of finish my bachelor thesis, and while doing so, got a call from someone at eBay here in Europe who was the senior lead for IT in all of EMEA, who essentially said, "Hey, I kind of need someone like the chief of staff, just over here in Europe and maybe a bit more junior.
And I heard you're cool. I heard you know some things. Maybe you wanna come down to Berlin and have a ta- and have a chat." And that's essentially how also my first full-time job came about. It wasn't really planned.
It wasn't like I want to be going in this direction, but it was more like, it could be a match, like, let's try to figure this out.
So back then, the decision was for me, do I pursue a master's or do I actually try this out first? And I felt like this opportunity was something, hey, maybe it won't come along again like this.
I also wanna get some practical experience and go out in the world, so I decided on that trajectory. So I had a direct reporting role to the lead for IT EMEA. I had a dotted line to the chief of staff.
The chief of staff unfortunately left shortly after and wasn't replaced, so I was also trying to figure out a lot of my own things.
My key focus areas were a lot of, like, internal, external comms, process optimization, looking at learning and development opportunities for the team, and just generally seeing how the IT team over here in EMEA, I think around, like, seventy, eighty people work.Where are maybe gaps?
How can we make everyone be a bit more efficient? And from then on, it just sort of developed and continued from there.
After about one and a half years, I jumped ship because someone I knew wanted to start an interior startup essentially, and was looking for someone to take care of all the operations.
I knew them, so I was put together with her. She was the founder and head of creative, and then I essentially took care of everything else. So that was my first super early-stage startup.
It, it didn't end up working out, which is also completely fine.
Great learning experience for me for a year, where we tried to figure out different business models and what do we actually wanna do and what would the team look like, et cetera.
Um, and also supporting on the creative side of what would the interior products that we actually create look like.
Again, in the end, didn't end up working out, and then I came to this venture builder 'cause then I felt like, okay, this startup world is actually super fascinating.
I know personally that I wanna work in the impact space. Like, sustainability, super important to me.
I am a very impact-driven person, so kind of looking for a role within the startup space that has some sort of positive impact on the planet that we live in, and then stumbled across a venture builder for a circular economy, where I first started as venture operations manager, basically focusing on enabling all the venture builders to do their best work.
Those were some administrative tasks, you know, like what kind of events do we have, organizing all hands, et cetera, organizing off-sites, but also really looking into governance topics, into people topics, and building that base layer.
Right off the bat though, I had also communicated that this role really does remind me of a chief of staff, like it could at some point develop into one.
So even before I was hired, I already said, "Okay, for me, it's important to have that trajectory," because- You planted that early...
I planted that right from the start because, you know, I know that that's what I wanted to be at some point.
I talked to the two MDs, again, before I even signed the contract, and they were, like, totally open to having this type of development.
So after two years, I then also became chief of staff, which mainly meant, as a progress to the role I had previously, to be more independent, to have my own projects, you know, very focused on building a community and me essentially being the head of that community, having also people reporting to me to actually realize this, the topics that I was working on, and that was so much fun.
I think creating this role was a lot of fun.
I'm still very grateful that I also had this freedom to do so, where I essentially, you know, wrote my own job description of what I think the chief of staff could be doing in this context, and then organizing the goals that I had on a quarterly basis to align with these new responsibilities at some point and then really grow into this role, I think, also at a very healthy and sustainable rate, which was awesome.
Cool. Before we jump into your time at NPAL, I wanna go back to some of the things that you said.
First of all, I find it really interesting that you looking up to a potential mentor at eBay was the first time that the chief of staff title entered your world, and then as something that you carried with you in other aspects of your career, whether wittingly or unwittingly, right?
That became a through line as you were looking at new roles and saying, "Okay, well, this is how this position could be crafted and work at a very early-stage company, at a venture builder organization," and now at your current role, you know, in a much larger company.
It's interesting that it wasn't something that you sought out, and I guess that's probably the most natural way that it would have entered your world given that the role is also relatively quite new in Germany.
It's not a title that has been thrown around, certainly in the last five years.
Last two or three years, it's been growing a lot, but five, 10 years ago, it was not something that anyone was talking about, and for you to have kinda taken it back from your time in San Francisco at eBay and carried that as part of how you were going to shape your career I think is fascinating.
Was it something that you were pretty adamant about for every company that you were joining? Like, was it always something that you were exploring, "Hey, this could be a chief of staff role.
Hey, this is what the makeup of this role might look like inside a five-person company versus a venture studio"? What was your understanding of the chief of staff role, I guess, before you stepped into it the first time?
How quickly did that understanding change?
I think being at eBay and then doing kind of the first very superficial research, I understood the role as being the connector essentially between the C-suite, so senior leadership, and then the entire team.
So being the translator in both ways and making sure that the entire team knows where we're going, what C-level wants, but then also vice versa, saying, "Hey, this is how the team is doing.
This is maybe the direction we should be headed. This is what the team is feeling." And this is, of course, for a larger team, how it worked at eBay IT. Those were, I think, 500 people globally at that point.
Might be a totally [chuckles] different number now, but that was what it was, yeah, around seven years ago now.
And then I think the key learning that I had afterwards, after also talking to more chief of staffs and also reading a book about it and just learning about things, was yes, it can be that, but the chief of staff role is probably one of the most flexible roles that I know, where, yes, you can be the translator between people.
Some people might also simply be the extended arm of C-level. For some teams, it might be this is the joker.
Maybe they don't even talk to the rest of the team, but this is the joker that we can put on various projects, whether that's within finance or ops or people, whatever, and we know this thing will be solved.
So, like, being this person that has a lot of variance to them.
So I think key learning is I still see the classic chief of staff as being that translator as one of the key objectives, but there are so many different interpretations out there now, depending on are you in the US versus Europe versus other countries, how junior or senior are you, because I know people that are super junior and super new to the role and maybe even come fresh out of university, which for me was a surprise, but if it works, it works.But then you also have chief of staffs, you know, that have 15 years of experience and that run the entire CEO office, for example, and have a team of five people reporting to them.
So the key learning was there's so much more variance to this role than I thought at the beginning.
Yeah, I think heavily dynamic and also very dependent on what your past experience is and background is, and what level of leadership you're entering into the role for. Exactly.
And also dependent, obviously, on the leadership that you are reporting to, because for me, it also often fills the gaps, basically, of what leadership maybe from their skill set currently isn't covering or isn't capable to cover.
So there's a lot to it. It's quite interesting. Let's fast-forward a little bit, 'cause now you're at a much larger organization at Enpal. What made Enpal the right move for you?
And I guess while you get into that, tell us a little bit about the company, the mission, your principal.
So maybe to start off, Enpal is one of the leading renewable energy unicorns out of Germany, so founded in Berlin, and essentially the mission is to make energy sustainable, free, and accessible to everyone.
We were founded 2017. We just reached a billion in revenue, which was great, last year, so again, heavily growing, close to around 5,000, uh, employees worldwide. I personally work for one of the managing directors.
We have four managing directors for the parent company, and I work for the one that is responsible for production engineering and supply chains.
So I'm not the chief of staff for the entire company, but focused on production engineering and supply chains. What made me switch?
At the venture builder that I was at before, at New Ventures, I realized that I had gotten to a point where I love my job, I love the team, I love the mission, but I felt like my growth trajectory simply was slowly slowing down.
It's also a company, we had built startups, spun them out, and then the startups grow.
The venture builder itself wasn't planned to grow heavily, so I knew that my scope wouldn't necessarily be growing unless I switch into one of the startups we spun out.
The startups were still too early stage to need someone with a skill set like me.
So I wasn't never actively looking, 'cause I was still quite happy, but then I was approached and essentially recruited for this role, you could say, which was super emotional process, to also be honest, uh, because New Ventures was, again, super dear to my heart.
But what essentially drew me in at the end, Enpal is a super impact-driven company. That was important to me.
I knew that the next step would be at a larger scale company, so I knew from like early stage, startup, pre-seed, I would want to go into a scale-up, you know, series A, B, C, D, something along those lines, which when you look at the landscape in Berlin, Enpal was kind of the only answer to that, nearly.
So mission was perfect. The role was also... So the chief of staff role, we already said, can go in various directions.
I knew I wanted to keep that title for a while, and with the role that I was recruited for, I knew that there was a big skill set match, because key responsibilities, again, governance, organizational effectivity, people topics.
My lead also was based in Shenzhen, so in China, so one of the key responsibilities is also bridging that gap between the China office and then Germany to make sure everything runs smoothly over here and to make sure that if there is an escalation, we can also get him on board.
So that was the second one, mission good. The job description essentially really also fit my needs.
And then something that's also super important to me is simply the team fit, where obviously I met several people before.
I had several conversations with the MD, and I had a very good feeling about the team fit, and I think that's the key point.
You don't always have to get along, because nothing is always, you know, happy butterflies and flowers everywhere, but you need to have the confidence that if there is a conflict, we can solve this conflict in a logical and human matter.
I think unfortunately that's one of those things that you have to rely on true gut instinct to ascertain.
You can ask all the questions in the world in the interview process, but it's hard to judge how people will really react in challenging emotional situations until you're truly there.
I think that's especially poignant for your principal as well. So how did those interview process with your principal go?
What was it like, you know, the first couple weeks after you actually joined, building that relationship with your managing director?
It really depends on how you approach things with him and how honest you are from the start. Where I also knew he's obviously very busy.
He's not someone that can take several hours per week to onboard me, so I think a key thing here is also building your own plan, and from the start, looking at what is the org structure like? Who is which lead?
Where is which VP and director? Who has which potential influence? Who is responsible for which decisions?
And then mainly check in with those leads and have your own one-on-ones and build your own understanding of the org, which as a general, I think, recommendation to any chief of staff stepping into this role at a new company, when you also look at, you know, what should you be doing in the first 90 days or so, try to understand everything first.
I often see people that are heavily in execution mode and, like, see something on day one and want to solve it by day three, which for the role that you have as a chief of staff, I always recommend taking more time than that.
Because your key objective is not to solve every single issue at the company or to completely revolutionize your team, but it is to understand where the organization currently is, understand where the principal wants it to head or where the principal also sees key issues, and then kind of creating your own thought process on do I agree with this?
Yes, no. Who are the other stakeholders at play? And then giving your principal recommendations and saying, "Okay, these are the issues that I'm seeing. This is, I think, the direction we should be heading to.
Do we have the same opinion? If yes, great, let's go.
If no, let me understand why you have this approach."So taking the time, understand obviously the content, what's at hand, which for me also took some time because I was suddenly working in supply chain at a renewable energy company talking about, you know, the best important solar panels coming from this.
We build ventures in the circularity space, so definitely took some time, but it's super important to take the time so you can also challenge things and push things into the right direction. I completely agree.
I think everyone's natural instinct, especially in this role or coming out of any operations or strategy position, is go, go, go, execute as quickly as possible, show real wins, prove your value, and that's often at the expense of slowing down, taking the time to really understand the team, the team's dynamic, as you said, where the principal and the organization is today and what the vision is for tomorrow and, and much further than that.
That's a totally different style of working and set of tasks, right? But there are tasks to do there, right?
Sitting down and having real conversations with people and actually understanding what their motivations are, what gets them up in the morning, what's keeping them up at night, are the things that drive this kind of living organization forward, and it takes a human to do that, and I think the chief of staff is kind of best equipped to do that.
But only when they enter knowing that that's the first job, right? If they're immediately given a set of priorities and tasks and go figure out our strategy and solve the OKR process, that should all come later.
It- it's not kind of the first thing that I think really matters and makes this role effective.
That being said, you are working for a scale-up where I'm sure speed is one of the most important, maybe not on your values list, but certainly something that is probably often discussed.
When people say a company's moving at kind of scale-up speed, it can sound a little bit like a cliché, and maybe scale-up speed is different in the European mindset than the American mindset. Who knows?
I'll let us argue over that one together. [laughs] So what does this actually mean from the inside, like sitting in a chief of staff seat?
What did it feel like after you took kind of those slow moments to get your bearings? So how does it feel now?
So I think speed really does matter, and when it comes to how quick is the company operating, you need to figure out your own role, also together with your principal.
For the area that I'm working in, which is about, you know, we want to create a new product, or we want to update a product, let's make sure who are we working with in order to realize this? What do we need?
How do we get this going? So going from there's a product demand to we can install this at a customer, how do you approach this in the best way? And then again, also asking, as a chief of staff, what is my role here?
Am I the pusher? Am I the one who asks questions? Am I the one who does reality checks? Where do I really sit? What really makes sense in this case?
And for me, that essentially means, I think when it comes to scale-ups or also venture builders, the issue is never not enough ambition, not enough speed.
It's more so that there are too many parallel ambitions happening, and you need to figure out where do we actually need to drive and how do we take this ambition?
Because ambition's super important, but when you're going in three different directions at four different speed levels, that's an issue.
So for me, that usually always meant let's quickly sit down, let's do a reality check, let's see what we actually can realize, and how do we make this work in the goal setup that we have?
So in this case, in our North Star setup, in our OKR setup, what is actually the structure behind this?
My favorite motto when it comes to things like this that I also learned from a former boss of mine is clarity before harmony. Let's not say yes to everything.
Let's sit down and see what are the trade-offs when we want to do this or this, and let's do a reality check on senior leadership level.
So creating clarity, getting everyone aligned, writing this down in the OKRs, in the North Stars, whatever it may be, and then going into this direction.
Also having regular check-ins every couple of weeks on this is still the OKRs that we're aiming for. Does this still make sense? Do we need to adjust them maybe?
But for me, key mission is let's try to hold this all together in our OKR framework and make sure that this is the direction that we want to be heading, and then have the team run into this direction. I love that.
We did talk a little bit about the chief of staff being the connective tissue between the executive team and the rest of the company.
When you talk about figuring out what the real priorities are versus what feels urgent in the moment, which often become the biggest distractions, not just to the exec team, but to the whole company, where does the chief of staff, in your mind, play a role?
Where does your time get spent in either translating those goals back down to the rest of the organization or actually figuring out the strategy and, like, doing the homework alongside a product team or a biz ops team or whoever might kind of also be responsible for those things?
Where do you end up spending your time? And obviously, this is a big company, so you're gonna be maybe not across the whole organization, but certainly a big chunk of it.
So again, this is very subjective to the way that I do the role.
There's a million other ways of doing this, but my key objective here is never to make the decision or drive a certain decision, or also even push into a certain direction.
It's more so bringing transparency and clarity so we can make a very clear decision on what we're talking about. So kind of understanding what are the trade-offs?
Who do we need to get on board in order to understand the trade-offs? Did we think of everyone involved, or did we not?
And then enabling, essentially, senior leadership to, based on that, then make the accurate decision. We should never be an organization where everyone says no, you know, and we're not doing certain things because of it.
It's more so let's have the bird's-eye view.
I also have the expectation to my principal and senior leadership to also have that bird's-eye view, but then there's still certain silos that some people can get into, so it's also part of my responsibility, right, to do that and to really make trade-offs visible in the end.Are there things that only you could see from your position in the organization?
Does the chief of staff title or the role afford you a certain level of relationship building or trust and confidence from other members of the team that help to bubble up potential challenges and help you see around some of the corners where issues might arise that then helps to set the strategic direction of the organization?
Even though these people are ultimately reporting into your principal, it doesn't necessarily mean all the information is traveling in that direction, and I think a chief of staff, like, working from the bottom up and also the top down has a certain level of confidence that can be built amongst the team that then inspires that information to be shared more fluidly.
And that doesn't mean that you're the gatekeeper all the time. It does mean that when you enter that exec room, like, you have a different perspective than what each of the P&L owners might have.
I think my first reaction was to say no, simply because I don't think it's the chief of staff role. It should come with the territory, but I also know chief of staffs that maybe work in a different way.
For me, it absolutely is the case where the focus really is also on building personal relationships in order to have my own way and network of getting information because, you know, always depends on your principals.
Some are better at being transparent about information and also knowing what to share with me or not, but that's not the case for everyone.
So sometimes you have to figure out things on your own and build your network, not just within my team, but also beyond that.
And also, in my case, talk to other chief of staffs and kind of being in the know on what their teams are doing, um, talking to different people from the CEO office or so, just to make sure that I can be informed on various topics and based on that, make recommendations to my principal, but then also to other senior leaders in the team.
So kind of being that informed fly on the wall in certain ways and certain aspects.
And for that, one of the, I think, most crucial things a chief of staff needs to be is, again, a people person and really make sure that you can build this network and you also have the trust.
How I describe this role is I don't need to be an expert like a VP, for example, but what I need to be is a trusted advisor, where people trust me to share information because I will not simply give through every information that I get.
Based on that, also giving advice and pushing the org in the right direction. Let's talk a little bit about what that looks like in practice.
So when priorities are shifting constantly, you're having lots of conversations, either in structured meetings, one-on-ones, group team meetings.
How do you help your principal stay oriented without becoming the person who just, like, pumps the brakes on everything when too much is going on?
What does your day-to-day sometimes look like when things are going really well or, like, when things are not going really well?
[laughs] I think it's important as a chief of staff to not be a yes, but, but a yes, and person, where it's not my role to stop anything because if certain things are prioritized, then they need to happen.
It's important to get that one-on-one time with your C-level because I also won't be the person to, in a big meeting, say, "Yes, we cannot do this," whatever.
For me, it's super important to guide my principal so he can make that decision, or he can have that statement and that say.
But the key thing is in those one-on-ones that one needs to have regularly, at least weekly, I know some chief of staff that don't, but I think it's highly important to talk with your C-level several times a week, ideally, to end those conversations, be very candid and be very honest and not hold back.
If you're holding back because for some reason you don't have the trust to kind of speak your mind and say what you're seeing, then it's the wrong role, basically.
That might sound harsh, but you need to have these kind of conversations of what you're seeing, of what you're feeling.
Also, if you think your principal is going into the wrong directions, you need to be very blunt and honest about that towards them.
We've talked a little bit about how the chief of staff role is kind of famously hard to define. There are certainly guardrails that I think many of us would agree do exist around the position.
How did you personally shape the scope of the role when you joined NPAL, and what has changed since then? Or has it remained mostly the same as when you entered?
It definitely changes with how the, the role is kind of evolving because sometimes certain things were planned that my principal in this case would do.
He ended up not doing these things because some other C-level took over in this case, so again, priorities shifting.
The thing that I remain to be essentially is the person for the entire OKR governance, what I would call, like, the backbone, the skeleton of how we work, and then certain people processes.
There were a couple of other projects that I took over also to get to know more of the NPAL environment, you know, like a customs compliance project, which never dealt with customs.
No idea what I was doing there, but still a very great learning experience.
The role is shifting at the moment heavily because my principal is also leaving the organization, which great for him, I think he's doing a great next step.
For me, this currently means that I'm talking to various people at NPAL to see, you know, where could I be needed with my skill set next. It's not certain yet. We haven't fully figured it out.
There's still a lot to do on the governance side for my team specifically, but I'm essentially talking to various teams at the moment, figuring out what is the next good step, also beyond chief of staff.
Kind of gives me an anxious feeling 'cause it's been a role that I've had for over two and a half years now.
It was the role that I worked towards, so kind of looking beyond that now has also been quite an exciting process. It's definitely a roller coaster moment to find out that your principal is leaving.
What does a moment like that reveal about how, I don't know, you've built your own standing within the organizations? We've talked about relationships. We've talked about information flow.
You find out that your principal is leaving. You're now having conversations. Uh, we won't call it interviewing necessarily, but you're trying to find your next home within the company.
What did that moment reveal in terms of how the chief of staff role-Has reflected on kind of what you might do next There were a lot of interesting conversations, I would say, because I've also spoken to people, like leaders within the organization, that had a very different role on the chief of staff role, essentially.
Some people said it's just an assistant, essentially, working on these types of various projects. Some other kind of had the approach of it's essentially a venture developer or a project manager of sorts.
But then when I actually gave them the overview of what I was doing, how I was operating, some of them also were surprised.
Not everyone, but some, which I thought was very interesting on, like, kind of the view that people have of the chief of staff role, because there's also not a lot of education around this unless you are in the role.
But also great of having conversations with teams that essentially heard what I was doing and were like, "That's so smart.
That's such a great role, and we would actually need this type of role, and it would be awesome to, like, continue conversations."
So yeah, interesting to learn on the different perspectives people have on the role, on how people, when you tell them what you're doing, actually feel like, "Damn, that's so smart.
I need this for my team, my org," whatever it may be. I think those were the key learnings. And also just nice knowing that with the network that I've built, it was also quite easy having these conversations.
It is a fascinating insight. Really doesn't feel that obvious on the surface that NPAL has a few different chiefs of staff across the company.
You would think that the entire company would have a better sense of what you all are doing as chiefs of staff and how that works alongside your principal and the rest of the team.
And I know this from experience talking to other companies with multiple chiefs of staff. That's almost never the case.
There's always people that have totally different impressions or expectations of what you're there to do, whether that's the wrong idea of, like, this is an administrative role, all the way to the, well, you just kind of fill gaps that don't exist.
And we both know that those are not quite where the chief of staff sits.
Yeah, so it is interesting to kind of hear your take on how you had to go re-educate or educate for the first time your own company on how the chief of staff might work across different parts of the organization, and that will probably be the most natural move for you inside NPAL eventually.
Do you find that ambiguity for this role energizing, or does it get exhausting eventually?
I feel like it's energizing because I know how important the role can be for teams, and I know how much, when you're a chief of staff yourself, you can also actually grow from that and how many insights you have.
I love this role. You can learn so much from this role. I will never get tired of educating and telling people about it.
[laughs] We did talk about this a little bit at a previous Berlin event late last year, so I'd be remiss for not asking it here.
What do you think are some of the common differences between the chief of staff role in Germany and just the German adaptation of this role versus what you've seen or heard from kind of your US counterparts?
I'm happy to give my own explanation as well.
The first thing that I've noticed is there is a little bit of a hesitancy inside some, not all, German companies of just calling the role a chief of staff to begin with, and I think that hesitancy comes from, well, maybe the German language being a very strict language in terms of how words are defined and, and in what order.
And so chief of staff might sound, in some cases, too grandiose for what that person is actually doing, and that obviously is dependent on the level and the skill set and where they sit within the executive team or outside the executive team at lower levels.
And so that's why you see these other titles like a founder's associate, as an example, becoming more prevalent, and they're doing similar work. They might not be the most senior chiefs of staff.
People full German and say, ""[foreign language] "" Head of CEO office you could translate it to. [laughs] Exactly. And I, and I have seen that title translated to English on many German chief of staff equivalents.
My first takeaway is there is not an anti-cultural movement against the role necessarily, but it's a very cautious approach to, hey, we're not just going to throw this position inside our companies because all the American startups are doing this as well.
In preparing for this, I also did a little bit of research on where did this role actually come from, where did it once originate, and I was very surprised to learn, or not surprised, but I learned that it kind of came about around the 1900s, maybe from Prussia.
So back then, of course, full on military in the Western European region, coming from this military background where the chief of staff was essentially...
There was the one strategic officer who made the war decisions on where are we going, and then the chief of staff was essentially the person to realize it all and tell the army of where we're headed.
So maybe that's also a nice comparison at this point because I think in the US, from the few chief of staffs that I've spoken to, they have a lot more liberty, I would say, and they also still have a lot more influence than what I'm currently seeing in Germany, where people are like, they know that this is the extended arm of C-level, and they know that they can go to them, and they have their own projects, but what they stand is also highly relevant in any meeting.
And I think, like with a lot of things when it comes to adopting new technologies, new concepts, et cetera, Germany has been a bit more cautious with that.
The approach to the role is still a lot more cautious on various levels, but also, obviously, that depends on are you at a scale-up, at a startup, are you at a, you know, mid-size German company with hundred fifty years of company history?
Are you at a nonprofit or so? So it really depends on what type of company are we looking at and what's their dynamic there.
But as a general trend, it's a more cautious approach, but that will probably also change in the next five to ten years. I think that's right.
I think the idea in Germany of disrupting the status quo for the chain of command of how companies generally have operated for millennia feels like too big of a swing-To change all at once.
And I think where the American culture, and this definitely comes from San Francisco first and foremost, is like very willing to throw all the structures out the window and just, like, start from something new and invent it as we go.
That works to some degree. It introduces lots of friction and chaos to other degrees. That's another conversation. I think the Germans are... they're a little bit more conservative in that approach.
It's more of a wait and see, listen and learn, and that's not necessarily a wrong approach.
Lots of good things for companies built inside Germany, but it does mean that this role being so new has taken a little longer to kinda get off the ground, and Berlin is probably ahead of most German cities in terms of where most active chiefs are living and staffed today.
Part of that might be, like, large expat population across Europe and the US also helping to, like, drive and influence the culture there. But the role is now expanding pretty quickly.
I'm talking to chiefs of staff in Frankfurt and Dresden and Munich. You know, when I moved to Germany six years ago, that was definitely not the case.
I got laughed out of every room talking about chiefs of staff, and so it's nice to see that come full circle in some ways. Yeah, fully agree.
It's nice to see how it develops and how people also actually really see the value in the classic chief of staff. Yeah. And I think a lot of it will come down to speed. Industries are moving faster.
The business world is changing by the moment, and these things have become too complex for a small executive team to handle all by themselves.
One notion of a chief of staff that I've kind of always carried with me, and, and you might disagree, is that the chief of staff is there to also double the capacity of that team.
You're not there to fill 100% of their time, right? That is more administrative. It's more, "How do I manage a calendar?"
You're there to effectively double their capacity and make sure that the things that are coming out of that room are coordinated and executed across the rest of the teams.
And in a world of, like, ever-increasing complexity, that kind of role is needed because it can't be on one person or now even one person plus a bunch of agents to do on their own.
You, you need another human there actually, like, implementing, coordinating, and making sure that people are hearing and delivering the same things.
I fully agree, I think, with that notion that you are the multiplier, and you are that additional brain that you also need in order to structure everything.
Oftentimes, like principals, C-level, et cetera, they are super brilliant at what they do, obviously. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in that position.
But because of that brilliance, maybe the organizational structural abilities are either not there or not there anymore because they're focusing on other things.
So you, uh, need to be in that room in order to really not multiply that effect but actually enable the outcomes to be translated into actionable items.
Looking back at your time as a chief of staff so far in at least two companies, what are some of the things, one or two things, that you had to unlearn to get better at this role?
What are the things that you carry with you that you're like, "This is not good for me. I, I need to change this behavior or this approach"?
Almost all chief of staff that I know have this, but there is the trend that every chief of staff is a perfectionist and a control freak, and I think it's also important to be good at your role to have these instincts and to strive for this, but always striving for perfectionism will make your mental health suffer.
[laughs] So key thing is approaching things with the 80/20 rule, making sure that the 20 also happens at some point. Like, it's not like you should just forget about those 20%, in my opinion.
But making things actionable and not always pushing for perfectionism is, I think, a key thing.
And then something that I learned was also balancing essentially patience with persistence, where you want things to happen fast, and you sometimes need things to happen fast, and then you need to be super persistent and make sure that they happen.
But that is not always the case. That cannot always be the case. So you really have to choose when are you gonna chase and be super annoying persistent and be there to get in for whatever it is that you need.
But sometimes you also need to remain patient and maybe drop a seed, drop an idea somewhere, like in a little half sentence that was only there kind of said in a whisper, and then kind of sometimes watch how this seed maybe grows and how sometimes even without you knowing, things still go into the direction that you want them to head to.
'Cause sometimes you can also be too blunt with certain ideas, and then people will be like, "Ah, that doesn't work." Choosing those battles and choosing when is maybe a more patient approach the right approach.
I love that. Those feel like good parting words for the chiefs of staff listening and others looking at the role as a potential path in their career. Marlen, thank you so much for joining us today.
I enjoyed the conversation very much, and I'm looking forward to seeing you at Connect in Berlin. Yes. I'm also really looking forward to that. Thank you so much for having me. Maybe a little anecdote.
When I was building out my role to become chief of staff, like three years ago now, I listened to this podcast a lot, so it does feel like a full circle moment now to also, you know, have the privilege to join as a guest, so thank you for that.
I love to hear it. Thank you so much. That was Marlen Heske, chief of staff at NPAL. A few things from this conversation I keep coming back to.
One was her framing of clarity before harmony as a North Star for how the chief of staff operates in a fast-moving org.
The point about the 80/20 rule being not a shortcut but a mental health practice, and the observation that the role in Germany is still being defined in real time, which honestly makes it a fascinating moment to be in it.
If you found this conversation useful, please share it with someone you think could benefit from it, and leave us a review wherever you're listening. It genuinely helps the show reach more people in the community.
One more thing before we go.
Marlen will also be joining us live at the Chief of Staff Connect Berlin Forum on July 2nd, where she'll be on a panel talking about the operating system and how chiefs of staff build the machine behind scaling businesses.
If you're in Berlin or can make it there, I'd love to see you in the room. You can find the link to register in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
[outro music]