Welcome back to Top Perspectives.
One story this week, because it changes how your work reaches the room.
THIS WEEK
Chief of staff postings are up 85 percent since 2020
The New York Times spent last week on why so many CEOs are hiring a chief of staff. LinkedIn News carried the number: postings for the role are up an estimated 85 percent since early 2020. The CEO of IMAX has kept one for sixteen years. The detail worth your attention came from an expert the Times quoted. An assistant figures out what time something goes on the calendar. A chief of staff figures out whether it should go on the calendar at all.
| |
MADDY'S READ
The door to the room now has a salary. Between you and the person who decides your next role, companies just installed a professional filter, and its entire job is deciding what deserves the room's attention. Your business case. Your promotion file. Your name. Nobody announced this change, because the org chart did not change. The route to being seen did.
Here is what that means at Director and VP level. The filter does not read effort. It reads legibility. A chief of staff moving forty items a day will not reconstruct your quarter from a sixty-slide deck. What passes through is work that arrives already easy to carry: a claim anyone can repeat in a room you are not in. Talent reviews have always run this mechanism informally, where somebody summarizes you in your absence and the summary competes against every other summary at the table. The change is that the summarizer is now hired, titled and paid for exactly that judgment, which means the bar for what survives the filter just went up.
|
THE MOVE THIS WEEK
Take the one piece of work the room most needs to know about. Write the single sentence a stranger could repeat after one reading: a decision you made and the result it bought, not a description of activity. Put it at the top of your next update. You are no longer writing for your manager. You are writing for whoever carries the page into the room.
|
TOOL OF THE WEEK · THE READINESS SCORE
All of this turns on a question you can test today. When the filter reads your public signal, what passes through?
The Readiness Score reads your LinkedIn profile the way a talent review reads it and hands back the version of you that arrives ahead of you, in about two minutes.
|
See you next Monday.
Maddy
P.S. Somewhere this week a chief of staff will decide whether a name like yours makes the agenda. If a leader you rate is better than their updates, send them this issue. Then help them write the sentence.
|
CRAFT YOUR