“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff

I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:

Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.

Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/deputy duos regardless of titles):

1. Split the CEO's role into component parts and assign responsibility for each part to CEO or CoS
   1. Example: CEO does fundraising; CoS does budgets
   2. Advantages: focus, accountability
2. Share the CEO's role with both CEO and CoS actively involved in each component part
   1. Example: CEO speaks to funders based on materials prepared by CoS; CEO assigns team budget allocations which are implemented by CoS
   2. Advantages: flex capacity, gatekeeping

Some things to note about these approaches:

• In practice, it’s inevitably some combination of the two, but I think it’s really important to be intentional and explicit about what’s being split and what’s being shared
  • Failure to do this causes confusion, dropped balls, and duplication of effort
  • Sharing is especially valuable during the early phases of your collaboration because it facilitates context-swapping and model-building
  • I don’t think you’d ever want to get all the way or too far towards split, because then you functionally have one more department-lead-equivalent, and you lose a lot of the benefits in terms of flex capacity and especially continuity
• Both approaches depend on trust, and maximising them depends on an unusually high degree of trust
  • CEO trusting CoS to act on their behalf
    • In turn, this depends on trusting their judgement, and in particular trusting their judgement of when it’s appropriate to act unilaterally and when it’s appropriate to get input/approval from CEO
  • Others trusting that CoS is empowered to and capable of acting on CEO’s behalf
    • Doesn’t work if CEO and CoS disagree or undermine each other’s decisions in view of others, or if others expect CoS decisions to be overturned by CEO
    • It being easier to burn credibility than to build it is something close to an iron law, which means CoS should tread carefully while establishing the bounds of their delegated authority
• It’s not a seniority thing: an Executive Assistant having responsibility for scheduling is an example of splitting the role; a Managing Director doing copyedits for the CEO’s op-ed is an example of sharing the role
• I don’t think the title “CoS” matters, but I do think maximising the benefits of both models requires the deputy to have a title that conveys that they both represent and can act unilaterally on behalf of the principal to some meaningful degree
  • Managing Director and Chief of Staff do this; Project Manager and Exec Assistant do not

Congratulations on developing and launching this new strategy!

I'm Chief of Staff at CEA, and as we wrote in our own recently-published strategy post, we're making diversifying EA funding a central part of our efforts to steward the community in the coming years, and I'm excited about us exploring more ways to collaborate on making pledges a big piece of that puzzle.

Staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our total spending, but the proportion increased in 2024 compared to 2023 (28% vs 21%).

Between 2021 and 2023, our total spending increased by 264% (from $6.9m to $25.1m), while our headcount increased only 40% (from 24 to 34), which meant we had insufficient capacity to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs. This informed our decision to make foundation-building our organizational priority in 2024, including both investing in hiring to increase our capacity and cutting non-staff costs, with the majority of savings (per Ollie's comment) being contributed by lower spending on events, especially EAG.

If you want to know more, we (CEA) just published our stewardship strategy, focused on building sustainable momentum for the EA community

“In my role at CEA, I embrace an approach to EA that I (and others) refer to as “principles-first”. This approach doubles down on the claim that EA is bigger than any one cause area. EA is not AI safety; EA is not longtermism; EA is not effective giving; and so on. Rather than recommending a single, fixed answer to the question of how we can best help others, I think the value of EA lies in asking that question in the first place and the tools and principles EA provides to help people approach that question.”

Zach wrote this last year in his first substantive post as CEO of CEA, announcing that CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA. (I’m Zach’s Chief of Staff.) Our approach remains the same today: we’re as motivated as ever about stewarding the EA community and ensuring that together we live up to our full potential.

Collectively living up to our full potential ultimately requires making a direct impact. Even under our principles-first approach, impact is our north star, and we exist to serve the world, not the EA community itself. But Zach and I continue to believe there is no other set of principles that has the same transformative potential to address the world’s most pressing problems as EA principles. So, in our assessment, at this moment in time, the best way for CEA to make progress towards our ultimate goal is sustainably growing the number of people putting EA principles into practice.

In reaching and implementing their decision to shift their strategic approach, Niel and others at 80k are putting those principles into practice. While we might disagree about some of the particulars, or draw different conclusions, we don’t disagree that updating in response to new information is appropriate, that AI risk reduction is a critically important cause, or that achieving progress at the scale and speed required will require making some hard trade-offs. We agree that there will be implications and opportunities for our community, including for CEA, in terms of filling some of the gaps 80k might leave behind, and this transition will be made smoother by the fact we are all still shooting for the same north star.

I want to recognize that these are big shoes to fill: 80k has built an incredibly impressive team, developed a set of remarkable products, and earned great respect from a wide audience. I’m both sad that this unique combination won’t be deployed so directly in stewardship of EA, and excited to see what it can achieve with even greater focus.

Quick followup to note that collaborative spirit is included among CEA's Guiding Principles listed on the CEA site. Clearly it's confusing - including to a member of CEA's own staff like me! - that we refer to different things as 'principles' in different places, and that might be something we look to clarify if and when we revisit these pages as Zach Era CEA.

Thanks for reading closely, and for flagging this! While CEA is the owner of EA.org, the intro essay was drafted by a collaborative process including non-CEA staff, and the final version was written by 80k's Ben Todd (more in the essay's announcement here).

The discrepancy is tracking the reality that there is no consensus about how best to define EA, although I think the omission of collaborative spirit from the CEA page is an oversight and I expect we will edit it accordingly soon.

Our (CEA's) website has a page about core EA principles.

And note that Zach has said elsewhere he intends to write more about his views in due course.

Circling back to say we recently published CEA's 2023 budget.

Note that we project spending to be substantially under budget.

In 2021, we spent $6.9m and ended the year with 29 staff. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because those staff include five members of what was then the CEA ops team, and is now the EV Ops team, so the more direct comparison is with 24 staff at that time.

You can see on our dashboard some of the ways our programs have changed since 2021 (three in-person EAG events compared to one, nine EAGx events compared to zero, etc).