The Chief of Staff to a UHNW principal is the most consequential appointment in a principal-led family office — and the one where principals most consistently get the specification wrong. Below are the five mistakes we see repeated across principal-led offices, and the archetype-fit test that would have prevented each of them.
1. Hiring for CV rather than temperament
The most senior candidates on paper are not always the right Chiefs of Staff. A former Bulge Bracket MD may bring extraordinary intellectual firepower and be entirely wrong in a role where the principal expects to remain the decision-maker. Chief of Staff is a role about judgement, patience and personal chemistry — not about repeating a corporate CV in a smaller room.
2. Confusing Chief of Staff with Family Office CEO
These are different roles and the confusion between them causes half the failed appointments we see. A Family Office CEO leads the office as an institution — investment strategy, headcount, governance. A Chief of Staff sits closer to the principal personally, coordinates the principal’s calendar and standing commitments, and holds the flow between the principal and the office. In some offices the same person fills both roles; in most, they are distinct — and specifying them at brief stage saves months.
3. Underestimating the discretion requirement
Principals are usually clear on this in the brief, but interviewing panels sometimes probe candidates on hypothetical scenarios in a way that inadvertently signals that the office’s standards on discretion are looser than the principal’s actually are. The candidate who is honest about a prior discreet situation may look worse in interview than the candidate who is theoretical about it — but the honest one is more likely to hold the standard when in seat.
4. Treating the Chief of Staff as a “test” for the Family Office CEO role
This is a specific pattern in offices that are transitioning from principal-led to governance-led. The principal hires a Chief of Staff with the implicit intention that they will grow into a Family Office CEO role over eighteen months. Sometimes this works. More often, the temperament required for Chief of Staff (patience, principal-proximity, follow-through) is not the temperament required for Family Office CEO (institutional leadership, strategic decision authority) — and the appointee ends up in the wrong role.
5. Skipping the archetype conversation
Before we write any Chief of Staff mandate, we spend a fortnight in what we call the archetype conversation — establishing which of the three governance archetypes (principal-led, governance-led, enterprise-adjacent) the office actually operates under, and building the brief around that. Principals occasionally push to skip this. The mandates that skip it are the ones that end up needing to be re-run twelve months later.
If your Chief of Staff search is being briefed without an archetype conversation, it is being briefed to fail.
Related reading
For our Chief of Staff role page, see Chief of Staff · Family Office. For the archetype framework, see the three archetypes of family office governance. For the practice this sits within, see Private Client & Family Office.