Q&A: Practical Ways Chiefs of Staff Can Collaborate Laterally

The conversation focuses on practical ways a Chief of Staff can work with peers across departments, like finding small ways to make someone’s workflow easier or kicking off cross-team projects such as company-wide KPI dashboards and revamped performance reviews. Real examples include removing unnecessary steps from daily processes, automating Salesforce reports, and even simple gestures like ordering a camera cover for a colleague’s laptop. The episode also covers building trust through these actions and handling resistance from team members.

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If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.

Time Stamps:
00:25 Listener Question Setup

01:31 Small Wins Build Trust

02:00 Workflow Fixes and Shortcuts

03:44 A Tiny Gesture Example

05:54 KPI Dashboards and Automation

08:58 Handling Peer Resistance

10:27 Time and Political Capital

16:58 Wrap Up and Next Steps

Transcript

Listener Question Setup

Small Wins Build Trust

Workflow Fixes and Shortcuts

A Tiny Gesture Example

KPI Dashboards and Automation

Handling Peer Resistance

Time and Political Capital

Wrap Up and Next Steps

0:06

Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, chief of staff to an executive leadership coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you. Alright, listener, question time. So we have a question from username. I'm gonna pronounce this access, not access. It is spelled A-X-C-I-S. So I'm gonna go with access. Like you have access to this thing, not access as in. Axis of evil. Um, okay. Axis, I'm sure you're a great, great person. Uh, freedom loving, fun loving person who is asking a very important question. Axis says, say how to collaborate horizontal. Person, A few words. I love it. Very concise. How to collaborate horizontally, laterally. This is a huge question for chief of staff. This is a very apt question. There are a breadth of things one could say to this question. I'm just gonna pick a few, a grab bag, so I might come back to your question access to answer it a different way, because I might think of something later on and go, oh, like, oh, access needs to know about that. And that's another angle to come at. How do I. How do I engage with my peers? How do I interact with different people across the organization? Okay. If you are first coming into a chief of staff role, you've heard many guests talk about, get the small wins and build trust. I would agree with that. How does one do that? How do you do that, Emily? Tactically and practically speaking, these are where you find small things, and we don't wanna get pigeonholed into admin or minutiae or lunch runs or buying extra paperclips for people or whatever. But if there's little things that can make someone's life easier. So one of the previous guests, I, I remember he talked about, um, I would go through someone's workflow. I'd say like, tell me about your day. Tell me about your week. What are you spending time on? What do you wanna be spending time on? What do you not wanna be spending time on? Like, you, you keep describing this workflow. Like show me, like actually walk me through. And they, the person walk, the chief of staff through chief of staff cut out two steps. From their, I think it was like a 10 or 12 step process that was small, but for that person, they had to do that task multiple times a day. So those two steps made a a positive impact to that person that's making someone's life easier in a small way. Are you. Going to do that level of review for your entire tenure as chief of staff, probably not. Maybe depending on the exact chief of staff version or iteration you have, but probably not in your first 90 days or six months or whatever, where you're going around and you're trying to learn stuff and learn the actual workflows. It could be a good learning experience for you to get into that level. And also, look, I can take these two steps out. I can automate these. I have a shortcut for you. I have like. You know, I've, I've had people go like, I found a keyboard shortcut for them, or I programmed like a custom keyboard shortcut, and now all of our CS reps or all of our analysts. It takes them 10 seconds less to do this one thing they do all day long with every ticket they have. That makes a big deal. So find these small things, uh, even if it's like, Hey, like I kind of see you doing your email like that. Can I, can I show you something that might make your life a little easier and just show'em like a keyboard shortcut of how to, um, you know, archive something or how to, put something in a folder, whatever it is, like small stuff like that. I remember. When I was coming into my chief of staff role, we had, um, our new CTO come on board and, you know, you come on board, you're trying to like, prove yourself or just, you know, make a good impression, all this stuff. And, Alex noticed that I had a little, like a sticky note, like a, a ripped portion of a sticky note over the camera. On my laptop, and it was like falling off. So I was like trying to like, you know, scotch tape it on there. And he, like looked at my laptop and figured out what, size it was. And he ordered me those little slidey things where you can slide the, you can stick it, like adhesive it to your laptop and then slide the little thing back and forth to cover or uncover your camera on your laptop. And he was like, here you go. I bought this for you and let me know, like I can put it on for you. And I was like. Oh my gosh. Like you're our CTO and you like are doing big things, but that makes a big difference in my life. And like, thank you very much. I didn't have time to go get one, but you knew exactly what kind I wanted. So little things like that, you can look for little things like that. Obviously don't just do those things. You're gonna be doing, principle management and you're gonna be doing, um. Initiatives, like the most common one is, Hey, we need rhythm of business and we might need a leadership team cadence. And if we have one, it might need, we need a actual better meeting itself. Like we have a set meeting on the calendars, but we need to, um, fill that with, with, uh, more robust conversation, more dynamic conversation, not just rote reading of some stats in my department over here. Next. Okay, how to collaborate horizontally when you first get in. Small things. Look for low hanging fruit. Make people's lives easier. This helps build trust, right? This helps. Oh, like she's here to make my life easier, and she did. Cool. Feelings, emotions, humans run off. Feelings, emotions, and sometimes logic, but mostly the feelings. Okay? Then you want to insert yourself into certain. Areas where you touch a lot of people. That was a interesting sentence structure. Um. Add, Adam, just, just leave this in. Just leave that in. Uh, you wanna put yourself in position to, to, Nope. Just initiative. So, uh, uh, an example of an initiative would be something like, Hey, we need to get a dashboard of our main KPIs, right? So we wanna know how we're doing as a team, and we've gotta report that up. Very, very common. We've talked about this topic in previous episodes, okay? That is bread and butter Chief of Staff Initiative. It's touching multiple departments. It's cross departmental. There's no like, like, you know, product should clearly take point on that initiative. Or like people ops, like probably a little closer, but not really. So that's a chief of staff initiative. It doesn't fit neatly in a functional area, but it's very important and it's very, important to coordinate all the respective departments. So something like that where you can. Interact with different departments and have a reason, not just Hey, do you wanna catch up for coffee? Type of chat. It's like we have an actual business reason to be collaborating and talking and exchanging ideas and let me again help you with the workflow. Or is there a way to automate that data poll or like asking those types of questions, even if you ask those types of questions to help someone get to a good answer. Win. Good trust, small win, medium win. If you could actually do it for them, maybe I had like a situation where like, Hey, I actually know how to automate this piece in Salesforce, so like, let me do this, and then we run it together. Is this what you want? Is this pulling the data how you want it to be pulled? Yes. Cool. Let me show you. What I did and how to manage that and, and do the maintenance for it and the updates for it going forward. So stuff like huge win. Oh my gosh, Emily, it was like magic to this person. It was like, oh my gosh, like you just created an automated thing to pull the data I want. And you trained me and my, right hand person in my department how to update this as we go along. So stuff like that is gold. It's money. So anything you can find like that. So your. Taking on initiatives that need to be done, right? You're not making these things up out of thin air, but you're, you're taking initiatives where you're gonna interact with folks from different departments and you're gonna have reasons to speak with them. So the KPI one is a big one. Um, honestly, things like benefits or performance reviews. So I revamped our performance review process with, uh, in conjunction. HR and with our operations teams. And then we rolled this out to all the different departments and I worked with all the team leads and all the managers and things like that. So something like this where this is a business need, uh, we were doing different performance reviews for different departments and we wanted to make that process more. more uniform and have just a general process for the company, and that was a legit need. I wasn't making that up, but I got to talk to a whole bunch of different people. So things like that. Keep an eye out for initiatives like that. Okay, so how to collaborate horizontally, laterally, peer group across the company. We've got a new chief of staff coming in. Look for small wins. Um, look for little things to make people's lives easier. Then we have take on initiatives or propose initiatives that interact with a lot of different departments. And then I would say, um, sometimes you're going to run into resistance from a team member, a colleague, like another C-Suite, team member who just like, for some reason. Is not picking up what you're laying down and is not on board with what you're trying to do, or maybe just is not on board with her being a chief of staff at all. Like why do we need a chief of staff and who are you to be telling me what to do? All this stuff, so. You do all the things. All the stuff and things to what's important to them. How can I tie what I'm trying to do to what's important to them? How do I make them look good? My job, part of my job, part of my job is to make you look good, buddy. so you can have those kind of conversations, that dialogue. sometimes those work. A lot of the times those work, a lot of times those work. It's like, okay, okay, no defense shields goes down. This person's not here to fire me or not here to make my life miserable. On the contrary, they're making my life easier and they seem to be for me, and they seem to be supporting me and giving me resources and giving me good advice over and over and over again, and I guess they're just a good person. So you have that. That's a very common tale. Sometimes you get people who are just entrenched and they're like. I'm just here to be miserable and I'm just here to, you know, throw a pity party for myself or make mountains out of molehills and I just don't like you. In those situations, collaborating horizontally, collaborating with your peers can be more complex. Is it doable? Yes, but it can be more complex. The biggest thing I would say here, just the biggest thing I would say here is sometimes you have to prove it over time. Sometimes it's just a matter of time. Like it's duration of time you're going to have, you can say all these things like, look, I'm here to help you. I'm here to move the team forward. that sentiment, I always try to convey like I'm here to move the team forward, and there's ways to move the team forward with you on board, and I'd love to have everyone on board, but my job is to move the team forward. And if I'm giving someone. Every opportunity to get on board. Like, please come on board. Like we're, we're going, like, we're rowing this direction. Here's our boat, here's our ship, and we're moving this direction. Get on, like get on the fricking vessel right here. And they're like, no, no, I'm just gonna be dead weight off of the side. And like, that's their prerogative and that's their choice over and over and over again. And you give them every chance, every opportunity, every benefit of the doubt, every, I'm gonna suppress. You know, that was my idea and I implemented that. But you know, great idea so and so, and like, oh my gosh, we couldn't have done that without you. All that stuff. And they still don't get on board and they're still not being collaborative back. Then it might be, look, I'm just gonna move this thing forward. And over time, let's say you just became chief of staff, but over a year, 18 months, two years now, you've been there for a full calendar year, like a full cycle. Now you've been there, now you're a known quantity. Now people know what you're made of and know what you're capable of. Oh, he's here. he doesn't just make my life easier with like the small ticky tack stuff, even though that's awesome. He's, he moved our whole department and whole company forward. In this way. Uh, we got this across the finish line. Never could have dreamed of doing that before, but now that he's here, we did that to our board. Now we're in much more, positive communication and frequent communication with our board has totally changed That dynamic has totally changed the impression. Of our team to the board, all that good stuff. Now you have some of that political capital built up. Yeah. But before you were kind of the new kid on the block, couldn't, certain things wouldn't be as politically astute as others. And so you know that now maybe you're into this thing, you've let time go by and you've, you've done these different things with people. And now it might be like, Hey, we're moving forward. I'm here to move the team forward. Always has been. I've always has been here. I have been here to move the team forward, and I'm still doing that. And right now you need to get on board and it might be demonstrating like, we're just gonna keep moving and you can come on board or you can be dead weight. And then if it goes like to the extreme, uh, version of this, it might be like, Hey, like we can't have dead weight off the boat, so you need to like get on board, or we're gonna, we need to. Cut you loose or put you on a buoy or put you on a dingy, or whatever the analogy is like to not totally drown someone, but like to give them a nice little off ramp to land. Okay. So that's a thing you can think about. It might take time. It might take time with the positive reinforcement and just taking the high road and. Just trying to be empathetic toward people who they're dealing with. A new team member. They might be dealing with different dynamics in other places. They might have stress over here in their functional department. They might have big stuff at home. They're dealing with, and this is just how they're showing up right now. But over time, the Titanic turns and they actually move in a different direction and a year or two from now, it's fine, six months from now. Oh. Look at that. All right. You know, they're not as ornery and kind of difficult to be around in team meetings. Very cool. All right, very cool. So it could take time. Just know, know that about collaborating with peers. Um, like I don't instantly trust people. Like I, I want you to be a good person and I hope that, you know, you do good things for the company. And until you prove me wrong, I'm gonna assume that you're a capable, competent, trustworthy person. But I'm also gonna just. Watch you over time. So it could be one of those things where it's not ill will per se, it's just, it's just wanting to see what you're about over time, which I think is, is valid. Um. So those are some of the things that I would say in terms of collaborating horizontally. I've said, I've said this. Next thing I'm gonna say over and over again on the podcast, but I will say it again'cause it's so important, is, as chief of staff, your primary relationship and responsibility is to your principal. So for instance, the CEO, for example, The fast follow to that would be your entire executive team. So if you're talking about collaborating horizontally like that, like your peer group, that's your next immediate, that's my team too. That's my, I gotta make sure these people are dialed in. I gotta make sure I'm building relationships and building trust with all those folks. And then it can extend to, you know, senior managers, VPs, uh, directors, managers, those types of things, depending on your organization. But don't. Don't forget about managing horizontally. So I do love this question'cause it's a huge part of being chief of staff. I would make the argument, it's a huge part of being a part of any team, so know that you are part of your functional group. So you might be the leader of your like operations or finance or product or chief people officer or what have you. And you are also a member of your leadership team. So whatever level that is, if you're like a, a manager and you have, you know, 10 other managers at your level, that's your team too. If you're a vp, like all the other VPs, that's your cohort. That's your group too. C-Suite executive, same thing. So I would. Make sure to not only be collaborating well with your direct reports, collaborating well with your direct boss, but also collaborating across the organization. And it could even be like, Hey, we have this team over here that's kind of like. Two steps removed. They're not really my peer, they're just something out there. But you know, they're part of the company and I collaborate with them every once in a while, every month, every quarter, whatever it is. It could be strategic vendors, strategic partners, different things like this, making sure that you're kind of keeping tabs on all these people. As chief of Staff, I was head of strategic partnerships and so part of my job was to make sure those partnerships were actual partnerships where like we knew each other and we were talking about here's the updates that are coming up. Um, look, you know, COVID has done this thing. we're switching resources over here. We have to delay your integration. I'm so sorry, but like, I wanna keep you. updated on that and transparent with that. All those things are building trust and building, um, uh, building trust and relationships and collaborating horizontally. Okay, so hopefully that's giving you a little bit of food for thought. This is a broad question, so again, I might come back to this for a part two or three. Um, if you have any follow-up questions on this, Access or anyone else listening to this, if you have follow up questions for a specific scenario or even I don't have a specific scenario per se, but like, what about this type of thing? If you have something like that, then please drop it in the comments or shoot me a note and I'll cover that on a future episode. Otherwise, I'll catch you next week on leveraging leadership. This episode is brought to you by Next Level Coaching. If you or anyone you know would like to learn more about executive leadership coaching, please visit www.next level Coach.