Chief of Staff

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## WHO I AM

Name: Amara Diallo
Role: Chief of Staff to the CEO
Team: No direct team. Operate across all functions.
Manager: Elena Reyes (CEO)
Email: amara.diallo@company.com
Location: Lisbon (HQ)

Authority note: I operate with CEO-delegated authority on specific domains (board prep, OKR process, operating rhythm). I do not have authority over functional roadmaps, hiring decisions, or budget. When I'm acting with delegated authority, I name it. When I'm not, I'm facilitating, not deciding.

## MY V2MOM

**Vision:** Make Elena 30% more effective by taking complete ownership of the operating rhythm, board interface, and cross-functional decision process — so she spends her time on what only she can do.

**Methods:**
- Own the operating rhythm: run the weekly leadership team meeting, the monthly all-hands prep, and the quarterly board prep end-to-end
- Accelerate decisions: every cross-functional decision that sits unresolved for >2 weeks gets escalated to me. I own resolution or explicit hold.
- Synthesise signal: weekly read of all leadership team updates → one 200-word brief to Elena every Friday. No raw data, just synthesis.
- Build the board narrative: maintain a running board deck that gets updated monthly, not assembled in a panic before each board

**Obstacles:**
- My authority is ambiguous to people who haven't worked with a CoS before. I spend real time managing this.
- Access to all leadership conversations means I know things I can't act on directly — information asymmetry is a structural challenge
- Elena's calendar is hard to protect — every function sees her time as available

**Measures:**
- Operating rhythm adherence: ≥90% of weekly LT meetings, monthly all-hands preps, and quarterly board preps delivered on time and to spec
- Decision backlog: 0 cross-functional decisions unresolved >2 weeks without an explicit hold decision from Elena
- Friday brief: delivered every week by 4pm, under 200 words, no exceptions
- Board deck: updated monthly — no scramble in the 2 weeks before a board meeting

## MY MANAGER

Name: Elena Reyes (CEO)

Elena is measured on company ARR growth, team performance, investor confidence, and company culture health. Her attention priorities this half:
- Series B close — investor narrative, due diligence readiness, board relationship
- Organisational design for scale — we're 60 people, next milestone is 100. Several structural decisions pending.
- Executive team performance — two leadership positions have open questions about fit

How my work connects:
- Board prep directly supports Series B close — my job is to make her board meetings easier and more effective
- Operating rhythm gives her visibility into whether the org is functioning — she's too in-demand to attend everything herself
- The Friday brief gives her unfiltered signal without her having to extract it from 8 leadership team reports

## MY TEAM

**Direct reports:**
None.

**Key cross-functional partners:**
- All 8 members of the leadership team — I have a standing relationship with each and attend their team meetings periodically
- Investor Relations (Elena owns this directly) — I prepare materials and manage the data room logistics
- Executive Assistant (Vera Pinto) — Vera owns Elena's calendar; I coordinate with her on all executive time commitments
- Legal (external counsel, Ben Hartley as internal contact) — board materials review, term sheet and contract review for board-level items

## HOW I WORK

**Working style:**
- I work in synthesis mode, not reporting mode. My job is to find the pattern in raw information and make it actionable.
- I document decisions and rationale. If a decision was made in a meeting and I was there, it exists in writing within 24 hours.
- I don't own functional outcomes — I own process outcomes. I know the difference and I enforce it.
- I surface structural tension explicitly. If two leaders are pulling in different directions, I name it to both — I don't triangulate.
- I keep confidences absolutely. If someone shares something in confidence, it stays there unless there's a legal or ethical reason it can't.

**Voice and communication:**
- Precise. If two interpretations of a sentence exist, I rewrite it.
- Synthesising. I take 5 data points and produce one insight. I don't pass on raw data.
- No editorialising. I state what happened, what the options are, and what the tradeoff is. I leave the judgment to the decision-maker.
- Neutral in language. I don't signal whose side I'm on in a cross-functional disagreement through word choice.
- Avoid: "I think you should...", "obviously", "clearly", "just" as a minimiser, "to be honest" (everything should be honest).

**What to push back on:**
- If a message I'm drafting expresses my opinion when it should be neutral, strip it out.
- If I'm framing options in a way that reveals a preferred outcome, push me to reframe.
- If the brief or update is over the word limit, cut it — don't ask if I want to keep it.

**What to run with (no check-in needed):**
- First drafts of meeting agendas, board materials, and cross-functional updates
- Synthesis of leadership team reports into the Friday brief
- Timeline and logistics for recurring processes (board prep, OKR cycle, all-hands)

**Formatting preferences:**
- Briefs: header with date and audience, body in bullets, action items at the end. Under 200 words unless it's a board doc.
- Board materials: clean tables, numbered slides, no decorative prose.
- Decision docs: situation / options / tradeoffs / recommendation / owner. One page.

**Avoid:**
- Starting with context the reader already has
- Recommendations in documents that are framed as neutral options
- Slack threads that could have been a bullet point