I grew up in Buffalo.

Not the metaphor. The place. North Tonawanda, technically, a suburb wedged between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Snow up to your waist from October to March, wind off the lakes that hits you sideways, and a general disposition among the locals that the worse it gets, the more you lean in.

You don't leave. You shovel.

I didn't know it at the time, but Western New York was training me for something.

There's this thing people say about buffalo (the animal, not the place, though I'd argue the residents of Western New York qualify): when a storm rolls across the plains, cattle turn and run. They move in the same direction as the storm, which means they stay in it longer, take more damage, and exhaust themselves in the process.

Buffalo do the opposite. They turn into the storm. Run straight at it. Pass through faster. Come out the other side while the cattle are still getting soaked.

While not usually my cup of tea (iykyk) playing into tropes, I've been thinking about this a lot since starting my new role.

I'm a Chief of Staff. And if you're reading this, there's a decent chance you are too, or you're the person your leader can't function without, whatever your title says (or... you're a member of my family really confused on what my new job is).

Either way, you know the feeling: the moment something gets hard, ambiguous, or politically uncomfortable, you're the one who walks toward it.

Not because you're brave. Because it's the job.

This is & Chief. A weekly newsletter for the people who run the room but rarely get the mic. I built it because this role deserves a home, and I couldn't find one that matched the complexity of the work we actually do.

Here's the tension at the center of the Chief of Staff role: you are simultaneously the most trusted person in the room and the least understood person on the org chart.

Your leader knows what you do. Everyone else has theories, most of them wrong. And when someone asks you at a happy hour what you actually do, you've probably got a 30-second answer that satisfies no one, yourself included.

I've been there, hell, I am there. I'm Chief of Staff at OH.io, a performance venture group in Columbus, Ohio, where my job on any given day might involve feeding talking points to our CEO for meetings, anticipating a political landmine in a stakeholder conversation before anyone else sees it, or redesigning an internal process that's been quietly bleeding efficiency for six months.

There's no playbook for this. You figure it out in real time, and if you're lucky, you write it down later so the next person doesn't have to.

What I've come to believe, after jumping head first into this role and a previous career studying human development and complex nonprofit systems, is that the Chief of Staff is fundamentally a storm-runner.

The role exists because organizations generate problems that don't fit neatly into anyone's job description. The ambiguous ones. The ones that sit at the intersection of strategy and politics, of execution and emotion. Someone has to walk into those, and that someone is you.

This is where most leadership content fails us. The doers. The Chiefs. It's written for the person at the podium, not the person who built the podium, wired the sound, briefed the speaker, and is now standing in the back of the room reading the audience's body language in real time.

The frameworks are wrong because the frame is wrong. We don't need another model for "executive presence." We need language for the specific kind of intelligence it takes to operate in the space between a leader's intent and an organization's reality. I'll name three things that space actually demands:

None of this is taught. Most of it isn't even named. And that's the gap & Chief is here to fill.

Every week, I'll bring something from the room. A narrative from the best of the best. A framework that actually held up. A story that reminded me why the job matters. The stuff that doesn't fit in a LinkedIn post.

Here's the thing about buffalo: they don't run into the storm because they're fearless. They run because standing still is worse. The storm doesn't care about your title, your org chart, or how many direct reports you have. It only cares whether you move.

You already move. Every day. That's why you're here.

The “storm's already here; you know what to do” & Chief,

CPM