4 steps to successfully managing workflow in the Office of the CEO

CEOs are quitting and dying faster than ever, and the culprit is too much work. (source: WSJ) That means as a Chief of Staff or Executive Assistant in the Office of the CEO, you have to be the ultimate master of work. Every day you must:

• Delegate 100s of tasks

• Track dozens of workstreams to completion, and

• Report on the outcomes of all work to your CEO.

It’s imperative that you implement a work management system that works for your team. Common workflow management tools include Teams, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, and Trello. You likely already have some sort of tool in place today, so you must decide whether it fits your needs and double down, or decide to deprecate it altogether. 

But move on quickly, because it’s really the workflow management process that unlocks true value. It’s the repeated repetitions of Delegate > Track > Report (DTR) that enables your team to embrace this as a net benefit rather than a chore. 

Here are 4 steps to managing Office of the CEO workflow:

Step 1: Assign an owner

Assign an Office of the CEO team member whose goal is to develop workflow management in your executive office.

Step 2: Test the tool and process

Identify a few workstreams with just a few stakeholders to test the new process in a controlled environment on a specific project.

Step 3: Champion your new best practice

Have the project group champion the tool and the process along the way by reporting out their workflow management successes to the team.

Step 4: Repeat

Move on to other workstreams and other projects to expand usage of the tool and adoption of the DTR process. 

There you have it - 4 steps to successfully managing workflow in the Office of the CEO. Implement these practices and you’ll avoid CEO burnout and even worse, death.

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