Kaye Chan sits in an enviable seat. As the Chief of Staff to the CEO at Athena, a fast-growing company that helps world-class leaders find elite Executive Assistants and Chiefs of Staff, she works at a company that both values and deeply understands what it takes to be great in these unique roles.
Tactical EA vs. Strategic Chief of Staff: Making the Leap
How did she rise to this position? Kaye’s story starts a decade ago, when she started working as the Executive Assistant to Robert Hayes, Co-Founder & CEO of Athena. She started taking on more responsibility when the company needed someone to manage projects that were more client-facing, including visits of important customers and prospects to the Philippines, where she’s based. She built out a department to handle those tasks as the company scaled. Fast forward to today and she oversees seven EAs, in addition to the VP of Capital Investments and the legal team (on an interim basis).
Kaye attributes her expanded responsibilities to her “exposure and experience” and continual focus on learning everything she can, whether it’s a small task or a larger project. Being “always ready to take on any challenges” has been key to her success in the role, as well.
The EA and Chief of Staff roles are “totally different”, according to Kaye. EAs are focused on “making sure daily activities [of the CEO] are on point,” while as a Chief of Staff she spends her time “making sure that the entire staff of the CEO is really solid to make sure that the CEO’s function is expanded.”
Effective Delegation: Harder than it Seems
Delegation is the lifeblood of Athena; they claim to have turned “the art of delegation into a science” with a rigorous internally-created training academy on delegation and a set of thousands of playbooks. According to Kaye, delegation is all about the skill of the delegator, not the person being delegated to.
“Being an effective delegator is making sure that you’re ready to let go, even though it’s uncomfortable because you’re a little afraid that things won’t turn out the way you wanted,” Kaye said, admitting that she sometimes still has a hard time with it. “It’s hard to put trust in someone,” she continued.
When taking on a new direct report, “you really need to learn how to trust that person. Of course, you need to continuously follow through and still guide them, being a mentor.” Both sides are necessary - trust and guidance. But it’s important not to err too much on the side of guidance because “micromanagement sidetracks the decision-making part of that person,” she observed, which is crucial to helping them improve.
AI as a Delegation Superpower
Athena is “heavily, heavily using AI,” said Kaye. Adding it into her team’s workflow isn’t mandatory, but “encouraging” its use on a daily basis to “jumpstart that creativity” has revealed where it can help find efficiency. 100 percent of Athena’s EAs use AI on a monthly basis, according to the company, and the company is investing heavily in developing AI apps to do things like “pre-draft emails in your tone and proactively suggest delegations from your existing workflows.”
What’s Kaye’s response when she sees her team getting stuck on a task? “You delegate it to the AI, right?” According to Kaye, many of Athena’s clients also ask their Athena EAs and Chiefs of Staff to use their own AI systems, too.
So what’s the lesson here? For Chiefs of Staff and CEOs, learning effective delegation is a must, whether to people or to AI. And Athena seems to have cracked the code on combining the best of EAs and Chiefs of Staff with the best of AI.
Learn more about Athena: https://www.athena.com/newsletter-referral?code=chief-of-staff-network
