Tools and templates for Chiefs of Staff

Most Chiefs of Staff inherit a mess of tools before they inherit a job: a project tracker nobody updates, three places where decisions might be written down, and a leadership meeting with no agenda. The temptation in month one is to fix the tools.

Fix the documents first. A tracker for work that happens once a quarter is overhead, while a one-page agenda for a meeting that happens every Monday pays you back fifty times a year. This page is the first stop on the Toolkit path in our Chief of Staff handbook.

What's in a Chief of Staff toolkit?

A Chief of Staff's toolkit is a handful of recurring documents, the rules that keep them current, and the software that holds them. Start with the documents; pick software last. Six carry most of the job:

1. The leadership meeting agenda, with a cutoff for agenda requests. See our leadership meeting guide.
2. The decision log, one line per decision, with an owner and a date. It lives in our guide to context management.
3. The weekly update to your principal, in four parts, sent at the same time every week. Our weekly update guide has the template.
4. The brief, a page your principal reads before a meeting, with your recommendation first. Our briefing guide covers four kinds.
5. The context file, covering what the leader knows, wants and has decided, kept current for you, your principal and your AI tools.
6. The calendar rules, covering what your principal's time goes to, and who can book it. See our calendar guide.

Your mandate sits above all six. You'll edit it a few times a year, and it tells you which of these documents you own and which belong to someone else.

The six map to what employers ask for. In the Chief of Staff Network's 2026 Pathways Report, we read more than 1,800 Chief of Staff job postings and counted how often each responsibility came up.

Read the chart as a list of recurring jobs, each needing one document with an owner and a day of the week. The operating cadence needs an agenda, a decision log and a scorecard. Executive communication needs briefs, a weekly update and a way to write in your principal's voice. Board work needs a deck process and a list of likely questions.

How to tell a working document from a folder of templates

A Chief of Staff on a dinner panel we recorded for our podcast described the simplest version. Their remote team couldn't see what was getting done, so they started a shared Google Doc of priorities and wrote each day what they were working on. Their principal commented right in it: no need to work on that one, or "I'm gonna take care of that". The Chief of Staff called it a game changer, and said it gave them confidence they were working on the right things.

That document passed three tests, and I'd hold every document in your toolkit to them. It repeats at least monthly. Someone other than you reads it. And it changes a decision or a conversation, the way the principal's comment changed that day's work. A document that fails the third test is a report: send it less often, or stop.

Judge a toolkit by Monday morning: which document gets updated, who reads it and where it lives.

In a company under 50 people, three documents usually cover it: a shared priority list, the decision log and the weekly update. In a large company you'll inherit a reporting stack, and most of your first quarter goes to merging and retiring documents. This week, write down the six documents above and, next to each, where it lives today and who updates it. The gaps are your first month's work.

Which templates should a Chief of Staff have?

Have a template for every document you write more than once a month, and nothing else. A template saves you the blank page every week, and when the leadership team gets the same agenda shape every Monday, they go straight to the content. Every template below is free to copy from the guide it lives in, with no email needed.

You don't need all of these. A new Chief of Staff needs four in the first month: the mandate, the leadership meeting agenda, the decision log and the weekly update. The rest arrive when the work does.

[SCOTT: the one document you ran every week at Spring, and what it replaced]

Keep templates where the work happens. If your company runs on Google Docs, a template in Notion that nobody else opens is a private habit. Put each template in the same folder as the documents it produces, named so a new hire could find it without asking you.

Which tools do Chiefs of Staff use?

Chiefs of Staff mostly use what their company already runs: the document suite, the project tracker, the chat tool and the calendar. On top of that, most add one AI assistant. Pick each tool by whether the leadership team will open it: a plain spreadsheet they check beats a better tracker they don't.

The search layer is the one most teams skip. Lauren Stein, Chief of Staff at GrowthLoop, said on our tools episode that much of her day went to miscellaneous questions from her team. Her fix was a company-wide search tool connected to their documents, wiki and chat, so people could find answers without asking her, and her knowledge stopped living only in her head.

For the AI layer, I'd start with Claude, but you can pick any tool you prefer or your company allows; Claude and ChatGPT work in similar ways for this work. Either needs your principal's context and clear rules before it's useful, and our AI setup guide walks through that setup. Our older post on AI tools and tips covers a wider set of options.

When to add a tool, and when a sheet will do

Avoid a new tool in your first month, two places for the same thing, and any tool only you understand. Add one only on one of three signals: you answer the same question several times a week, work goes missing between two systems, or security, compliance or scale rules out what you have. A leader seeing a demo isn't a signal.

Sometimes the right move is fewer tools. On the same dinner panel, a Chief of Staff whose company tracked OKRs in a performance-management system found that keeping it complete had become a task in itself. They moved the goals into a shared Google Sheet that needed no training, and visibility got better. The table shows where the answer changes most with context.

Before Friday, list every place a decision got written down last month. If there's more than one, pick the one that stays and move the rest into it.

How do you roll out a new tool without annoying the leadership team?

Pilot it with one to five people before anyone announces it, then treat the company-wide rollout as change management. Most rollouts stall because people never change their habits, so the work is in who uses it first and what they tell everyone else.

Tim Bristow, Chief of Staff at Edge, runs new tools as small pilots: anyone can bring a tool forward, it goes through a quick compliance check, and then one to five people use it before anything bigger happens. Ashlea Holt, his co-guest on the episode about leveling up without losing the human touch, described learning to be patient, because even easy tools take time to become part of how a team works. The pilot tells you whether the tool solves a real problem before you spend anyone's goodwill, and it gives you the first few fans, who persuade colleagues better than any announcement.

Your own leadership team creates a second risk. Leaders try a tool once and ask why the whole company isn't using it, and if you roll out every tool your principal mentions, the team learns to wait out your launches. I'd say no to most and pilot the one or two that match a problem you already have.

A five-step rollout

1. Name the problem. Write one sentence on what's broken today and how you'll know it's fixed.
2. Check it: security, data access and cost, with IT or whoever approves software. Do this before anyone logs in.
3. Pilot with one to five people for two to four weeks, chosen because they have the problem.
4. Decide: keep, change or drop, using the sentence from step one. Write the decision in the log.
5. Roll out through the pilot group. Let them show their teams. Your announcement comes after, and it's short.

A worked example: piloting company-wide search

This is a labeled illustration built on Lauren Stein's fix. You're Chief of Staff at a 200-person company, and you spend about an hour a day answering "where's the doc for X?" in chat.

Your problem sentence reads: "People ask me where things are about 15 times a day; fixed means under five." IT confirms the search tool respects existing permissions, so nobody finds a document they couldn't open before. You pick four pilot users who ask the most questions: two new managers, a sales lead and the executive assistant. After three weeks, questions to you are down to about six a day. You keep it, log the decision, and ask the four to show it in their next team meetings before your three-line announcement.

Usage dips around week two once the novelty wears off, so check the numbers before you judge the tool. By month two, search shows you which documents are stale or duplicated. Tim Bristow added a rule I'd copy: don't give everyone every tool, because that becomes overwhelming. Match tools to what each role needs.

What should you build first?

Build in the order your principal will feel it. Start with the leadership meeting and the decision log, then the weekly update, then the brief, then the calendar rules and the context file. The meeting comes first because it's where the most people see your work at once, and the weekly update next because it's your channel to your principal. Draft your mandate in week 3 and agree it in week 4, so by the end of the month you know which of these documents are yours.

# Toolkit setup: first four weeks

## Week 1: watch
- [ ] List every recurring meeting, document and report you've inherited
- [ ] Note where decisions get written down today (all the places)
- [ ] Ask your principal which three documents they'd miss most

## Week 2: the meeting and the log
- [ ] Leadership meeting agenda with an agenda-request cutoff
- [ ] Decision log: one line per decision, owner, date
- [ ] Send the log within an hour of the meeting
- [ ] Start the weekly update to your principal

## Week 3: briefs and time
- [ ] Meeting brief for your principal's two biggest meetings next week
- [ ] Draft calendar rules: what their time goes to, who can book it
- [ ] Draft your mandate

## Week 4: context and agreement
- [ ] Context file: priorities, owners, decisions, how they want information
- [ ] Agree the mandate with your principal
- [ ] Retire one inherited document nobody reads

## Every Friday after
- [ ] Which document did nobody open this week? Fix it or drop it.

The Friday line is the one people skip. A toolkit grows by default, because every new problem gets a new document, and pruning is what keeps it small enough that people read it.

Once a template is working, an assistant can help you tighten it. Paste in three real examples of the document, written by you with names and sensitive numbers removed, and ask what they have in common. Inherited documents carry someone else's habits into your template.

You are helping a Chief of Staff build a reusable template.

Below are three real examples of the same document I write every week: [paste examples, with names and sensitive numbers removed].

1. List the sections all three have in common, in the order a busy executive would want to read them.
2. Flag sections that appear in only one example and say whether they belong in the template.
3. Write the template with a one-line instruction under each heading.
4. Keep it to one page. Tell me what you cut and why.

What does each guide in the Toolkit path cover?

The Toolkit path has eight guides, one for each part of the daily work. Read them in order if you're new to the role, or jump to the one that's breaking this week; if you only have time for one, start with meetings, because the leadership meeting is where most of the other documents get used.

1. Briefing: meeting briefs, decision memos, pre-reads and daily digests, with the ask and your recommendation in the first two lines.
2. Executive communications: writing in your principal's voice, the all-hands, hard news and cascades. 46% of the postings in our 2026 Pathways Report ask for this work.
3. Meetings: the weekly leadership meeting agenda, notes, the decision record, follow-ups, and what never to record.
4. Calendar and inbox: a calendar audit, a time budget and booking rules, focus time and executive inbox triage.
5. Context management: the context file, decision log and commitments list, kept current in four steps: capture, curate, direct and check.
6. Stakeholder map: who matters to each priority, what they want and where they stand.
7. Research: scoping your principal's question, finding and checking sources, and writing up an answer they can use.
8. Board meetings: the deck calendar, the pre-read, likely questions from each director and the follow-ups.

Two guides outside the path belong in the same toolkit: setting up AI safely with your calendar, notes and email, and the operating cadence that ties the meetings, reviews and planning cycles together across a quarter.