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This issue is guest authored by Claire Podulka, a strategic executive with 20+ years of experience across tech, education, and consulting. She is currently the Chief of Staff at Crisis Prevention Institute, the global leader in crisis prevention and de-escalation training. Previously, she spent nearly a decade at TXI, a boutique digital product consultancy. She writes and speaks on topics at the intersection of culture, operations, and strategy, with a particular focus on prioritization, both organizational and personal.

You’ll see the advice, from Clara among others, that the 30-60 day window as a new Chief of Staff is when you begin to own and implement — the shift from listening to doing.

As I wrote in part one of this series, if you can go a full 30 days without putting your hands on an oar, lucky you. The reality is, there are often items you’ll have to jump in and own on day one or two. But by your second month, you’ll absolutely be owning some streams of work.

But what that work looked like for me was a surprise 👀

The workstreams I owned in month two, by and large, weren’t new to the organization. They built on foundations that already existed. That’s the part of the advice we’ve got to dig into more, because it flips the pressure of “own and implement” into something much more sustainable.

📚 The advice Claire references throughout this piece is from The New Chief of Staff’s Survival Guide. It’s in the Substack paid archive — start a free trial now and dig in!

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There’s a metaphor I learned from Rodney Evans at The Ready that gets at the heart of inventing vs. iterating.

If your work serves external customers, user research is a given before you launch anything new. But if you serve internal customers, and especially if you’re new and eager to prove your unique value, it’s very easy to walk into work one day and, without asking questions or making thorough observations, say, “You know what would make things better here? A cake.” 🎂 (Don’t get distracted by hunger — this is a metaphorical cake.)

You get this impulse, right? It feels more valuable to jump in with a shiny new idea than to observe closely, get clear on the problem and the existing solutions, and take a less splashy action. So, because you are a proactive problem solver, you run into the kitchen, whip up a favorite recipe you’ve made a dozen times before, or a new one that looked good on Instagram, and march into the next team meeting to present your beautiful delicious cake to a room full of people who did not ask for cake.

❓ The point is: ask. Talk to your teams. Read their recipe books. Check how much old cake wound up in the compost bin. Then, and only then, decide what to bake — if anyone should bake anything at all.

Because you’re a great Chief of Staff and did thorough research in your first month (and continue to do research throughout your tenure) you’re not going to waste time or effort on an initiative no one wants. You’re going to understand the most meaningful problems and what existing solutions you can build on. In my own second month, the streams I took ownership of were all versions of this:

Producing our first Global Virtual Town Hall, transitioning from weekly HR-driven, North America–only touchbases to a monthly, global session focused on strategic direction, progress, alignment, and transparency.
Bringing disparate functional roadmaps into a cohesive organizational strategy we share consistently across all levels of the business. Seven months in, we’re still focused on the same goals (although the tactics have shifted plenty).
Taking control of the exec operating rhythm, moving from variable times, days, and agendas that no longer served their purpose into a consistent cadence with a living agenda.
Stepping in to temporarily own go-to-market metrics and data governance initiatives, which my CEO had been leading but was not where her time should be spent.

None of these were invented from scratch. They were all iterations of something the organization was already doing (or trying to do).

🧑‍🏫 THEORY: Take ownership of 2–3 core processes based on the insights from your listening tour.

💡 REALITY: The processes worth owning might already exist in some form. You're not inventing; you're refining. Look for the wheel that needs to be a little rounder.

Just as there’s an impulse to jump in and create something new to solve a problem, there’s also pressure — almost always internal pressure — to get it right the first time.

Don’t fall for that. Clara encourages you to set up the operational infrastructure that will support your work going forward, and she’s right. But the thing she doesn’t say out loud is: you’ll always be tinkering with that infrastructure. You’ll learn more, and you’ll adjust.

The first board deck I put together was extensively detailed, with a ton of text on each slide, because I’d been given explicit instruction from our operating partner on what the board expected to see. I didn’t know the board yet, so I went with it. But after the first meeting, I realized we had leeway to adjust. The expectations were more like preferences, and we could change things to better share the narrative and drive the discussion. No two board decks I’ve built since then look exactly like that first one, but they all build on the templates and structures I used then.

The lesson: set up the best system you can, and then let it teach you what the next best system should be. Your first version isn’t your final version. It’s the foundation for the next iteration, which becomes the foundation for the one after that.

🧑‍🏫 THEORY: Build the operational infrastructure that will serve you for your entire tenure.

💡 REALITY: You'll be tinkering with that infrastructure forever. The goal isn't a finished system; it's a system good enough to build on.

The listening tour doesn’t end at day 30. It just changes shape. Once you’re owning things, the feedback loop is your listening tour.

Our first Global Virtual Town Hall is a good example. It was a real step forward from what existed before — global, strategic, transparent — but it was also almost entirely executives talking to the rest of the company. When I ran a post-event survey, one theme came through clearly: people wanted more celebrating and more connecting. They wanted to hear from each other, not just from leadership.

So the next version incorporated more voices from across the company — space to celebrate wins, share localized stories of success, and surface the kind of work most people would never otherwise hear about. That change didn’t come from a fresh idea I brought in from outside. It came from asking and from being willing to adjust something I had just built.

This is the version of “listen and learn” that carries you past day 30. It’s less about intelligence gathering and more about staying honest with yourself about what’s working. The moment you stop asking is the moment the cake you worked so hard on starts showing up in the trash.

🧑‍🏫 THEORY: Synthesize your listening tour findings into action by day 60.

💡 REALITY: Your listening tour never really ends. The version of it that runs alongside your work — surveys, retros, hallway conversations — is what keeps your work from stagnating.

Next up: Part 3 — the first 90 days, when you really start to see results (and, of course, more new problems to tackle).

📚 Download the The New Chief of Staff’s Survival Guide

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