Build your strategic plan, increase visibility, and drive engagement leveraging Elate’s Dynamic Strategic Planning platform.
Redefine your strategic planning process. Dynamic planning with radical simplicity connects planning, execution, and success for Strategy and Operations leaders.
Learn MoreElate puts everything you need to build your Strategic Plan right at your fingertips. From setting your long-term vision and annual goals to tracking quarterly objectives, it’s never been easier to create a plan that helps you reach your goals.
Rather than working out of dozens of spreadsheets or endless presentations, Elate helps you build a simple, intuitive plan that can be easily shared with team members.
With Elate, double down on what’s working and shift away from what’s not through insights leaders can take action on.
The Chief of Staff position is no longer a nice to have, it’s a must have for today’s leading high growth companies. What started as a position reserved only for Fortune 500 companies or government entities, the impact of the Chief of Staff position at companies looking to effectively scale has been seen across some of the fastest growing companies today.
For those that might be unfamiliar with the role, the Chief of Staff position often serves as the connective tissue between leadership and the rest of the company, connecting long-term vision with tactical execution.
Often the position is specific to the Chief of Staff to the CEO, serving as an extension of the CEO and replicating their impact across the business. However, as the role continues to gain momentum, other areas of the business are starting to hire dedicated Chiefs of Staff to help increase a principal’s visibility and impact. From specialized Chief of Staff positions like the Chief of Staff to the CTO or the Chief of Staff to the CRO, we are starting to see the role become even more focused within companies.
As the Chief of Staff position becomes more relevant and prevalent for high growth companies, so do the tools used to support the role. Here at Elate we believe firmly in the idea that it takes the right people, process, and tools to execute and maximize the growth of any business. To solve for the right ‘people’, companies are turning to the Chief of Staff to fill that void within the company.
But once the right person is identified, now it becomes the responsibility of the Chief of Staff to help implement the processes needed to create a rhythm for building, executing, and reviewing a company's strategic planning process and execution.
To help establish this process and effectively implement an operating framework throughout the business, today’s leading Chiefs of Staff are turning to Chief of Staff Software to deliver on the needs of their growing companies.
Meet Elate.
Elate was built for today's Chief of Staff to help navigate the challenges and opportunities they face in scaling their company. As the leading Strategic Planning software, Elate was built to help high growth companies communicate their vision, create alignment, and track performance all in one place.
So as Chief of Staff jobs continue gaining in popularity, we wanted to share what today’s leaders should be looking for in a Chief of Staff software to help drive alignment and increase visibility across the business.
For many, the Chief of Staff position is still a bit of an unknown. We often get asked the simple question, 'What is the difference between a Chief of Staff vs Executive Assistant?' Or even, 'What is the difference in the responsibilities of a Chief of Staff vs COO?' Since the role is relatively new, foundational questions like these aren’t uncommon.
But frankly, when trying to define what the Chief of Staff role entails, it’s hard to give a concrete answer. The reality is that the Chief of Staff position looks different for every company.
However, while the roles might all look a bit different from company to company, there are some commonalities that span every Chief of Staff position.
For example, the Chief of Staff role is one of extreme ownership and accountability. The Chief of Staff is regularly asked to flex between all areas of the business, looking for opportunities, while also identifying weaknesses. To say that it is a highly dynamic role that requires a high degree of context switching is an understatement.
No aspect of the business brings these challenges to life more regularly than the strategic planning process. From building your company’s strategic plan to driving execution, it’s imperative to find a solution that accounts for each aspect of the strategic planning process.
At Elate, we view strategic planning in three partners: Plan, Execute, Review.
For so many companies, part or all of the strategic planning process is fragmented or disconnected.
Planning on whiteboards or with sticky notes. Tracking OKRs in spreadsheets or OKR tools that aren’t adopted by employees. Reviewing performance on static dashboards or presentations pulled together at the last minute for board reporting.
All of these methods lead to reactive, disjointed processes that slow down companies and restrict visibility into insights across the business.
When evaluating a strategic planning solution for 2022 strategic planning, ensure you select a platform that brings together the full process of strategic planning.
When companies think of unified reporting, often they think of building a balanced scorecard or setting up KPI dashboards. While having visibility into KPIs and key results across your business is critical to success, don’t rely solely on KPIs or lagging indicators.
While objective data and KPIs can provide us a glimpse into future performance, the best strategy and operations leaders know that bringing together objective data with subjective insights can truly unlock new areas of growth within a business.
Part of the value of OKRs comes from the ability to bring together subjective updates with objective data. By allowing employees to provide updates with context, you maximize visibility into how current performance may influence future trends.
With a strategic planning software like Elate, leaders are able to maximize the adoption and engagement of employees by simplifying the OKR process and streamlining how team members provide updates.
With integrations into Slack and Microsoft Teams, Elate allows employees to update OKRs from the platforms they already work from today. Additionally, connecting OKRs to platforms such as Salesforce, Quickbooks, or Jira, also allows objective data to be updated in real-time.
By choosing a Strategic Planning software, rather than a performance management software or OKR software, you are providing your employees an easy, intuitive way to understand how their work contributes to tangible goals and company direction.
Far too often when we meet with a Chief of Staff who had a false start in implementing OKRs or executing a goal-setting framework, we find that the OKR process was rushed into place. As strategy and operations leaders, it’s so easy to take for granted our understanding of the impact OKRs can have on the company.
Whether it is OKRs vs EOS, OKRs vs Balanced Scorecard, or any other goal-setting framework comparison, the issue rarely lies in the methodology itself, but rather in how the framework was implemented.
At Elate, we try to radically simplify the process and experience for companies. To do this, we start by answering the question of ‘why’ for all employees. Whether it is members of your leadership team, individual contributors, new hires or seasoned employees, being able to answer the question of ‘why’ is crucial to driving continued alignment and execution.
Within a strategic planning tool, look for a solution that starts by outlining the company vision. The company vision will help explain why you select certain priorities as a business, how potential pivots align with the long-term direction, and allow employees to understand how their work contributes to what they are helping to build.
We often see that as strategy and operations leaders, we want to jump directly into execution. Building OKRs, tracking them, and measuring success of OKRs. Yet, for employees they are often more motivated by first understanding the big picture.
There are plenty of free OKR tools or free OKR tracking solutions, but is that really what we are trying to solve as strategy and operations leaders? It seems like the last thing our employees want is yet another solution they have to use that provides leaders with limited visibility into what’s truly going on across the business.
Don’t lose sight of ultimately what we are trying to accomplish in implementing an operating framework that can help align employees and provide valuable insights to leaders.
As the Chief of Staff role continues to evolve, so will the processes and software leveraged to amplify the impact of the role. Even the Chief of Staff job description will continue to take new forms as companies realize the impact of the position. We are just at the beginning of truly understanding the transformation the Chief of Staff position can have on high growth companies.
At Elate, we are thrilled to be in the front-row for this continued evolution of the role, and part of the Chief of Staff community we are helping to build. From the number of LinkedIn Chief of Staff jobs to helping to fairly identify the Chief of Staff salary, we are committed to partnering with Chiefs of Staff and programs that support the evolution of the role.
For those leaders interested in learning more about Elate or Aspiring Ops and the community we are building, we’d love to connect. Don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our team members today to learn more about how we are helping to build the best Chief of Staff software for today’s strategy and operations leaders.
