“At Finless Foods I got people aligned across science, ops, and fundraising by making the shared problem visible: we mapped one company-wide OKR set everyone could see their stake in, then ran weekly all-hands so each team could say what was blocked. When no one shares a boss, the Chief of Staff becomes the translator who proves the other person's priority is not a threat to yours.”
“I don't have formal authority in those rooms, so I stop trying to win the argument and start mapping what each person is actually protecting. Once I can name their real priority out loud, alignment usually becomes a trade conversation instead of a turf war.”
“You don't have authority, so your currency is trust built before you need it. I watched Craig Walker rely on people who were great at cross-functional work no matter their title, and Matt Reustle make priorities explicit so people could decide without escalating.”
“I’ve called flag on the play and cleared rooms because the real fight wasn’t between departments, it was between priorities nobody had named out loud. My job was to make each side argue the other’s case until we found the decision the principal actually had to make.”
“Without a shared boss, your leverage is the quality of the decision process, not your title. I force-rank what the meeting must decide, make everyone argue the trade-offs out loud, and then write down who owns what so disagreement can't hide in ambiguity later.”
“When I was Chief of Staff at Scratchpay, I had to coordinate a 160-person remote team across functions with no direct reporting lines, so I learned fast that authority is not the tool. What worked was making the shared outcome visible, usually through OKRs, and then running a tight check-in rhythm so people saw their own priorities in the same numbers.”
“At BlueBridge I had to get police departments, donors, and our own team moving together when nobody reported to the same person. What worked was making the shared outcome so concrete that people could argue about the how without questioning the why.”
“At Pfizer, I spent two years as Chief of Staff to Finance trying to herd global controllers, tax, treasury, and HR into the same quarterly timeline with no direct authority over any of them. What actually worked was mapping each function’s bonus metric to the shared deadline and making the cost of missing it visible to their real bosses before anyone escalated.”
“At Sanibel Group I spent two years as chief of staff watching people with no shared boss try to pull in different directions, and the only leverage I had was the one thing everyone wanted: a clear picture of what success looked like for them inside the project. I stopped running status meetings and started asking each stakeholder what they were personally measured on, then rewrote every update around those metrics.”