Cape Town: Chief of staff posted by K2 Recruit

K2 Recruit is proud to partner with a high-growth, performance-driven organisation to appoint a strategic and execution-focused Chief of Staff to the CEO.

This is a high-impact 2IC role within the Office of the CEO, designed to strengthen organisational rhythm, structured decision-making, governance discipline, and cross-functional execution.

This role does not own line operations or strategy. Instead, it exists to increase the leverage, clarity, and effectiveness of the CEO by ensuring that what is decided gets executed with discipline, structure, and momentum.

This is not a stepping-stone role. The successful candidate will bring maturity, independent judgement, commercial depth, and the confidence to engage at executive and board level.

The Role

The Chief of Staff acts as an integrator and orchestrator, ensuring alignment around CEO-sponsored priorities and enabling structured follow-through across leadership forums and enterprise-wide initiatives.

Your mandate is simple but critical:

• Create clarity.
• Drive alignment.
• Ensure disciplined execution.

Key Responsibility Areas

Organisational Rhythm & Executive Cadence

• Establish and maintain structured executive and organisational operating rhythms
• Design cadence frameworks to support planning, tracking, and delivery
• Ensure leadership forums operate with clarity and purpose

Decision Enablement

• Frame strategic and operational issues clearly
• Prepare structured decision packs including options, trade-offs, and implications
• Implement escalation discipline and decision-flow structure
• Ensure decisions land clearly and move into execution

Execution Coordination

• Coordinate mobilisation of CEO-sponsored and cross-functional priorities
• Align stakeholders around enterprise initiatives
• Track execution milestones and surface risks early
• Remove bottlenecks and ensure forward momentum

Governance & Board Enablement

• Prepare and coordinate Board, Exco, and governance forums
• Ensure disciplined follow-through on governance actions
• Drive structured issue resolution across executive and board environments

External & Strategic Engagement

• Coordinate and prepare key external engagements aligned to CEO priorities
• Ensure alignment between external commitments and internal execution

Enterprise Performance Visibility

• Enable integration and visibility of enterprise execution systems (e.g., OGSM, 4DX, KPI dashboards)
• Strengthen performance tracking at executive level
• Ensure actions raised in governance forums are tracked and closed

About You

You are calm, structured, and intellectually sharp. You have strong emotional intelligence and situational awareness able to read dynamics, manage complexity, and influence senior stakeholders without ego. You bring clarity to ambiguity and structure to fast-moving environments.

You are:

• Confident without arrogance
• Direct but diplomatic
• Analytical yet pragmatic
• Relentless about follow-through
• Comfortable having difficult conversations
• Concise and outcome-focused
• You naturally create rhythm, order, and alignment across leadership environments.

Required Experience

• 5+ years experience in a strategic, advisory, consulting, executive support, or senior coordination role
• Proven experience working closely with senior leadership or executive teams
• Demonstrated ability to drive initiatives end-to-end in complex, high-performance environments
• Strong exposure to executive-level communication and structured analysis
• Experience coordinating cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority

Knowledge & Capability

• Executive operating rhythms and governance structures
• Strategic planning enablement and execution tracking
• Business performance analysis and reporting frameworks
• Organisational dynamics and stakeholder management
• Cross-functional project coordination
• Structured problem-solving and issue resolution methodologies

What Will Make You Stand Out

• Honours or Masters degree in:
  • Industrial Psychology
  • Industrial Engineering
  • Law
  • Accounting
  • Commerce
  • Business Management
  • Or related analytical discipline
• Strong capability in issue framing and structured decision enablement
• Comfort orchestrating senior stakeholders without formal authority
• Solid exposure to governance processes and executive forum management
• Natural inclination toward accountability, loop-closing, and execution discipline
• Experience in wholesale distribution, manufacturing, order fulfilment, or network-driven business environments (advantageous)