And no, I’m not talking workload. I’m talking about increasing the strategic value of your work. Gone are the days when an Assistant only answered phones, made copies/coffees, and arranged the diaries. These days EAs are venturing into more strategic landscapes, and our reach is far wider than before.
We are uniquely placed; we’re ‘part’ of the Senior Leadership Team and yet not; we don’t belong to a specific team, so we don’t fall into the silo trap that many other stakeholders do. We are privy to high level, sensitive information – and in some cases, more information than other direct reports.
So why aren’t we leveraging this? The Chief of Staff role, whilst growing in some circles, isn’t fully understood and is not commonplace in the UK yet. I’m going to say something potentially controversial here… I know many Senior EAs who ARE Chiefs of Staff. They don’t have the title or the compensation, but they are doing the job (a rose by any other name...). Why is that? Why do we still – by and large – get viewed as a cost on the bottom line, rather than the value-add, 10x-er that we truly are? And how do we change it?
Many assistants wonder “what’s next?”, but just as many are perfectly happy in their career choice – and yes, it is a choice, not the ‘fall back’ that people still seem to think it is – but we want to develop within the role. So how do we facilitate this? How does we ensure our Executive gets the best output, whilst we gets the career development that we deserve? DIVERSIFY. There are so many ‘training courses’ out there, but not many at high level for EAs. And in my opinion, a lot of that is because the best training is done on the job. Learn by doing.
Many experienced EAs have advanced degrees, years of business knowledge spanning multiple disciplines, and are expert networkers… yet we are still treated as ‘just’ the assistant. We plan, organise, compile the senior team meetings and offsites, and in some cases even attend them… but we don’t have a seat at the table. Naturally, this won’t be suitable or appropriate for every EA, but a Senior EA at C-Suite level will likely have valid business insights and can oftentimes provide an alternate view that other more traditional leaders may have yet to consider.
Ask to be brought into senior team meetings, ask for a seat at the table and to sit in on other leadership meetings – the finance team, the sales team etc., so that we can deepen our knowledge. This will only benefit the company in the long run; we can be more proactive, more strategic, if we understand what the company is doing and why. If we know that a specific KPI is falling behind, we can keep an eye on things, we can help to ensure that things don’t fall off the radar and ensure that the actions are completed and the team held accountable, saving our exec time and brain power in the meantime.
EAs worldwide have been saying this for years. We know things need to change. Finance, for example, has a clearly documented progression from finance assistant all the way up to CFO level, with corresponding professional qualifications and formal professional licences.
Until the Admin profession gets the same structure – and I do believe that it is coming – the change needs to come from the top. We need more executives, more recruiters, more senior leaders, to see, and understand, the value that an experienced EA can bring to a team, and to start giving EAs a seat at the table.
The only way that will happen, is if we show them.
