Understanding how to use your assistant should be built into leadership training. Not as a “nice to have”. Not as optional soft skills. As a core leadership capability.
Because right now, we keep placing the burden in entirely the wrong place.
Why is it always down to the employee to push back?
To escalate.
To educate their own manager on how to treat them, how to work with them, how not to cross lines.
That is exhausting.
It is risky.
And in junior, isolated, or single-EA roles, it can be career-limiting.
We talk endlessly about resilience and confidence, yet we ignore the power imbalance that makes “just speak up” a problem in many workplaces. People do not fail to speak up because they lack courage. They stay quiet because the cost of being seen as difficult, disloyal, or replaceable is very real.
Healthy workplaces do not rely on individual bravery to correct broken systems.
They design roles, expectations, and leadership behaviour so that assistants are never put in that position in the first place.
Clear scope.
Clear authority.
Clear boundaries.
Clear understanding from leaders about what an assistant is there to do, and what they are not.
I have spent 15 years pushing this agenda. Fifteen years of research, data, frameworks, case studies, and lived experience from tens of thousands of administrative professionals around the world.
And yet we are still here.
Still seeing the role disrespected, misunderstood and underutilised.
Still watching brilliant professionals burn out.
Still hearing “it’s just a personality clash” used to excuse poor leadership.
Still expecting the least powerful person in the room to manage the emotional intelligence of the most powerful one.
This is not an assistant problem.
It is a leadership failure.
Until organisations stop treating effective executive support as something assistants must fight for, and start treating it as something leaders must be trained for, nothing fundamentally changes.
If a leader does not know how to work well with an assistant, that is not a gap to be filled by the assistant.
It is a capability gap in the leader.
And it is long past time businesses owned that.
