Executive Assistants are often brilliant at recognising everyone else’s priorities, strengths and achievements. Recognising their own? That can be much harder.
During a recent Pally Talk training session on performance identity and knowing your value, former EA Siobhan Mears asked a deceptively simple question:
Do you actually know what you bring to the table?
Not your job title. Not your salary. Not the bullet points on your job description. Your actual value.
For an EA, that can include the decisions you influence, the problems you prevent, the information you protect and the hours of senior leadership time you give back to the business.
Your value is often in what nobody sees
One of the difficulties with the EA role is that doing it exceptionally well can make the work almost invisible.
The diary works. The CEO gets to the right place. The difficult stakeholder is managed. The problem is spotted before it becomes a crisis. Sensitive information stays sensitive.
Nobody sees the fire because you put it out before it started.
As Siobhan explained during the session, EAs manage some of a leader’s most valuable resources: their time, attention, decisions and access. They are constantly making judgement calls about what needs a leader’s attention, what can wait and what should never reach them in the first place.
That isn’t simply administration. It requires judgement and strategic intelligence.
Stop measuring your value by how busy you are
There can also be a tendency in the profession to equate being valuable with doing more.
Taking on another project. Staying later. Replying at the weekend. Becoming the person everyone relies on when something goes wrong.
But being incredibly busy isn’t the same as progressing.
Siobhan identified three patterns that high performers can fall into: the Achiever, who associates worth with output; the Protector, who absorbs everyone else’s problems; and the Striver, who is constantly available and indispensable but rarely has the space to step back.
They aren’t necessarily bad traits. In fact, they may be part of what made you successful.
The problem comes when they become the only way you know how to demonstrate your worth.
Make your invisible contribution visible
Before your next appraisal, salary review or career conversation, don’t simply write a list of everything you do.
Ask yourself:
What decisions have I influenced?
What problems have I prevented?
What time have I given back to my executive?
What responsibility am I carrying now that wasn’t part of my original role?
Where am I using judgement rather than simply completing a task?
That’s the story of your value.
You don’t need to prove that you’re working hard. You need to be able to articulate the level you’re already operating at.
And there is a big difference between the two.
About the Host
Siobhan Mears works with founders, leaders, and high-performing professionals navigating growth, pressure, and increasing responsibility.
Blending behavioural insight, performance, and leadership dynamics, her work focuses on the patterns that shape how people operate, position themselves, communicate their value, and sustain success over time.
With a background working closely within high-pressure professional environments, Siobhan brings a grounded and commercially aware perspective to conversations around performance, influence, identity, and sustainable success in modern working life.
She is an ICF & ACC Certified Coach and the founder of The Mears Collective.
siobhan@siobhanmears.com