Creating communication principles with your Executive is one of the most useful things you can do as an EA, and I think many of us would benefit from doing it more formally. Most EAs are already very good at communicating with their Executive, but without clear agreements in place, people tend to use whichever channel they prefer and expect a reply on their own timescale, which means messages get missed, and our Executive gets interrupted more often than they need to be.
Communication principles are a simple way of fixing that. They are a short, written agreement about how you and your Executive communicate, and once they’re working well between the two of you, you can share a version with your Executive’s team so everyone knows how to reach them and what to expect.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what communication principles are, why they matter, how to create them with your Executive, and how to extend them to the wider team.
This template provides you with practical, ready-to-use dialogues tailored for various common scenarios where you might need to refuse a request at work. Equip yourself with the right words to handle difficult conversations gracefully.
Communication principles are a set of agreements about how you and your Executive communicate, written down so nobody has to guess. They usually cover which tools you use and what each one is for, how quickly people can expect a reply, and what to do when something is urgent.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison has a team communication charter that works on the same idea. Their template lists each communication tool a team uses, what the team agrees each tool is for and the expectations that go with it, and a date to review the whole thing. It’s a useful starting point because it keeps the agreement short and practical.
The written part matters more than you might think. Most of us already have unspoken rules with our Executive, and they probably work well most of the time, but unspoken rules are very hard for anyone else to follow, especially someone covering for you while you’re on vacation, which is one of the best reasons for creating communication principles in the first place.
Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication report surveyed knowledge workers and business leaders in the US. A knowledge worker is someone whose job mainly involves working with information and ideas rather than making or handling physical things, and EAs fit that description closely because almost all of our work happens through email, chat, meetings, and documents.
The report found that knowledge workers spend 88% of their working week communicating across different channels, that 73% have seen the number of channels they use increase over the last year, and that every single person surveyed experiences miscommunication at least once a week. For EAs, I’d expect those numbers to be at least as high, and possibly higher, because we’re communicating on our own behalf and on our Executive’s behalf at the same time. So when the number of channels keeps growing, and nobody has agreed what each one is for, we’re usually the ones chasing the missed messages and sorting out the mix-ups.
This is where communication principles really help, because they give everyone the same set of rules to work from.
Start with your Executive, because what you agree on will impact what you share with everyone else. Book 30 minutes for this conversation so you both have time to think it through properly, instead of squeezing it into the end of a regular check-in.
If you’d like some help with how to approach this conversation, we’ve covered it in more detail in managing up as an Executive Assistant.
The last part of creating communication principles with your Executive is writing them down. Keep them in plain language, and to one page if you can. It doesn’t need to be formal, and a short document covering what you’ve agreed is plenty.
Save it somewhere you can both find it easily, and add a review date. Your Executive’s role and priorities will change over time, and the principles need to change with them.
Once the principles work well between you and your Executive, the next step is to create communication principles for your Executive’s direct reports and the wider team. This is probably where you’ll see the biggest drop in interruptions, because most of the requests for your Executive’s time come from the people who work most closely with them.
When creating communication principles for the team, keep them simpler than the ones you have with your Executive. They should explain how to request time with your Executive, what should come through you, how to flag something urgent and how quickly they can expect a response.
How you introduce it makes a big difference to whether people use it. Share a draft at a team meeting, ideally with your Executive in the room, and ask the team for their input before you finalize it. People are much more likely to follow principles they’ve helped to shape, and they’ll often point out something you hadn’t thought of, like a regular report that always needs a quick sign-off.
Having your Executive introduce it, or at least back it up in the meeting, also helps. It shows the team these are your Executive’s preferences as well as yours, which makes it much easier to point people back to them later.
We’ve also written about protecting your Executive’s focus time, and the two work really well together, because clear principles for the team mean fewer requests landing in the middle of your Executive’s focus blocks.
Creating communication principles is something you’ll come back to, because they only help if people keep using them, so plan to review them with your Executive every few months, and again whenever someone new joins the team or your Executive’s role changes.
People will forget, of course, and a few will ignore them. When that happens, a friendly reminder usually works best. Pointing someone back to the agreed channel while still helping them with their request keeps the relationship positive and reminds them how things work, without anyone feeling told off.
If the same issue keeps coming up, take it as a sign that the principles might need adjusting. It could be that a channel isn’t working for the team, or that your Executive has changed how they like to work, and it’s much easier to update a one-page document than to keep correcting the same thing every week.
Creating communication principles takes one conversation with your Executive and one with their team, and once they’re in place, your Executive can trust that anything important will reach them in the right way.
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