Being effective in the EA role has very little to do with how busy you look. Most of us know an Assistant who seems to have it all under control. The inbox is at zero by lunchtime, and the calendar is immaculate with nothing ever late. By every obvious measure, they are very good at the job.
But being on top of everything and being genuinely effective in the EA role are not quite the same thing, and the difference between them is easy to miss. We tend to treat efficiency and effectiveness as if they describe the same quality. They don’t, and that distinction matters more now than it has for a long time.
There is a line from Peter Drucker that captures the difference better than anything else I have read. In The Effective Executive, he wrote that efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing the right things. What it means to be effective in the EA role sits almost entirely in that second half.
The distinction is a really simple one. Efficiency is about how the work gets done, cleanly and quickly and without waste. Effectiveness is about which work gets done in the first place and whether it is the work that needs to be done at all.
You will often see efficient and effective bundled together, but they can come apart completely when you look at them in those terms. An Assistant can be wonderfully efficient and still be ineffective, moving at speed through a list of tasks that isn’t shifting anything that actually matters. Finishing the wrong work quickly still leaves you exactly where you started.
For a long time, Assistants have been trained and rewarded almost entirely for efficiency. A clear inbox and a fast turnaround became the markers of a good Assistant, and so it was easy to assume the two were the same. They are not, and being effective in the EA role increasingly depends on understanding why.
This template is a resource to help you manage responsibilities effectively, improve alignment with your executive, and maintain organized, consistent support.
The reason comes down to what efficiency has come to mean. Our sense of it was shaped by the assembly line, where output was measured in quantity per hour and the more you produced, the better you were doing. The neuroscientist Mithu Storoni, speaking on the HBR IdeaCast, points out that this definition was built for an era of repetitive, high-volume work.
That kind of work is exactly what AI is now taking on. Drafting a first version of an email, summarising a long meeting transcript, pulling a report together, or formatting a set of slides are all tasks a machine can do quickly and cheaply, and increasingly, it does – maybe not as well as an EA but good enough for a first draft. If being effective in the EA role rested mainly on getting through that sort of work at speed, much of the job would already be under threat.
What a machine cannot do is decide which of those things are worth doing at all. It cannot tell whether a meeting is unnecessary, whether a recurring diary clash is a symptom of something that needs fixing, or whether one issue deserves your Executive’s attention while another does not. That kind of discernment, knowing what actually matters and what doesn’t, is where being effective in the EA role now really lives.
And it is the reason you will never truly be defined by the tasks you carry out, but by the value you create for your Executive and the organisation. The task list for any EA has always shifted depending on a number of factors, but it definitely feels like it is changing faster now than it ever has.
So what does it look like day-to-day?
The simplest way I can put it is this. An efficient Assistant will become very good at doing the work that lands on their desk. An Assistant who is effective in the EA role looks at the same work and asks whether it needs to be done at all, which I know, for those reading, might seem a bit scary, but in a really fast-paced environment, needs to be done, and then addresses whatever keeps it landing there in the first place. Let’s go into more detail, in everyday terms, the difference will look something like this:
The behaviours underlying all of these examples are very similar. If you are super efficient, your response makes you quicker to address the symptom, while an effective response eliminates the cause, saving you a ton of time in the long run. More often than not, being effective in the EA role means building a system or process where there wasn’t one before, so the same problem doesn’t keep coming back, for both you and the person you support.
None of this is an argument against efficiency, because that trait is really important for EAs.
Being effective at a glacial pace brings its own problems, because doing the right work so slowly that everyone is left waiting helps nobody. Efficiency and effectiveness are meant to work together, and what matters is the order in which you build them.
Effectiveness should always come first by working out which tasks genuinely move things forward for your Executive and your organisation. Efficiency then comes second, once that work is clear. Speed is really valuable as long as your energy is pointed in the right direction.
Which means you will have to step out of your comfort zone and start to voice your concerns. Removing a standing 1:1 meeting, redesigning a process everyone is used to, or deciding what does and doesn’t reach your Executive all depend on a degree of trust from your Executive and a little permission to act on your instincts and experience. If that isn’t there yet, it is worth a conversation with your Executive. Bring some examples and share how you would solve the problem. The most reliable way to earn that level of trust and authority is to find one process you can see is broken, fix it well, and let the result make the case for the next one.
Being effective in the EA role has never really come down to how much you get through in a day. Going back to our original example, the Assistant from the start of this article, the one who was endlessly on top of everything, isn’t being overlooked because they aren’t good at their job, far from it. The problem is that they are being measured on the wrong thing, and very often measuring themselves on it, too. They are proud of being constantly busy and of feeling needed. They probably thrive under the pressure of the work and the speed at which they operate – without questioning why they are under such pressure in the first place.
If any of these examples sound familiar, the chances are you are already doing a good deal of this effective work without giving yourself much credit for it. Being effective in the EA role comes down to seeing the work clearly, being able to describe it, and making sure the people you work with can see it as clearly as you do and give you credit for it. Doing things right is always going to be important in the EA role, but with AI now taking over much of the fast, repetitive work, it is more important than ever that we also think about doing the right things, which is what makes you effective in the EA role.
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