For much of the twentieth century, a senior leader with an executive or personal assistant got much more than administrative support. The private office created a physical boundary. The assistant screened calls, visitors had to get past them, and information travelled through channels that could be filtered and prioritised before it reached the top. Maya Rooz, a former Chief-of-Staff at Jaguar Land Rover talks about how EAs can create the right conditions for leaders to perform at optimum level…
Today, the assistant is still there, but the job has grown harder because the old boundaries are easy to bypass. Email, Slack and Teams messages go directly to the executive. Almost anyone can fill a calendar, often without weighing what that really costs. This is the noise of modern corporate life. We have dramatically increased the speed and volume of contact a senior leader receives. We have barely considered what that does to the quality of their thinking.
The role of an Executive Assistant and Personal Assistant goes way beyond the job description
The role of a PA or EA carries more weight than the usual job description shows. Look at almost any executive assistant job description and you will find calendar management, travel arrangements, correspondence handling, meeting coordination, expense reports, document preparation and stakeholder liaison. All of it matters. But none of it, on paper, names one of the most important things the role does: help create the conditions a leader needs to think well. Perhaps it should.
A leader’s judgement belongs to them. No one else can think a decision through on their behalf, and no amount of calendar management provides insight that was not there to begin with. But judgement never works in a vacuum. It depends on conditions, and the whole system around a leader helps build those conditions, not the leader alone.
Maya Rooz is an international speaker, executive performance expert, and the author of The Protected Mind. She has spent fifteen years working inside senior leadership environments, including as Chief of Staff to the Chief Marketing Officer at Jaguar Land Rover, and has watched leadership from both sides of that filter.
“The longer I work with executives now, the more convinced I am that performance is shaped not only by capability, but by environment. We talk constantly about whether a leader is decisive, strategic or present. We rarely ask what happened in the three hours before they needed to be those things. Did they have space to think, or did someone treat every gap in the diary as unused capacity waiting to be filled? Executive assistants influence the answer every day, whether anyone credits them for it or not.
Calendar management is one of the most powerful tools for creating the conditions for the necessery leadership performance
Take calendar management. It sounds administrative, but a calendar is one of the most powerful tools for shaping a senior leader’s performance because it decides not only where they go but what kind of mind they bring when they get there. I have watched the same pattern play out across many organisations. A diary can look sleek and efficient on the surface, with meetings packed neatly from morning until late afternoon. Logistically, it works. Cognitively, it can be costly. A difficult people conversation followed immediately by a strategy discussion, followed by a budget decision, looks like a clean handover on paper. Something very different happens in the leader’s mind.
Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue helps explain why. When we move from one task to another before fully disengaging from the first, part of our attention stays behind. The leader may have entered the next meeting physically, while something from the previous conversation is still unresolved mentally, and that shapes the judgement they bring to whatever comes next. Good calendar management therefore asks what the leader needs in order to be genuinely useful once they arrive. Sometimes that means protecting a transition or creating space before a significant decision, or resisting the instinct to treat every blank space as availability. White space is often where the actual work of leadership happens.
The same logic applies to screening access. Every organisation generates requests for a leader’s attention, and without a good filter they all begin to look roughly equal. When everything can reach the top, an organisation slowly teaches itself to send everything to the top. Deciding what genuinely needs the leader now, what can wait, and what someone else can handle is not a small thing. It is the judgement that keeps a leader’s attention pointed at the work only they can do, instead of everything that simply found its way to their inbox.
The value here has limits. It does not make senior leaders inaccessible, and it does not make the PA or EA responsible for the leader’s judgement or wellbeing. What it protects is their capacity for the work only they can do. An EA who protects a block of thinking time nobody else thought was necessary, filters a request before it becomes another executive problem, or simply creates space between two demanding conversations is shaping the conditions for executive clarity.
If you have ever sensed that your role carries more than its title suggests, you are right. That is the hidden work. It goes well beyond managing a calendar. It shapes what a leader’s mind can actually do.
About Maya Rooz
Maya Rooz is an international speaker, executive performance expert, and the author of The Protected Mind, her forthcoming debut book. Drawing on research, historic examples, and the voices of fifty senior leaders, the book explores the conditions behind clear thinking, sound judgement and sustained leadership performance.
Follow Maya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayarooz/
mayarooz.com
