Executive assistants play some of the most crucial roles in an organization. They can perform personal tasks for their superiors, such as organizing personal appointments or providing high-level administrative support. An executive assistant has an administrative focus, which saves much of the higher-up’s time, and a strategic role, in which planning and decision-making ensure that a company runs untroubled and flourishes.
An executive assistant who stands out in their field usually has a combination of skills, attributes, and qualities that intertwine with one another naturally and enable them to perform successfully. This article will discuss several skills that executive assistants need to perform effectively in their roles.
What is an Executive Assistant?
An executive assistant is a professional who provides high-level support to executives, business owners, entrepreneurs, and board members.
Unlike administrative assistants who typically handle more general office tasks, executive assistants serve as strategic partners who manage both business and personal matters for their principals.
The executive assistant role has evolved significantly from the secretarial positions of decades past.
Today’s EAs function as extensions of the executives they support—anticipating needs, making decisions, representing their principals, and handling sensitive information with the utmost discretion.
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Key Responsibilities of an Executive Assistant
Executive assistants handle a diverse range of responsibilities that span five key performance areas:
1. Business Partner: Acting as a sounding board, offering insights on business decisions, and representing the executive at meetings when necessary.
2. Chief of Staff: Serving as the single point of contact between the executive and internal/external stakeholders, managing communication flow, and ensuring information reaches the right people.
3. Project Manager: Overseeing complex initiatives, coordinating resources, tracking timelines, and ensuring successful completion.
4. Assistant/Scheduler: Managing calendars, coordinating meetings, handling travel arrangements, and ensuring the executive’s time is optimized.
5. Personal Assistant: Supporting personal matters such as family scheduling, home maintenance coordination, gift purchasing, and other non-business tasks.
These five performance multipliers enable executives to achieve what Bull refers to as a “29-hour workday“—accomplishing significantly more than would be possible working alone.
Day-to-day responsibilities typically include:
- Email management and correspondence
- Calendar management and scheduling
- Meeting preparation and follow-up
- Travel planning and logistics
- Managing confidential information
- Preparing presentations and reports
- Coordinating with internal and external contacts
- Event planning and coordination
- Personal task management
What Makes a Great Executive Assistant?
The most effective executive assistants possess a balanced combination of hard skills (technical abilities) and soft skills (interpersonal qualities).
The ideal ratio is 51% soft skills to 49% hard skills.
Hard Skills (Technical Abilities)
These are the concrete, measurable abilities that enable an executive assistant to perform their daily tasks efficiently:
- Technical Proficiency: Mastery of productivity software (Microsoft Office, Google Workspace), communication tools, and project management systems.
- Information Management: Organizing digital and physical files, maintaining databases, and creating efficient systems. Getting your email inbox under control also falls under this ability.
- Written Communication: Crafting clear, professional emails, memos, and other documents.
- Calendar Management: Juggling complex scheduling demands and prioritizing effectively.
- Research Abilities: Finding information quickly and presenting it in a digestible format.
Soft Skills (Interpersonal Qualities)
While technical skills are important, these human-centered qualities often make the difference between a good assistant and an exceptional one:
- Emotional Intelligence: Understanding others’ emotions and responding appropriately.
- Discretion and Confidentiality: Handling sensitive information with complete trustworthiness.
- Proactivity: Anticipating needs before they arise.
- Adaptability: Pivoting quickly as priorities shift.
- Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and non-verbal communication abilities.
- Problem-Solving: Finding creative solutions to unexpected challenges.
- Hospitality Mindset: Providing high-touch hospitality and service that focuses on how people feel, not just what tasks are completed.
- Work Ethic: Demonstrating reliability, consistency, and dedication.
Why Hiring the Right Executive Assistant Matters
The term “executive assistant” is vast—vast from experience, hard experience, compensation perspective, and an executive assistant’s internal mindset in terms of what their role is.
It’s a subordinate relationship to the principal, which puts the onus on the principal to clearly explain and define what excellence looks like to their executive assistant.
The benefits of finding the right EA:
- Time Reclamation: By delegating tasks that don’t require your specific expertise, you free up hours each day to focus on strategic priorities, relationship building, and revenue-generating activities.
- Reduced Decision Fatigue: Every decision depletes your mental energy. A good EA filters information, handles routine decisions, and brings only the most important matters to your attention.
- Better Work-Life Balance: With administrative and personal tasks managed efficiently, you can maintain boundaries between work and personal life, improving overall well-being.
- Organizational Continuity: Your EA serves as the central repository of information about your preferences, relationships, and projects, creating continuity across your affairs.
- Relationship Management: A skilled EA maintains and strengthens your professional relationships by ensuring timely follow-ups and representing you effectively.
- Business Growth: When freed from administrative minutiae, you can devote more attention to strategic initiatives and business development opportunities.
When hiring the right executive assistant, your needs will differ based on whether you’re in a Fortune 100 company, a startup, a family business that’s been running for 35 years, or if you’re an entrepreneur who just purchased a business.
All these different scenarios require different levels of assistant support.
To determine that level, you need to know their hard experience, the longevity in each of their roles, and whether that aligns with what you’re looking for.
Given today’s plethora of assistant support options, you can be specific about your needs and match them with profiles of potential executive assistants.
Once you find a match on that level, take the next step deeper to ensure you’re personally comfortable with this person. That you feel a rapport with them. That they run at your speed. And represent you how you want to be represented.
Some executives want an “iron fist” executive assistant, while others prefer a “kid glove” approach, or anything in between.
Executive Assistant Required Skills
Possessing a diverse skill set is essential for excelling as an executive assistant. Let’s examine the must-have skills every assistant needs to perform.
Organizational Skills
An executive assistant must be well organized and know what to prioritize.
Time Management
An executive assistant must be able to tackle multiple assignments and meet deadlines. Time management for executives is essential in their daily routine. They should be direct, efficient, and never waste a moment.
Detail Oriented
An executive assistant must be precise when dealing with documents and data. They must be aware of every little detail. They need to be thorough and carefully review work. This attention to detail will allow them to notice small mistakes and address them as quickly as possible, ensuring correctness.
Digital Organization
In today’s world, everything is moving towards the digital realm. Categorizing data well only opens the doors further to getting the job done better. The process of structuring and managing data files makes them more accessible.
Scheduling
Managing a schedule is essential for an executive assistant. Creating a schedule is necessary with all the tasks and projects at hand. Experience in planning will be in an executive assistant’s favor for setting deadlines and prioritizing duties. This moves them one step closer to reaching their planned executive assistant goals.
Resource Allocations
Distributing and assigning resources plays an incredibly significant role in achieving objectives effectively and efficiently. These allocations can vary from budget to personal, equipment allocation to performance observation.
Delegation
Besides allocating, we have task delegations. The executive assistant is assigned to choosing the proper individuals for the task, setting clear instructions and timelines, and micromanaging should be avoided for the process to run smoothly.
Communication Skills
An executive assistant has to be clear and precise. This allows them to communicate important matters quickly, internally and externally. The manner of their delivery also plays a key role. Executive assists must have highly developed:
Written Skills
Strong written communication is essential for an executive assistant, ensuring clear and professional correspondence. They must excel in drafting concise emails, reports, and documents, maintaining a tone that reflects the executive’s voice and the organization’s standards.
Verbal Communication
Executive assistants will be dealing daily with calls, video calls, emails, meetings, presentations, and preparing documentation. All sorts and forms of communication. Therefore, they should be well-versed in communication.
Technical Proficiency
Companies use many devices and systems, including different customer relationship management systems that manage customer data, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and so many more. An executive assistant must be familiar with many of them, or at least the one their company uses
So, an executive assistant’s should also have the following skills:
Software skills
They must be skillful in the fundamentals. Such as having expertise in office software and being able to navigate through these systems.
Tech savviness
Executive assistants must be able to adapt to new tools comfortably and effortlessly. This will require them to be up to date with new platforms. Executive assistants who excel are the ones who are constantly finding ways to improve or develop their skills.
Discretion and Confidentiality
Discretion and confidentiality are paramount for an Executive Assistant, requiring the utmost professionalism when handling sensitive information.
Professionalism
Being professional is a virtue and very much appreciated in the workforce. The ability to manage sensitive information is something executive assistants will have to get used to. They will be tasked with such duties more than once.
Problem-Solving
As we can see, the job of an executive assistant requires constant activity in the search for solutions.
Proactive approach
Having the ability to find and resolve an issue before it builds up is crucial. This emphasizes the importance of planning ahead and anticipating what may be future problems for the workforce.
Adaptability
A key quality of executive assistants is their capability to adjust to situations, change approaches, and take different routes. Not everything will go the way it was planned, so having to improvise will assist the company significantly.
Agility
We established that executive assistants work in a fast-paced environment and often times there are unexpected challenges that insist on having them change their priorities and tackle different tasks that may come up.
Stress Management
Tasks thrown at executive assistants are not easy ones. So, they must be able to not only be equipped with the right tools and skills but also maintain their performance in high-pressure situations.
Interpersonal skills
Since executive assistants constantly work with others, another key skill they must perfect is interpersonal communication.
Soft skills
- Creativity: People with this soft skill are able to approach things in a different manner that has not yet been approached before. Coming up with new and innovating ideas for a problem.
- Critical thinking: The ability to evaluate objectively and being able to form their own conclusions.
- Punctuality: Is the skill of being consistent, meeting deadlines, being reliable, and having great time management skills.
Hard skills
- Technology: skilled in microsoft offices, social media, different programming languages, etc.
- Marketing skills: SEO specialists, SEM specialists, content management, etc.
- HR skills: Managing priorities, recruitment skills, decision-making skills, leadership skills, etc.
Team Building and Relationship Management
Strong relationships amongst employees are critical for the success of a company. Knowing how to create these relationships and motivating team members to maintain them is a pivotal role for executive assistants. They must have social awareness. Be capable of working with integrity and resolving conflicts. They must be great supervisors.
Responsibility and Leadership Skills
Leadership skills are key to directing a team effectively. An executive assistant must be able to take responsibility for the decisions they make, ensuring that their actions align with the company’s goals and values. They should possess the confidence to make informed decisions quickly and the humility to acknowledge and learn from mistakes. Strong leadership involves guiding others and inspiring trust, fostering collaboration, and maintaining accountability within the team. An executive assistant must also be adept at delegating tasks, managing priorities, and leading by example to cultivate a productive and positive work environment.
Project Management
Several things that executive assistants will need to keep an eye on will be:
Resource management
Executive assistants must skillfully manage various resources, including time, finances, people, and materials, to ensure that every asset is utilized to its fullest potential. Effective resource management requires strategic planning, prioritization, and adapting to changing circumstances. By optimizing these resources, executive assistants can drive efficiency, reduce waste, and ensure that organizational goals are met with precision and effectiveness.
Documentation Preparation
When working in a corporation, there are documents for various purposes. Contracts, presentations, reports, agendas, and so on. They must all go through several processes before their final form:
- Planning
- Researching
- Drafting
- Formatting
- Editing
- Revising and
- Finalizing
All these steps have to be reviewed and worked on with caution.
Preparing Different Projects
- Scheduling meetings
- Event planning
- Office organization
- Travel arrangements
Coordination
In order for all things to fall into place, many things must be thought of and planned carefully. Such as:
- Doing the research
- Securing supplies
- Creating the agendas
- Scheduling
- Internal and external communications
- Team coordination
- Expense Management
How to Hire an Executive Assistant
To hire the right executive assistant, you need to be really clear about what your needs are, what season your company is in, and what your goals are. Then, find executive assistants from an experienced level who match those goals.
Beyond that, make sure you’re comfortable with this person—someone you’ll look forward to interacting with, getting an email from, or receiving a text message from, rather than rolling your eyes or shaking your head when a note, text, or call comes in from them!
Here is a step-by-step process you can follow to hire an executive assistant:
1. Define Your Needs
Before beginning your search, clearly articulate what you need in an assistant:
- What specific tasks will they handle?
- What level of experience is necessary?
- Do you need industry-specific knowledge?
- Are you looking for full-time vs part-time, or fractional support?
- Will they work remotely, in-office, or in a hybrid arrangement?
2. Screening Resumes and Profiles
When reviewing applications, look beyond job titles to understand the scope of responsibilities candidates have handled.
Pay attention to:
- Longevity in previous positions (ideally 1.5+ years)
- Experience supporting senior-level executives
- Career progression showing increasing responsibilities
- Professional presentation (on resumes and LinkedIn profiles)
- Attention to detail (formatting, spelling, grammar)
- Additional certifications or professional development
At ProAssisting, we look at their career progression—did they constantly move up in titles? Are there any backslides that they do not seem to have overcome? What level was the person they assisted in their previous position, and how big was that company?”
3. The Interview Process
Effective interviews for executive assistant positions should assess both technical competence and cultural fit:
- Include multiple stakeholders: Have the candidate meet with other team members they’ll work with.
- Conduct informal meetings: Coffee or lunch meetings remove psychological barriers and show more of the candidates’ true personalities.
- Ask behavioral questions: Request examples of how they’ve handled difficult situations, managed executives’ time, or served as gatekeepers.
- Test technical skills: Consider assessments of writing, software proficiency, or problem-solving abilities.
- Trust your instincts: Your gut feeling about a candidate is often right, especially for a role that requires such close partnership.
4. Onboarding
Avoid that “I can do it faster myself” approach and invest time in proper onboarding—it pays off exponentially as your relationship develops.
Here is what you need to do:
- Share comprehensive information: Provide contact lists, preferences, account details, and other essential information.
- Introduce them properly: Formally introduce your EA to key contacts and explicitly define their authority.
- Establish feedback mechanisms: Create regular check-ins to provide feedback and address questions.
- Give access appropriately: Provide the access and permissions they need to be effective.
Remember that onboarding is an investment that pays dividends through increased efficiency and effectiveness over time.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let’s address some common questions about executive assistants:
What Are the Most Important Qualities of an Executive Assistant?
The most important qualities include trustworthiness, discretion, proactivity, attention to detail, excellent communication skills, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.
A top-tier EA thinks ahead, prioritizes effectively, and maintains composure under pressure.
How Do I Assess an Executive Assistant’s Skills During Hiring?
Some companies use personality assessments, grammar tests, or technology tests when hiring executive assistants. These can be helpful tools, but when assessing an assistant’s skills, you’re judging them on everything.
Look at the basics:
- Are there any typos on the resume?
- How does the layout of their resume appear?
- How is their LinkedIn profile coming across?
- Is their professional presentation aligned with how you want your company represented?
- Can they provide detailed examples of past projects and responsibilities?
- Do they clearly explain their career progression and transitions between roles?
- When describing a typical day supporting previous executives, do they offer specific details that ring true?
The way assistants present themselves speaks to their taste and attention to detail, which often reflects how they’ll perform in the role.
What Are Red Flags When Hiring an Executive Assistant?
Job hopping is a common red flag when hiring an executive assistant, though context matters:
- Frequent job changes without clear progression
- Gaps in employment history that can’t be well explained
- Short tenures at multiple companies (less than 1-1.5 years)
- Vague descriptions of previous responsibilities
- Inconsistencies in how they describe past experiences
- Answers that don’t ring true or feel authentic
- Reluctance to provide references
Remember that some great candidates may have left positions due to difficult principals who didn’t align with their working style.
The key is differentiating between legitimate career moves and concerning patterns that might indicate reliability issues.
How Can an Executive Assistant Improve an Executive’s Productivity?
A great executive assistant will protect an executive’s calendar to give them the space to be productive.
The question is, is the executive putting their effort and time towards something that is productive? So, it’s definitely a two-way street.
The assistant can’t do the high-level work, but the biggest way that an assistant improves an executive’s productivity is that they take the $100 an hour tasks and projects off their plate to allow room for productivity above that.
Final Thoughts
This article discusses an executive assistant’s top skills and their impact on helping a company flourish. The more skills (talked about)they have developed and mastered, the better performance they will have in their role.
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