I came across a LinkedIn post recently about executive assistant career development that made me sigh deeply. It was well-intentioned, beautifully formatted, and garnered plenty of engagement.

It offered a four-point plan for executives to help their assistants “become more strategic” through better leadership, inclusion in meetings, information sharing and motivation.

On the surface, what’s not to like? But as I read through the bulleted action items and tidy advice, I couldn’t help thinking: this is precisely the kind of comfort food content that keeps management support professionals stuck in outdated paradigms.

Persistent myth

The post exemplifies what I call the “strategic partnership delusion”, the persistent myth that the primary evolution for executive assistants is to move from task executors to strategic partners with their executives.

It’s a narrative recycled for at least two decades and fundamentally misunderstands how workplace transformation happens.

The problem isn’t that executives aren’t giving assistants “permission” to be strategic. The framing of the conversation remains locked in a hierarchical model that no longer reflects workplace reality.

When I supported a global CEO in the early 1990s, my ability to add value wasn’t primarily determined by whether he invited me to leadership meetings (though that helped).

It came from my unique position at the intersection of information flows across the organisation, a vantage point that gave me insights that weren’t visible even to him.

What most EAs get catastrophically wrong

My value wasn’t in aligning with his strategy. It was in applying systems thinking for executive assistants, seeing patterns across organisational systems that he couldn’t see precisely because of his position at the top of the hierarchy.

This is what most executive assistant training gets catastrophically wrong about management support transformation. It continues to position the executive as the primary source of strategic value, with the assistant’s role being to understand and extend that value.

This framing made sense in an era when organisations were less complex and information flowed primarily through formal channels. It makes increasingly little sense in the future of executive assistance we’re already witnessing today.

The four seismic shifts that actually matter

What’s truly reshaping the management support profession aren’t superficial changes in executive attitudes, but four fundamental shifts in how work actually gets done – shifts that completely redefine the executive assistant’s career path:

From information gatekeeper to information curator

In 1985, executive assistants controlled access to information through their management of paper files, messages, and appointments. The digital revolution obliterated that role entirely. Today, value comes not from controlling information flow but from curating insight amid overwhelming data noise.

When I started my career, I spent hours maintaining immaculate filing systems. By the time I supported C-suite executives, my value came from identifying which 3% of available information actually needed their attention and contextualising it appropriately. That’s a fundamentally different modern executive assistant skill that has nothing to do with “being more strategic” in the traditional sense, yet is critical to the future of executive assistance.

From task execution to problem solving

The comfortable fairy tale is that assistants used to just do what they were told, and now they’re expected to contribute ideas. The messy reality is that successful management support professionals have always been problem solvers – the difference is the nature and scope of the problems.

Early in my career, the problems were primarily logistical: how to arrange complicated travel or manage competing priorities. Those challenges haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been joined by more complex problems related to information management, stakeholder communication and systems coordination.

I once had an executive who struggled with information overload. The strategic partnership model would suggest I needed to understand his priorities better or attend more meetings.

But the actual solution came from applying systems thinking for EAs – recognising patterns in how information was being misrouted throughout the organisation – something I spotted precisely because I wasn’t in his position.

This shows why the strategic partnership model fails executive assistants who are ready to contribute at a higher level.

From technical proficiency to technological adaptation

The conventional narrative suggests that assistants need to master specific technologies to remain relevant. This misunderstands the fundamental shift in technological change.

When I started, technical proficiency meant mastering specific tools, including the typewriter, the dictaphone and early word processors. Today, the tools you’re using will be obsolete within five years. The critical modern executive assistant skill isn’t mastery of current technologies but adaptability to emerging ones, a core aspect of executive assistant career development that traditional training often misses.

I remember the panic when a new email system was introduced at a financial services firm where I worked. The assistants who struggled weren’t those who knew least about the old system. They were those who had built their identity around being experts in it.

The ones who thrived approached the new system with curiosity rather than defensiveness, understanding that adaptation rather than mastery was the key skill.

From hierarchical support to network leadership

Perhaps the most profound shift – and the one most executive assistant training completely misses – is the move from supporting individuals in a clear reporting structure to managing complex networks of relationships across and beyond organisations.

The strategic partnership model remains fixated on the executive-assistant partnership, as though that relationship still defines the management support role. But in the future of executive assistance within today’s fragmented workplace, value increasingly comes from connecting disparate parts of the organisation that formal structures keep separate.

This is why systems thinking for executive assistants has become an indispensable element of management support transformation.

When I managed a publishing team split across three locations, my effectiveness didn’t come from aligning with any single executive’s vision. It came from understanding the informal influence networks, the disconnections between departments and the unacknowledged workflow bottlenecks that no organisational chart captured.

Why the strategic partnership model fails executive assistants

So why does the “just be more strategic” narrative persist in executive assistant career development? Because it’s comforting. It suggests that the path forward is simply a matter of incremental change rather than fundamental management support transformation.

It tells executives they just need to tweak their approach rather than rethink how work gets done. It offers assistants a clear identity as an extension of executive authority rather than asking them to develop distinct forms of organisational value.

It’s the workplace equivalent of suggesting that horse-drawn carriage makers just needed to make slightly better carriages as the automobile was being invented.

The “strategic partner” framing is also insidiously disempowering. It positions the assistant’s evolution as dependent on executive permission and inclusion.

It suggests that without being invited to the table, assistants cannot create strategic value – which both understates their current contributions and limits their future possibilities.

What real management support transformation looks like

The future of executive assistance isn’t about being merely a strategic partner to an executive. Modern executive assistant skills extend far beyond this limited framework.

The future-proof assistant is an architect of organisational effectiveness who uses their unique position to identify patterns, solve problems and create connections that hierarchical structures often obscure.

When my executive was struggling with hybrid team cohesion after the pandemic, I didn’t wait to be invited to leadership meetings to offer suggestions. I applied systems thinking for executive assistants by mapping the actual communication flows across the organisation: who was talking to whom, where decisions were really being made, which formal processes were being bypassed through informal channels.

The resulting insights didn’t come from better alignment with his strategy; they came from seeing what he couldn’t see because of his position – demonstrating why the strategic partnership model fails executive assistants who are capable of this level of organizational analysis.

This approach requires fundamentally different capabilities than those most EA training programmes emphasise:

Instead of focusing solely on understanding executive priorities, those interested in executive assistant career development now develop systems thinking for executive assistants that allows them to see patterns across seemingly disconnected parts of the organisation.

Instead of measuring success by executive satisfaction, management support transformation requires developing metrics that capture impact on organisational effectiveness: decision completion rates rather than calendar density, information quality rather than volume.

Instead of building their identity around a single relationship, the future of executive assistance depends on cultivating modern EA skills like network leadership that creates value through connection and integration.

Moving beyond traditional EA training

The management support profession is undergoing genuine management support transformation, but it’s not the incremental shift from executor to strategic partner that most training programmes describe.

It’s a fundamental redefinition of how value is created in increasingly complex, fragmented organisations.

Those offering executive assistant career development have a choice. They can continue serving comfort food content that reassures without challenging or they can acknowledge the deeper shifts transforming our profession and help management support professionals develop the modern EA skills these shifts require.

The future of executive assistance doesn’t belong to those who perfect the art of strategic partnership within hierarchical structures. It belongs to those who recognise that hierarchies themselves are being complemented (and sometimes supplanted) by networks, and who develop the systems thinking for EAs and other modern EA skills needed to create value in this new landscape.

This isn’t comfortable. It’s not packaged in tidy bullet points with checkmarks. But it’s the honest conversation we need to have about why the strategic partnership model fails EAs if we’re serious about executive assistant career development and truly future-proofing the management support profession.

The traditional executive assistant role is dead. And that’s brilliant news for everyone ready to embrace what genuine management support transformation looks like.