Dara Simkin on why EAs can be the most underestimated cognitive asset in any organisation – and what to do about it.
You’ll likely know this moment well.
Your executive comes off a brutal back-to-back, shoulders somewhere near their ears. You do something that looks, to the untrained eye, like nothing. You tell them the next meeting has been pushed, hand them the one document they actually need and you’ve already handled the thing they were about to spiral into. They breathe.
What just happened wasn’t administrative. It was neurological.
You’re a conditions creator, not a task executor
After co-authoring Full Stack Human, I’ve come to believe that organisations don’t have people problems, they have conditions problems.
Capability is almost always there. What’s missing is the environment that allows it to flourish. And this is especially visible than in the relationship between a senior leader and their EA.
When Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson studied medical errors in hospitals, she expected the best teams to make the fewest mistakes. The opposite was true.
High-performing teams reported more errors – not because they were worse, but because psychological safety made it possible to speak up. The nurses on those teams weren’t waiting to be asked. They were watching, flagging risks, managing the information environment in real time.
The EA operates in the same dynamic. You often have the most complete picture of what’s actually happening: what’s been promised, where the tensions are, which stakeholder is about to lose their composure.
The quality of your relationship with your executive (and the conditions it creates) determines how good their thinking gets to be. That makes you a cognitive function, not just a support one.
What the brain actually needs
When leaders run in chronic fight-or-flight mode (technically functional but operating on adrenaline) decision quality drops, pattern recognition narrows and the prefrontal cortex gets starved.
The way you structure a leader’s day, protect their attention and pre-process information shapes the state their brain arrives in when it faces decisions that count.
AI has taken over much of the low-stakes logistical work, like scheduling, formatting and first-draft emails. In principle, that frees you to do more of what machines can’t – the relational reading, the contextual judgement and the split-second call about what the executive actually needs right now, which is rarely what they asked for.
The EA who knows their executive is running on empty and restructures the afternoon – not because they were asked to, but because they noticed – is doing something no algorithm can replicate.
Three skills worth building right now
From Full Stack Human, there are five capabilities that help people navigate high-change environments without losing themselves.
For EAs, three matter most:
- Embodied adaptability is cognitive flexibility under pressure – the ability to bend without breaking when things shift. It’s built through genuine recovery time, variety in the work and a leader who trusts your judgement rather than just your execution. If you’re in chronic reactive mode with no space to think, your adaptability is being spent, not developed. That’s worth naming to yourself, and potentially to your executive.
- Radical curiosity is the skill that makes everything else learnable. The EAs who thrive in a tech-heavy environment aren’t necessarily the fastest to master new tools. They’re the ones who stay genuinely curious about how things work and what the human layer needs to add. Curiosity is also one of the first things to disappear under chronic stress. If you’ve stopped asking questions, that’s not a character issue, it’s a conditions one.
- Strategic hope means hope as a skill, not a feeling. It’s the ability to see a path forward even when the environment is uncertain. It needs clarity on what you’re working towards, some agency over how you get there, and at least one person who sees what you’re contributing. If none of those exist right now, that’s the real problem. Not your resilience.
The people who stay most effective in high-change environments aren’t the ones who push hardest. They’re the ones who’ve learned to protect the conditions that keep their capability accessible.
If the role you’re in is asking you to be more human than it’s allowing you to be, that’s worth paying attention to – not as a complaint, but as a diagnostic.
