The EA Role is Getting Promoted
Your weekly round up of what's going on in the Admin world
Hello! Welcome to this week’s Admin Wrap. This week I’m coming to you from The SUN ☀️🥵
Aside from scoping out any and every air conditioned place I could find this week, I’ve of course been saving down all the interesting article and events I find that I think you might like.
Top of that list is the article which reports that EAs are using AI to get promoted rather than fired. Which I love, obviously.
Also this week my comment featured somewhere in LinkedIn news about how well a completely flat structure might work. I won’t spoil it - I’ll let you read it for yourself (although I do of course spoil it in the NewsWrap 🫣)
Whatever weather you’ve had, I hope you’ve had a great week, and to my European friends, I hope you haven’t melted.
Yvette 🔥
NewsWrap
Does your company need a boss? I see a lot of job adverts saying that they have flat structures, and I certainly see the appeal of not having layers upon layers of bureaucracy. But what happens if your leader ends up being someone who can’t lead? Surely a flat structure makes it even worse? A flat structure can be significantly better if it’s done well, but significantly worse if done badly, and my experience is that poor management is the norm, so I’d say that the chances of this working are slim. What do you think? Would your company still run well if you took away everyone’s titles?
Please spare a thought for your British and European colleagues who have faced a heat wave this week. I’m sure there are some of you (Australians 👀) who regularly deal with temperatures hotter than we have. But remember our homes are simply not built to deal with this kind of heat. In Paris, a lot of buildings aren’t allowed to change the facades - which means no air con at all! I travelled home this week from central London on trains that had no air con - and it was about 35 degrees! Wildly, there’s no law (certainly in the UK) which governs the maximum temperate your place of work is allowed to be 🥵🥵
June marked the deadline for EU member states to implement the EU’s Pay Transparency Directive and how many of the 27 members do you think have adopted it into their national law in line with the deadline? You can probably guess that it’s not many - else I would have just told you. The scary thing is that for about the past decade, the 11% gap between pay for males and females has barely changed - and this makes it look like they don’t even care. One country even suggested that they might just pay the fines rather than implement the directive! Honestly, I despair.
There’s so much talk about how AI is going to cause assistants to be laid off. That execs will just create a bot or an agent and our jobs will be no more. However, I’ve come across an article that changes that narrative. If your executive has created a load of GPTs or Agents (or - more likely - you did), then what’s stopping them from sharing them with you for you to use on their behalf? What’s the difference? Then you become significantly more effective, and this article is suggesting that we are even getting promoted off the back of it. So there’s even more reason to get stuck into AI and embrace it as much as you can (and there’s an AI course you might want to look into - check out the Event Wrap ⬇️)
In this week’s “I love a bit of data” article, there’s been a study of productivity of remote teams who have one day a month in the office (although I’d question whether it’s an actual office - it's probably a conference centre or shared workspace). The study showed not only incremental increases in productivity throughout the experiment but those gains remained even after the study finished. The in-person contact strengthened their communication and overall boosted morale. That’s a clear win in my book - even for the most hardy of work-from-homers!
How to Run a Discovery Session
Someone, probably your exec, decides something is broken. The travel booking process, the meeting prep routine, how invoices get approved, whatever it is this month. The very next sentence out of their mouth is usually: “Can you just sort that out?”
By referring your friends and colleagues to The Admin Wrap, you can earn yourself free access to The Extra Wrap - our in depth thought leadership pieces which are sent out every Monday. Can you make it to the top of the leader board?
🔎 RealityWrap:
You’re Allowed to Actually Love This Job
There’s an assumption baked into a lot of EA content: that the real goal is to leave. Climb into ops, move into Chief of Staff, become “more strategic,” outgrow the title. As if staying an EA is something you only do until you work up the nerve to want more.
But plenty of EAs aren’t waiting for permission to leave. They chose this. They’re good at it, and they have zero interest in trading it for a different job title that happens to sound more senior on LinkedIn.
The best EAs at this stage aren’t junior versions of someone else’s career. They’re running complex operations, managing relationships at the highest level, making calls that shape how a business actually functions day to day. The job isn’t a stepping stone for them. It’s the destination, and they’re excellent at it.
Somewhere along the way, “EA” got treated like a holding pattern. A role you graduate from once you’re taken seriously. That framing says more about how the industry talks about the job than about the people doing it. It also quietly tells the EAs who are thriving exactly where they are that their satisfaction must be temporary, or a failure of nerve, rather than a legitimate outcome.
If you love this work, stop apologising for it. Stop softening it with “for now” or “eventually I’d like to move into...” when you don’t actually mean it. You’re allowed to answer “where do you see yourself in five years” with “doing exactly this, just better” and mean every word of it.
You don’t owe anyone a five-year plan that ends somewhere else. Staying, and being brilliant at it, is the plan. Because a good EA is a career path.
EventWrap
The next cohort for the Carve AI course starts on 21st July for the summer intake. Plus, if you sign up by TODAY (not much notice - sorry, that’s my fault) you can get £300/$400 off as an early bird. So if you’ve been thinking about it, now is literally your chance. You can read all the details, including what’s included each week, here
The Office Management Show is hosting their next conference on 25th September at The May Fair Hotel in central London (which is lovely - I’ve been there!). Office Managers can attend for free, but there’s the choice of paying a fee to get lunch and post-show drinks. Get all the info you need here
On 9th July, Office Dynamics are hosting a webinar to help you with your presentation skills. Present With Confidence will give you advice on how to position yourself strategically, communicate with credibility, and be more effective at influence others. All the details are here
For a list of Conferences, head over to the Conferences section in our Ultimate Assistant’s Toolbox.
If you are running an event aimed at administrative professionals, please send me an email and let me know all about it - hello@theadminwrap.com
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