You know the feeling. You’ve sent the message, watched it sit there unread for six hours. Or you finally find a slot for your 1:1 meeting and your exec doesn’t join - you just sit there for ten minutes and wonder what they are doing. Things like this don’t happen once in a blue moon. Its regular. Every week.
If that’s your normal, you’ve probably already worked out that the polite explanations don’t hold up anymore. “They’re just busy” doesn’t explain a pattern. “It’s a mad week” doesn’t explain every single week. At some point the evidence just outweighs the excuse, and you’re left wondering what’s actually going on.
The Uncomfortable Read
When someone consistently doesn’t reply to you, and consistently bumps time with you, they’re telling you something about where you sit in their pecking order. Not always cruelly or on purpose. But clearly.
Sometimes that pecking order is fair enough. A board update, a client in crisis, a regulator on the phone: these will jump the queue, and they should. No EA worth their salt begrudges that. Your exec’s whole job is juggling competing demands, and some of those demands genuinely do outrank yours.
But there’s a second category. It’s when you’re being bumped not because something more important came up, but because your exec has decided - perhaps subconsciously - your time doesn’t actually cost them anything. That the meeting can move because you’ll just rearrange it like you always do. That the message can wait because you’ll still be there whenever they’re ready, however long that takes. Even that you can’t possibly have anything of importance to speak to them about.
That’s not busyness. They’re making a judgement call about your worth relative to theirs. Call it what you like - but they are deprioritising you and devaluing your time.
Why This Cuts Deeper Than It Should
There’s a reason this particular behaviour gets under your skin more than most other workplace friction, and it isn’t vanity. The EA-exec relationship runs on a slightly odd deal: you’re expected to know their day inside out, anticipate what they need before they ask, protect their time like it’s sacred, and generally build your working life around theirs. In return, the unspoken part of that deal is that they treat your time, and you, with a baseline of respect.
When that stops being reciprocal, it’s not just a wasted afternoon. It tells you the relationship isn’t the partnership the job description implies. It’s a one-way arrangement wearing a two-way costume.
You’re allowed to be annoyed by that. It doesn’t make you difficult, precious, or bad at your job.
Personally, this is one of my buttons. The sense of being ignored or dismissed is something that cuts me disproportionally deep. I understand that, and I understand why (childhood, of course) but that doesn’t make it any less demoralising.
The Trap of Over-Interpreting
It’s very easy, after the fifth cancelled meeting, to build an entire story in your head: they don’t rate me, they’re planning to replace me, everyone in the building thinks less of me than I realised. None of that may be true. I’d go as far as saying that it’s really unlikely. An exec who’s chronically disorganised, permanently overwhelmed, or just genuinely bad at managing their own diary will look identical from your side of the desk to one who doesn’t respect you. Same behaviour. Different cause entirely.
So as much as we have probably already jumped straight to a verdict. We should think about it rationally, so that we can tell the two apart before we act on either.
So What Do You Actually Do About It
Right. Enough diagnosing. Here’s what actually changes things.
