How to run an executive assistant performance review that’s actually useful.

In the years I’ve been recruiting executive assistants, the performance review is the part of the job I’ve seen done least well, and I don’t think that’s because anyone is careless. The executive is the EA’s manager, and the executive rarely sees the work. They see the diary that holds, the inbox that gets answered and the board pack that arrives, but not the many decisions that made those things happen. So when HR asks for a rating, the executive rates the outcome and the relationship, writes “exceeds expectations” and moves on.

That leaves the EA with no real evidence of what they do well, no sense of what would take them to the next level, and no case for the pay rise they probably deserve. It also leaves the business with no way of knowing whether its most senior assistant is an Executive Business Partner or a very good Operational EA being paid as one. I come across both, and neither shows up in “exceeds expectations”.

What I’d stop measuring

Hours and responsiveness. Replying at 11pm isn’t a competency, and it’s often a sign the day wasn’t run well, or that nobody has ever said what a reasonable boundary looks like. An EA who answers everything instantly is quite often an EA who isn’t prioritising.

Tidiness. A clean diary and an empty inbox are outputs, and they tell you nothing about whether the right meetings are in the diary or the right emails were escalated.

Attitude, resilience, positivity. These describe what it’s like to work with the EA, which matters, but they aren’t what the EA is paid for and they aren’t something anyone can be developed against. A review built on them turns into a review of the relationship.

The task list. Scoring an EA on whether they booked the travel and took the minutes is scoring them against the job description, not the level they actually work at. Most EAs do those things, and the review is meant to find what’s different about this one.

What I’d measure instead: the five pillars

The Core Standard scores every assessment on five pillars, and I think they work just as well as the frame for a review, because they’re the five things an EA role turns on. For each one, here are two questions the executive can answer from the last quarter. They’re deliberately about specific moments, because the moment is the evidence.

Prioritisation

When two things you cared about collided this quarter, what did they do, and did they tell you before or after? When the week changed on a Monday morning, did they re-plan it or wait to be told?

Judgement

What’s the best call they made this quarter that you didn’t ask them to make? What did they spot that wasn’t marked urgent and would have hurt if it had been missed?

Communication

Would you have sent the last email they wrote in your name exactly as written? When they brief you before a meeting, is it the three things you need or everything they know?

Execution

What was the last thing that slipped, and whose was it? When you handed them something messy, did it come back finished or did it come back with questions?

Partnership

Where do they draw the line between what they close on their own and what they bring to you, and has that line moved this year? Do they tell you things you don’t want to hear?

That’s ten questions, each one answerable with a story from the last three months, and once those stories are written down they are the review. For a lot of EAs it’ll be the first specific feedback they’ve ever had on how they work, and in my experience it’s what they remember long after the rating has been forgotten.

Give a level, not a rating

“Exceeds expectations” depends entirely on what was expected, and for an EA that’s rarely written down anywhere. A level is more useful because it describes the job they’re actually doing, and The Core Standard uses three.

An Operational EA runs the executive’s working life with accuracy and care, where the executive sets the priorities and nothing slips. An EA to Senior Leadership anticipates, prioritises and manages stakeholders, and holds things together when the day comes apart. An Executive Business Partner reads the commercial picture behind the inbox and operates as an extension of the executive. The levels are described in full here.

So two questions. Reading back over the ten answers, which level is the EA operating at, and looking at the seat, which level does it need? The answers are often different, and that difference is the most useful thing a review can bring out.

If the EA is working above the level of the seat, they’re underpaid, under-titled or both, and they’re likely to leave if nothing changes. In my experience this is the version that costs businesses good people. If they’re working below the level the seat needs, the executive has quietly been doing part of the EA’s job, and the review becomes a development conversation with a clear destination. If the two match, the review is a confirmation, and the conversation is about the next level and whether they want it.

What follows from that

Once there’s a level, three things become straightforward that were impossible with a rating.

Development. The move from EA to Senior Leadership to Executive Business Partner isn’t more care or more hours. It’s a different read of the same situations, joining the signals in the inbox, the numbers and the diary into the one thing the executive needs to hear first. That can be developed, and it can be named in the review as the specific thing to work on.

Pay. EA salaries vary a great deal, and in my experience the level someone works at explains more of that than their title does, so a review that places someone at a level gives both sides something to talk about that’s about the work rather than what the last person was paid.

Title. If the EA is working as an Executive Business Partner, call them one. It costs nothing, and if you don’t, the market may.

When to benchmark the whole team

If you have several EAs, the ten questions still work, but you’ve got a second problem. Each EA is reviewed by a different executive with a different idea of what good looks like, so the reviews can’t be compared. The EA to the most demanding executive gets marked hardest, and the EA to the executive who travels every week gets marked by someone who has barely seen them.

The way round that is to put the whole team through the same assessment. Benchmark Your Team gives every EA the same realistic working day, scored against the same published rubric by a specialist reviewer who doesn’t know who they are. Each EA gets an individual report and a level, and the business gets a view of the team it may not have had before: who’s working above their seat, where an executive has been covering a gap, and where the development budget should go. For teams of five or more there’s a debrief with the reviewer, which is often where the decisions get made. Because the scoring is independent, nobody’s review depends on how generous their executive happens to be.

A simple version you can run next month

1. Send the executive the ten questions, in writing, two weeks before the review, and ask for a specific moment against each one.
2. Send the EA the same ten questions about themselves. The two sets of answers side by side are the most useful document in the review.
3. Place the EA at a level and the seat at a level, and write down both and why.
4. If the levels differ, make that the whole conversation. Pay, title and development all follow from it.
5. Agree one thing to work on for the next six months, drawn from the answers, and how you’ll both know it has happened.
6. If there’s more than one EA in the business, run the same process for all of them in the same month, or benchmark the team so the levels are comparable.

Common questions

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