When several senior leaders need support, hiring an EA for every one of them isn’t always realistic. So what does a good shared executive support model actually look like?
You have six people on your senior leadership team. All six could do with some form of executive support, but none of them necessarily needs (or has the budget for) a full-time EA.
So you do what seems sensible…you give one EA to all of them.
Six months later, the EA is trying to manage six diaries, everyone thinks their meeting is the urgent one, three people are messaging her at the same time and nobody is particularly happy with the arrangement. Least of all the EA.
This is a situation we see a lot, particularly in growing organisations where the leadership team has expanded faster than the support structure around it. Hiring an EA for every executive would be excessive and expensive, but expecting one person to somehow stretch across the entire team isn’t working either. Fortunately, there are other ways to structure executive support.
Why shared executive support can go wrong
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a shared EA model. One experienced EA can successfully support several senior people when the workload, expectations and personalities are right.
The problems usually start when “shared support” really means “everyone can ask this person for anything”. Suddenly, an EA who was originally recruited to support the CEO is also helping the CFO with travel, managing diaries for two directors and being pulled into projects by another three people. Nobody has formally changed the role, but somehow the workload has doubled.
Prioritisation becomes difficult too. If the CEO, CFO and COO all need something urgently at 10am on Tuesday, who wins? An experienced EA will make that judgement, but if it happens constantly, you’re asking one person to manage competing priorities rather than actually getting through the work.
There’s also the relationship itself to consider. Great executive support relies on knowing how someone works: which meetings they genuinely need to attend, who can always get into their diary, who definitely can’t, how much time they need between calls and whether a 7am flight is acceptable or grounds for immediate dismissal. Multiply those preferences across six or eight people and one EA can quickly become a very expensive human database.
There are several ways to structure executive support
The traditional one-to-one model still makes perfect sense for some roles. A CEO with a complex international diary, significant board responsibilities and a constant stream of competing demands may genuinely need a dedicated EA.
Further down the leadership team, the requirement is often very different. A Finance Director might need ten hours of support a month, while a Commercial Director needs twenty-five and a Practice Lead only needs help when they’re travelling or preparing for a major client meeting.
Trying to force all of those people into the same support model doesn’t make much sense. Some organisations use a pooled model, where a central administrative team handles requests as they come in. This can work well for transactional tasks, particularly when processes are clear and the work doesn’t rely heavily on knowing the individual executive. The downside is that senior leaders can lose the continuity and relationship that makes really good EA support so valuable.
Another option is to create small support groups, with one EA supporting two or three named executives, giving people greater continuity while still making better use of available capacity. It can work extremely well, provided the total workload is realistic.
Then there’s the team-based fractional model, which is how we tend to work with larger organisations.
What a team-based model looks like in practice
Rather than assigning one person to an entire leadership team, we build a small team of experienced VAs around the organisation.
Each senior leader has a named person who gets to know them properly. They learn their diary preferences, regular contacts, travel habits and all the other details that gradually turn good administrative support into a genuinely useful working relationship.
Behind that person sits the wider team. It’s worth understanding that executive workloads rarely behave themselves. One leader might suddenly have a week of international travel while another is preparing for a board meeting. Someone goes on holiday. Somebody else has a particularly quiet month. Instead of one overloaded EA trying to absorb every peak, capacity can move around the team.
It also gives you proper cover. If someone’s usual VA is away, another member of the team already understands the client and can step in. The executive isn’t suddenly back to booking their own flights because their EA dared to take a week’s annual leave.
For a Chief of Staff, there’s another advantage: you can see where the demand actually is. Rather than committing to several full-time salaries based on a rough feeling that “everyone needs support”, you can allocate hours to different people or departments and adjust them as you learn what each role genuinely requires.
How this works with real leadership teams
We’ve seen this model work at very different scales. At World Rugby, for example, we originally came in to cover a relatively small gap when an EA was leaving. They already had two employed EAs supporting the very top of the organisation, with a wider group of senior leaders underneath who also needed support.
After three years, our team grew to seven people supporting members of the senior leadership team, the governance function and providing backup for Accounts Payable when needed. There’s a team lead who acts as the main point of contact, while individual VAs have named people or functions they support.
At The Chartered Institute of Marketing, we run a team of four supporting members of the senior leadership team. At Clarasys, we’ve had a team of around seven running for years alongside their existing in-house support.
The exact structure is different in every organisation because the people and workloads are different. That’s rather the point. You shouldn’t have to squeeze your leadership team into a support model that was designed before anyone worked out what they actually needed.
Protecting the EA you already have
For many Chiefs of Staff, the starting point isn’t a completely unsupported leadership team. There’s already an excellent EA in the business. The problem is that everyone has discovered she’s excellent.
This is how very good EAs end up becoming victims of their own competence. Someone asks them to “just help” with a diary. Another director needs a travel booking. Then there’s a project that needs coordinating and, before long, the person hired to provide strategic support to the CEO is spending half her week looking after everybody else.
Adding a team around an existing EA can protect that role rather than threaten it. In several of our client organisations, the in-house EA is actually the person who manages our relationship. She decides where support is needed, helps allocate budgets and works with our team lead when capacity needs to change. Instead of being expected to personally absorb every request, she has a wider resource she can use.
For the organisation, that means keeping the knowledge and relationships of an experienced in-house EA while giving more people access to proper support.
Start smaller than you think
You don’t need to redesign your entire executive support structure on day one. In fact, we’d usually recommend the opposite.
Pick one or two senior leaders who clearly need support and start there. Work out what they’re currently spending time on, which tasks can be handed over and roughly how many hours of support they need each month.
You may discover it’s considerably less than you expected. Most of the senior leaders we support use around twenty-five to thirty-five hours of fractional time a month, because they’re only paying for the time someone is actually working for them.
Once the model is working, you can add another executive, increase someone’s hours or bring another VA into the team. If one department suddenly has a busy quarter, you can flex support towards it without redesigning the whole structure or launching another recruitment process.
That ability to start small is particularly useful if you’re trying to make a business case internally. Asking the CFO to approve a limited pilot with two executives is a rather different conversation from asking for four new permanent heads.
Build the support model around the people
If several members of your leadership team need support, the answer doesn’t automatically have to be several new Executive Assistants. Equally, handing all of them to one increasingly frazzled EA and hoping for the best probably isn’t much of a strategy either.
Look at the people first. Work out who genuinely needs dedicated support, who could share, where continuity matters and where a pooled service would be perfectly adequate. Then look at the workload and build the model around what is actually happening in your business.
For some organisations, that will still mean recruiting another full-time EA. For others, it might mean a combination of employed and fractional support. And for a growing leadership team with different requirements across different roles, a flexible team can often give everyone the support they need without creating a row of new salaries on the payroll.
If you’re currently staring at a leadership team where everyone needs help and you’re not quite sure how to make the support structure work, we’d be happy to talk it through. We’ll look at the people, the workload and the support you already have, then help you work out what a sensible model could look like. No requirement to hire six EAs. Your CFO can stand down.