In January, most leaders do the same thing.
They open a fresh doc, stare at the year ahead, and start stacking goals like building blocks:
revenue targets, hiring plans, product milestones, execution bets.
It’s smart. It’s necessary.
But there’s one input that quietly determines whether those plans become reality, and it almost never gets included in the planning conversation.
Your executive assistant.
Not as a task list.
Not as “calendar coverage.”
As a partner in how your time, attention, and energy get deployed.
Because your EA isn’t just managing logistics. They’re shaping the conditions in which you lead.
They influence what gets protected, what gets interrupted, what gets delayed, what gets followed through. They are one of the most important design points in your operating system, even if you’ve never explicitly treated the role that way.
If you want a better quarter, don’t just set better goals.
Build better leverage.
And one of the fastest ways to do that is to bring your EA into Q1 with real context and real purpose.
1. Start with the story of the quarter
Most leaders share tasks. Few share the narrative.
But the narrative is what gives your EA judgment.
Before you talk about projects or meetings, talk about the season you’re in.
What are you trying to prove in Q1?
What can’t slip?
What’s the risk if you miss?
What would make you feel proud at the end of March?
This is a small conversation with an outsized return. It moves your EA from executing your instructions to understanding your intent.
When an assistant understands intent, they start doing the thing every leader claims they want: they anticipate. They prioritize. They make calls. They protect you from the wrong work.
A useful way to frame it is:
- The headline: “If Q1 goes well, it’s because ____.”
- The fear: “If Q1 goes poorly, it will be because ____.”
- The obsession: “The thing I’m optimizing for is ____.”
That’s not just context. That’s alignment.
2. Give them a “protect list,” not just a to-do list
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most executives accidentally train their EAs to be schedulers.
You send meetings. You forward asks. You say yes to too much. They arrange the pieces.
If you want leverage, you have to train something else.
You have to train your EA to defend your attention.
In addition to your goals, hand your EA a short “protect list” for Q1. Think of it as a set of operating constraints.
Examples:
- “Tuesday and Thursday mornings are deep work, no exceptions.”
- “Customer churn issues can interrupt anything. Internal updates can wait.”
- “If someone asks for 30 minutes, try to solve it in 10 via async first.”
- “No meeting gets scheduled without an agenda and a decision owner.”
Most leaders never write these down. Which means their EA is forced to guess. And when an EA has to guess, they default to being accommodating.
The protect list gives them permission to have standards.
It also gives you a way to measure success that isn’t “How fast did you respond?” but “How well did we protect what mattered?”
3. Use your EA as an early warning system (this is where real leverage lives)
Your EA has access to a layer of information you don’t.
Not private information. Not gossip.
Signals.
They see who shows up late and frazzled.
They hear the tone on quick calls.
They notice when a relationship feels tense, or when someone’s energy drops, or when a project starts slipping in small ways.
As Debbie Gestone put it: EAs often catch shifts, challenges, relationship context, and motivation issues long before an executive ever does.
This is one of the most underutilized strategic assets in an organization.
But there’s a catch: your EA will only share these signals if you make it safe to do so.
So instead of asking “How’s my calendar?” ask questions like:
- “What feels off this week?”
- “Where are we leaking energy?”
- “Who seems overloaded, disengaged, or blocked?”
- “What’s one thing you’ve noticed that I might not see?”
This turns your weekly check-in into something much more valuable than task review. It becomes leadership intelligence.
4. Let them watch how decisions get made
A great EA doesn’t just know what you want. They know how you think.
And that only happens through exposure.
There are meetings your EA should occasionally sit in on, not to take notes or run follow-ups, but to observe:
- how you weigh trade-offs,
- what you consider a “real” priority,
- what you tolerate versus what you won’t,
- what patterns you repeat under stress.
This is how an EA becomes an extension of you instead of an assistant standing nearby.
It also solves a problem most leaders complain about without realizing it:
“I want my EA to be more proactive.”
Proactivity is not a personality trait. It’s the result of context, permission, and pattern recognition.
Exposure builds pattern recognition.
5. Connect their work to the company, not just to your life
When an EA feels like their role is “keep one person afloat,” they will do exactly that.
When an EA understands their role as “support the company through the executive,” their impact expands dramatically.
This is the difference between:
- managing logistics, and
- designing flow.
So include them in the company-level outcomes that matter. Share the stakes. Share what leadership is protecting. Share how you’ll know Q1 is working.
And then name the truth that often goes unsaid:
Your EA isn’t just supporting you. They are supporting how the organization moves.
Purpose changes behavior. It creates pride. It raises the standard. It makes someone care about the work in a way that no checklist ever will.
This isn’t about being nice. It’s about building leverage.
Including your EA in your Q1 goals is not a soft leadership gesture.
It’s an operating decision.
When your EA has context, a protect list, exposure to decision-making, and permission to surface signals, you get:
- better filtering,
- fewer context switches,
- faster decisions,
- fewer preventable fires,
- and more time spent on work only you can do.
As you plan Q1 2026, don’t just ask:
What do I want to accomplish?
Ask:
What would it look like for my EA to be meaningfully aligned to this quarter, not just assigned to it?
Because when your assistant is connected, trusted, and oriented around the real goals, your whole system works better.
Reflection prompt
What is one change you can make this month that would deepen your EA’s context, connection, or sense of purpose in Q1, and what would it enable them to do that they can’t do today?
