The EA / Chief of Staff conversation

An Illusion of Linearity – The EA / Chief of Staff conversation

A conversation keeps resurfacing, not because it is new, but because it is repeated with a confidence that feels increasingly detached from how work actually functions inside organisations.

There is a quieter issue beneath it. A kind of interpretive drift. Roles that are structurally distinct are being spoken about as if they sit on a single continuum. Executive Assistant becomes “early stage.” Chief of Staff becomes “next step.” The language feels tidy, but it is built on assumption rather than structure.

Alongside it sits something more corrosive. A quiet industry of interpretation built by those who have never occupied either role neither Executive Assistant nor Chief of Staff and yet speak fluently about the transition between them. Training courses, talks, frameworks for progression. All of it smooth, all of it persuasive, and much of it built on assumption rather than experience. This is not commentary. It is correction.

In Platonic terms, it belongs to doxa, not knowledge. What is being circulated is not structured understanding of work, but socially reinforced opinion about how work is assumed to progress. It feels true because it is repeated. It feels logical because it is familiar. But familiarity is not the same as accuracy.

Plato would recognise the shape of this immediately. What is seen, proximity to decision-making, presence in rooms where outcomes are shaped, is mistaken for understanding those decisions themselves. The outline is taken as the thing. The reflection becomes the object.

Bourdieu would describe something adjacent but more grounded. A misreading of capital. Proximity is converted into perceived authority. Exposure is treated as competence. Different forms of labour are collapsed into a single, simplified measure of value, as though access and ability were interchangeable currencies.

Foucault would be less concerned with misunderstanding and more interested in production. The language itself does not simply describe reality, it produces a version of it. “Progression” becomes a narrative that feels neutral, but is quietly structured. What counts as advancement is not discovered, it is defined, repeated, and normalised until it feels self-evident.

This is where the distortion begins. Not in the work itself, but in how it is narrated from the outside. And once that narration becomes widespread enough, it starts to behave like truth, even when it does not match the structure it claims to describe.

They have begun to say it with a kind of certainty that brooks no interruption. As though it were fact, not fashion. That the Executive Assistant must, at some point, become something else. That the role, no matter how well it is done, is only ever temporary. A corridor, a waiting room, a preface to something more formal. And that what follows, increasingly, is Chief of Staff.

It is presented as logic. As progression. As the natural shape of ambition. But it is, more often than not, an illusion of linearity.

The Executive Assistant role is not unclear. It is not intangible. It does not need to be elevated to be meaningful. It is one of the most precisely engineered roles inside modern organisational life and it is precisely that precision that makes it so frequently misread.

The distortion begins here. Not in practice but in commentary. The role is recast as “fluid,” “undefined,” or “evolving,” not because it lacks structure but because that framing creates space for interpretation and in some cases monetisation.

Inside organisations it is exact. Outside of them it becomes negotiable.

Modern career language struggles with work it cannot easily categorise. It prefers movement that can be mapped. Steps, sequences, upward progression. Within that logic, the Executive Assistant becomes a starting point for something “larger” and Chief of Staff is positioned as its continuation. Not because the roles are similar but because narrative requires continuity.

But not all roles sit on a single axis.

The Chief of Staff is not what happens when the Executive Assistant develops further. It is what happens when an organisation introduces a different mechanism altogether. One designed not to stabilise flow, but to intervene in it.

That distinction is rarely stated because it disrupts the simplicity of the story.

The Executive Assistant reduces entropy. The Chief of Staff redistributes it. One removes friction so systems can hold. The other introduces friction so systems can change. One protects coherence. The other interrogates it. These are not stages of the same work. They are different functions within an organisational system.

The assumption is elegant in its simplicity. Proximity to power must eventually convert into power that is named. But simplicity is not truth.

There is a more honest way to approach this. Not by reinforcing the narrative, but by looking at the reality of the roles and the people within them. This is where Halcyon Partners take a different position. They understand the Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff roles clearly, as distinct functions with different demands. The focus is on defining those roles with precision, separating proximity from capability, and ensuring that any move between them is based on what the role actually requires, not assumption. It is also a more human approach, recognising that progression is not always linear, and not every role is a stepping stone. In a space where interpretation often replaces accuracy, that clarity matters.

And so, the Chief of Staff emerges as the promised horizon. a role defined by presence, articulation and visibility in decision making. It sits closer to the centre of the room than the edge. It carries a different kind of weight because it is performed in the open. It is, in many ways, a different language entirely.

And yet, beneath this framing, there is a harder truth that is rarely stated plainly. The gap is not only philosophical, but technical and structural. A Chief of Staff is often expected to read a balance sheet as fluently as a room, to interrogate numbers as readily as people, to move through strategy decks, financial models, and operating plans not as an observer but as a participant in their construction. This is not incidental knowledge. It is trained.

An MBA or something close to its rigour often functions less as decoration and more as baseline fluency in many environments. Not because of the credential itself but because of what it signals. Familiarity with the language in which decisions are formally made. Capital. Risk. Growth. Trade-offs expressed in figures rather than feeling.

This is where the illusion sharpens into something more unforgiving. The Chief of Staff is not a continuation of the Executive Assistant role and proximity is not pedagogy. Presence is not preparation.

If you have made it this far and still believe the Chief of Staff role is the natural next step, then I invite you to consider this:

• Can you turn a conversation into a commercial opportunity?
• Can you look at a set of numbers and see not what they are, but what they could become?
• Can you sit in a boardroom and challenge a growth assumption — not on feeling, but on evidence?
• Can you trace the fault line between revenue and profit, and explain why one is rising while the other resists?
• Can you model a decision before it is made, and defend its consequences after?
• Can you hear ambition in a pitch and immediately translate it into cost, risk, return?
• Can you step into a discussion on valuation and not just follow it, but influence where it lands?
• Can you identify where capital is being wasted — not obviously, but structurally, quietly, over time?
• Can you hold your ground when the room turns technical, fast, and impatient?

These are not intensified versions of Executive Assistant capabilities. They are different competencies entirely.

To pretend otherwise is not kind. It creates a quiet failure. It tells EAs that proximity is preparation enough, that years spent beside decision-making will naturally translate into the authority to make those decisions. But observation is not execution. Being in the room does not guarantee readiness for what the room demands.

This is not an argument against progression. Some Executive Assistants do become exceptional Chiefs of Staff. But they don’t get there by continuity. They rebuild. They unlearn parts of what made them excellent in one context and replace it with something else entirely. They learn what proximity does not teach. And in doing so they become something different.

The more uncomfortable truth is this. Many Executive Assistants are not behind, and they are not waiting to “step up.” They are already operating in a different function within the organisation. One defined by precision, control, and the ability to hold complexity without needing visibility or ownership of the spotlight.

That is not absence of ambition. It is distinction of function.

This is why the idea of linear progression becomes fragile under scrutiny. The competencies that define an exceptional Executive Assistant are not lesser versions of these skills. They are different forms of intelligence operating in a different register. Precision in anticipation is not the same as precision in allocation. Emotional calibration is not the same as financial interpretation. Organisational memory is not the same as structural authorship.

The idea that Chief of Staff is the natural next step survives because it is easy to say. It fits neatly into a sentence. But ease is not accuracy.

The mistake is not in comparing the roles. It is in assuming they were ever part of the same line.

That is the illusion of linearity.

Purvi Shah