The Relationship Architecture of a Great EA

Who you know, how you show up, and why it travels across every country and sector

The first time I understood that an EA's real power isn't positional was at Cigna. It was the first time I had worked inside a global corporate with an EA network to match the complexity of the organisation, and it changed how I thought about the role entirely. Confidentiality remained paramount, as you would expect, but there was an unspoken trust between us that allowed miracles to happen in calendars that were already bursting at the seams. When I first joined, a fellow EA steered me through the onboarding. When I needed a colleague's principal to chase an outstanding document, I knew who to call, and more importantly, I knew they'd pick up. There was no hierarchy, not exactly, but there was something more durable: reputation. Yours preceded you, and you protected it accordingly.

That network is a useful frame for what actually matters in this role. More than your systems, more than your hard-won technical skills: without relationships and the ability to operate across them without formal authority, the role becomes something close to impossible.

This is what I mean by lateral leadership. Not soft power in the vague sense that the term is sometimes used, but the specific and practised ability to move things forward without the lever of a title. It is how you position yourself within an organisation, and what people say about you when you're not in the room. It isn't about volume. It is about the quiet accumulation of trust.

In one of my first roles, I was the organisation's first dedicated EA. A senior colleague didn't accept the change gracefully — he had been accustomed to walking directly into the CEO's office, and now there was a process, and he resented it. The relationship was difficult until I stopped trying to enforce the structure and started working with how he actually operated. Over time, he came to understand that protecting the CEO's time wasn't bureaucracy for its own sake: it meant that when they did meet, the CEO could be fully present. The relationship didn't improve because I forced it. It improved because, slowly, trust was built between us.

Which is the point. All professional relationships begin as transactional — you need something, you speak to someone, the exchange ends. The real craft of the EA role is in shifting those relationships to something more durable. This doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen quickly. In my experience, three things are required: time, consistency, and openness.

Time, because there is no substitute for it. You cannot accelerate the process of learning how someone operates, what they care about, where their pressure points are. Watch them in meetings. Notice how they interact with your principal. Let that inform how you approach them. Consistency, because trust is built on predictability — not in the sense of being boring, but in the sense of meaning what you say. If everything is urgent, nothing is. If your deadlines are real, people learn to treat them as real. How you interact and what you expect from others needs to be visible, and it needs to hold. And openness — to feedback, to different processes, to the watercooler conversation that you might be tempted to skip but that turns out to be pivotal. The difficult relationship I described earlier stabilised not just through patience but through a willingness to hear how I was landing, and to adjust.

To be clear: lateral leadership is not friendship, and it is not the same as being well-liked. A professional distance is almost always necessary. Being friendly is not the same as being a friend, and conflating the two muddies the water in ways that are difficult to clean up.

What this framework doesn't prepare you for is what happens when you move countries.

When I relocated from London to Dubai, the relationship architecture I had spent years building didn't transfer, at least not in the way I had assumed it would. My first role in Dubai was at a company whose staff came from across the Middle East and GCC, Europe, and APAC, and almost immediately I encountered the concept of wasta. Loosely translated as "connections" or "influence," wasta describes the social system in which personal relationships are not simply useful but structurally significant — a conduit for getting things done, for access, for credibility. It isn't networking in the way we tend to mean it in the UK. It is something more layered: a relationship economy, where who you know and who vouches for you carries a weight that formal processes alone cannot replicate.

This was not inherently different from lateral leadership. But the rules governing it were different, and understanding those rules mattered. Erin Meyer's The Culture Map offers a useful frame here. On her communicating scale, the GCC sits considerably higher-context than the UK meaning that what is left unsaid carries as much meaning as what is said, that relationships must precede business, that trust is built relationally before it is built through delivery. I came from a culture where good communication is explicit and direct. I arrived in one where reading the room — and reading what wasn't in the room — was the skill being tested.

The adjustment took longer than I anticipated, and it was more granular than I expected. It wasn't just the vocabulary I had to relearn; it was the timing, the texture, the unspoken expectations around how relationships were initiated and maintained.

New Zealand presents a different question, and one I haven't yet answered.

On Meyer's scale, New Zealand sits at the low-context end — alongside the UK and Australia — where communication tends to be direct, explicit, and taken at face value. In that sense, it should feel familiar. But Meyer's framework also distinguishes between how cultures communicate and how they build trust. The GCC sits firmly in the relationship-based camp: trust is built through the relationship first, and the work follows. New Zealand, like the UK, leans task-based: trust is established through what you deliver, and the relationship develops alongside it. Different entry points, even when the surface texture of communication looks similar.

I've been thinking about this as I approach a new role. The First 90 Days — Michael Watkins' framework for transitions — suggests starting with listening and learning before moving to action. That feels right. But the relational dimension it's easy to underestimate: understanding how senior leaders relate to one another, where the informal power sits, which relationships my principal will need me to develop as a priority. These things can't be reverse-engineered. They have to be observed.

What I've come to understand — through London, Dubai, and now on the threshold of something new — is that the relationship architecture itself is always rebuilding. The foundations transfer: the instinct for trust-building, the discipline of consistency, the understanding that lateral influence is earned rather than assigned. Those travel. But the blueprint for how to apply them has to be redrawn every time. The architecture is yours. The landscape is always different.