At a past BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit—a virtual meeting of top leadership luminaries, hosted by ConantLeadership—Bonnie Low-Kramen (Founder of Ultimate Assistant Training & Consulting, Inc. and author of Staff Matters) and Ann Hiatt (Leadership Strategist at Ann Hiatt Consulting and author of Bet on Yourself) spoke with Doug Conant (Founder of ConantLeadership, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, and author of The Blueprint) about the importance of recognizing and developing executive assistants as strategic partners and leaders. Enjoy key tips and takeaways from their conversation in the recap below.
The following insights, along with additional input from top experts in the administrative space, helped inform the development of our groundbreaking new leadership course for Administrative Professionals, STEPS (Success Through Empowering Professional Support), which launches September 15, 2025. Get on the waitlist here to be the first to know when this course goes live, and get a sneak preview in our newly premiered program trailer.
Bet On Yourself
Doug Conant is “sold—hook, line, and sinker” on the concept of executive assistants as savvy leaders and strategic partners. He says senior leaders simply “don’t have the bandwidth” to do their best work without the administrative professionals who make things run smoothly and influence every aspect of the business. His co-panelists Bonnie Low-Kramen and Ann Hiatt know this firsthand: Low-Kramen with 25 years as personal assistant to Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis, and Hiatt with 15 years as executive business partner to former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and chief-of-staff to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Both Low-Kramen and Hiatt have since used their administrative backgrounds as launchpads to become entrepreneurs, speakers, and authors. It’s a trajectory that makes sense. Conant tells the story of Margaret Rudkin, Founder and CEO of Pepperidge Farm. Her company was acquired by Campbell in the early 1960s and she became the first woman to serve on the Campbell Soup Company board. When Conant was CEO of Campell Soup Company from 2001 to 2011, he learned of her remarkable story, and had the opportunity to ask her assistant about the secret to Rudkin’s larger-than-life success. Among other things, he discovered that Rudkin herself had once worked as an assistant so “she was tuned in” to every aspect of the business.
During her time as an assistant, Rudkin had experienced the all-too-common disconnect between leaders and the people on the ground floor. And it strengthened her resolve to do things differently at Pepperidge Farm. Because she had once been in their position, she knew how to tap into the strengths of the administrative professionals around her.
It’s all about implementation, says Conant. Administrative professionals tend to be doers who make things happen: “A lot of the work we see in leadership is about ideas and concepts. But you don’t get down to the brass tacks [and ask] ‘Okay, what am I going to do on Monday?’” This prompts him to ask Hiatt about her own practice of implementation—namely how and why she wrote her book, Bet on Yourself: Recognize, Own, and Implement Breakthrough Opportunities.
Hiatt answers with candor: She was “an unwilling author” at first. She experienced what many others wrestle with: impostor syndrome and the assumption that she wasn’t adding something new to the conversation. But she quickly realized how remarkable her situation truly was. “I had a unique perspective . . . I could translate the best practices of these super performers for the rest of us normal people.” A history of working with top tech leaders meant that Hiatt had a front row seat to an “incredible bespoke business school” where she could learn (and eventually teach) how to implement the winning, entrepreneurial behaviors she observed every day.
Now in her work as a leadership consultant who “wakes people up to the concept that they too can be an entrepreneur,” Hiatt has found that most administrative professionals want to know how to uplevel their authority in a room—and how to advance their expertise or industry reputation. She used her career as a case study.
“I would kind of test my knowledge,” Hiatt recalls. And she eventually became “brave enough” to ask clarifying questions in front of other leaders to help advance the discussion, “so that the brilliant minds in the room could then really home in on what was to be resolved.” She encourages other administrative professionals to find their courage and their voice too. As you support more senior leaders, or rise to the chief-of-staff level, Hiatt says it makes sense to take on a more proactive role so you become familiar with the patterns that accelerate success. By actively participating in strategic discussions, you can anticipate where the industry—and its people—are moving.
“A good strategy well executed beats a brilliant strategy poorly executed every time.”
‘Manage Your Managers’ Courageously
These ‘bravery in the boardroom’ moments that Hiatt describes are particularly challenging if you don’t have “the courage to wade into deeper water,” Conant says. The world around you “is not necessarily built to be encouraging,” so you’ll need to be “really well anchored in who you are,” because, “if you’re comfortable with yourself, you’ll be more comfortable in those situations, and you’ll have more courage.” This leads him to ask Low-Kramen about two of the courageous ‘aha!’ moments that helped shape her career.
The first was at an event in London. A speaker asked the 250 executive assistants in attendance to raise their hand if they felt like they were well-managed at work. From the back of the room, Low-Kramen watched in disbelief as only a few hands halfheartedly went up. “I remember thinking, ‘what is going on here?’” She left the event, determined to find the answer.
Low-Kramen’s second ‘aha!’ moment came in the Harvard Business Review article by Jack Zinger, “We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders.” Zinger and his team found that the average age leaders are first exposed to management training is shockingly late, at 42 years old. The article “literally changed the way I teach,” she says. Leaders everywhere “are suffering from a lack of education . . . and the executive assistants of the world” often bear the brunt or have to find creative ways to compensate for these deficits. Conant confirms that today’s leaders and managers need more direction: “The degree of intentionality they’re bringing to their work is haphazard at best.”
But Low-Kramen says there’s a silver lining. If more administrative professionals knew the data around late-blooming leadership, it would help them “manage their managers” more effectively and awaken the courage they need to evolve into strategic partners. It’s what she helps administrative professionals do today. Her past student roster includes the assistants to Bill Gates and the staffs of British Parliament, Starbucks, and Amazon.
It was her own role as a strategic partner that prompted Low-Kramen to write her book, Staff Matters: People-Focused Solutions for the Ultimate New Workplace. Her experience was unique: When she first got started as a celebrity personal assistant, she was immediately offered a seat at the table. “Olympia would say to me . . . ‘I may not always agree with you, and I may not always do what you say, but I always want to know what you think.’” That permission was pivotal. It gave Low-Kramen the gumption she needed to speak her mind. She recommends other leaders follow suit. It’s “a really valuable thing to share with your staff that it’s not only what they do . . . but it’s also what they know.”
Hiatt builds on this. When she walked the halls with big players in tech like Bezos and Schmidt, she saw that “they not only tolerated ideas from anyone, but they demanded it from any level of the organization.” In her work doing rapid-growth organizational scales and C-suite optimization, Hiatt urges executives to be communicative, open, and in sync with their administrative professionals: “Everything hangs off of that structure . . . your amazing moonshot ideas need to be reverse engineered into manageable steps, and that’s what your support staff can do for you.” It all comes back to administrative leaders transforming strategic plans into smart roadmaps for action.
Conant agrees: “A good strategy well executed beats a brilliant strategy poorly executed every time.” He recounts an important lesson from Jon Katzenbach’s book, Wisdom of Teams: The notion of the informal organization vs. the formal organization. He says, “there are people in your organization who—if there’s ever an issue—everybody goes and talks to them. And it’s none of your direct reports.” Conant says administrative professionals are the linchpin of this often-untapped ‘informal organization.’ They’re the people “who really know what’s going on.”
Listen to the silence. Pay attention to the things left unsaid.
Use the Win-Win-Win Formula
The hyper-interconnected world of 2025 isn’t forgiving of leaders who are out of the loop. To tap into their own informal organizations, Low-Kramen says there are two things leaders, executives, and HR professionals must do:
1. Take a fresh look at administrative staff to leverage their talents (and pay them accordingly). Ask about the other skills and abilities they’d like to use or develop. “There are a lot of jobs available . . . look toward the administrative staff as the pipeline for those roles.”
2. Listen to the silence. Pay attention to the things left unsaid. Of parallel importance is to encourage staff to speak up, because that’s how leaders can make more well-rounded, informed decisions. “If people are not talking, it most definitely does not mean that there’s not an issue.”
Low-Kramen notes that the second must-do might be particularly tough for leaders to digest, but the reality is that “there’s a lot of fear . . . of getting fired [and] fear of being labeled a troublemaker.” This is especially true among women, who make up the majority of administrative roles. Conant says that one way leaders can lay the groundwork for better communication is to “lead by listening,” a topic covered at length in his two bestselling books, The Blueprint and TouchPoints. He says deep listening initiates a “win-win-win” scenario in which “the organization will benefit, the staff will benefit, and the leader will get more done.”
Hiatt agrees with Conant and explains what this triple-win scenario might look like from the perspective of an administrative professional who is seeking to expand their career profile.
- Win number one is where you ask yourself “What do I want to learn in this next phase of my career? What expertise am I developing? What skillset do I want to be known for?”Win number two is about how your growth can help lighten the load for others. “If [your manager] can get something off her plate that’s draining her rather than helping her contribute, that’s a second win.”Win number three, she continues, is about making sure your actions support the current priorities of the organization.
Hiatt summarizes: “When those three things are aligned, you can get permission every time to do something outside your job description.”
Still, this triple-win scenario isn’t always cut and dry. If leaders don’t intentionally cultivate an environment of open communication, you’ll “need to be more proactive about being that strategic business partner,” advises Low-Kramen. For some, this might mean sitting down to explain what you do and where you want to go. For others, it might mean choosing a different work environment—one that values your input and leadership growth. Both options require bravery.
In closing, the panelists make one thing clear above all else: Relationships matter. “When you’re starting, it’s a lot of that relationship building,” and understanding, “emerging needs, anticipating those needs, and inserting yourself in places that strategically are really critical,” Hiatt says. And Low-Kramen puts a bow on it: “It doesn’t matter how much technology we have out there, it all comes down to the relationships. People do things for people.”
Enjoyed these insights?- Make sure you’re on our list so you don’t miss announcements and early-bird discounts when our STEPS course for administrative professionals launchesYou can also watch the full recording of this interview to get more details, including an audience Q&ARegister now for our fall 2025 BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit featuring an all-star panel of top leadership luminariesAnd access the complete inventory of previous BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit sessions, including illuminating conversations with Brené Brown, Susan Cain, Indra Nooyi, Amy Edmondson, Bill George, Barbara Humpton, and many more
About the Author: Vanessa Bradford, a featured contributor to ConantLeadership, is a freelance content writer and copywriter.
(Header photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash)
The post Executive Assistants ‘Really Know What’s Going On’—Why Administrative Professionals are Savvy Leaders & Strategic Partners appeared first on ConantLeadership.
