*SESSION REPEATS @ 10:45AM
Expand your knowledge and gain tips, tools, and inspiration in facilitated roundtable discussions with your peers.
Prompts for this session:
What does leadership look like in an administrative role, even when you don’t have a team to manage?
Leadership without a title is about presence, not position. For administrative professionals, it often shows up in quiet influence, driving clarity, connecting people, anticipating risk, and ensuring strategic alignment across the business. You don’t need to manage people to lead. You just need to model ownership, initiative, and critical thinking.
Follow-up questions:
- Can anyone share a time they led a project, process, or initiative informally?
- What mindsets or behaviors signal ‘leadership’ in our roles?
- How do you know when you’re having impact?
What approaches have you used to clearly communicate the value and scope of your role to others in the organization?
Influence comes from trust, credibility, and consistency. When you deliver with excellence, people start listening. When you bring insights, not just tasks, you become a trusted advisor. And when you understand the business and speak its language, you’re seen as a partner, not just support.
Follow-up questions
- How do you make your impact visible when much of your work happens behind the scenes?
- What’s worked for you when trying to shift others’ perception of the assistant role?
- Have you ever had to advocate for a change in your title, responsibilities, or reporting line? What helped?
What gets in the way of administrative professionals stepping into leadership, and how do we overcome it?
Too often, it’s structural invisibility, outdated perceptions, and sometimes our own mindset. Many assistants wait to be ‘given permission’ to lead, but the truth is, we already have it. The challenge is using our voice, backing ourselves, and stepping forward, even if the system hasn’t caught up yet.
Follow-up questions:
- What mindset shifts helped you embrace your leadership potential?
- Have you ever faced pushback or misunderstanding when you tried to lead? How did you handle it?
- What support or language do you wish you had earlier in your career?
