Why being highly trusted can stall your role

Being “Highly Trusted” Can Quietly Stall Your Role

~ 5 min read

If you’re trusted, relied on, and deeply embedded — but your role hasn’t expanded in a while—this may be why.

TL;DR

• Trust alone doesn’t expand roles—leverage does.

• Many senior EAs are trusted inside a model that no longer scales.

• The shift isn’t earning more trust; it’s changing how trust is used.

The Insight

“Highly trusted” sounds like the goal.

And early in a career or executive relationship development, it is.

But at the senior level, trust can become a trap.

Here’s the pattern:

You’re trusted to handle everything.
Trusted to catch issues.
Trusted to make things work.

So everything flows through you—instead of because of you.

The executive feels supported.
The system stays heavy.
And the role stops evolving.

Not because of a lack of confidence—but because nothing changed structurally.

Reframe

It’s not that trust is bad.

It’s that trust without redesign creates dependency, not scale.

Executives don’t expand roles when they feel supported.
They expand roles when they feel relieved.

Relief happens when decisions stop resurfacing,
when context doesn’t need repeating,
when judgment is embedded upstream.

That’s leverage—and it looks very different from reliability.

Keep reading and this will soon make sense.

Executive Translation

From the executive’s side, the unspoken experience is often this:

That sentence explains the ceiling.

Executives elevate people who remove themselves from the critical path, not the ones who manage it flawlessly.

The more decisions require their confirmation, the less expandable the role feels—even when trust is high.

This Week’s Strategic Move

What’s happening
Trust is being used to absorb work, not eliminate it.

Why it matters
Absorption sustains effort. Elimination creates capacity.

What to do
Convert one trusted task into a decision system.

Do (≤2 minutes):
Identify one area where your executive always defers to you—but still wants final confirmation.

Say:

Ask:

This reframes trust as delegated judgment, not delegated execution.

Forward This to Your Executive

What’s happening:
High trust can still create hidden drag.

Why it matters:
Leadership capacity expands when judgment is shared.

What to do:
Define decision thresholds once instead of revisiting repeatedly.

A Quick Note:

Only 48 hours left!

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Not productivity.
Not efficiency.
Capacity.

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In a recent group coaching session, a senior EA shared how this assessment:

• Reset expectations with her executive

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• Quite literally saved her role

No one else is teaching assistants how to lead this kind of conversation — and executives respond to it immediately.

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PS: This is why some senior EAs feel indispensable but stuck.

Not because they aren’t valued—but because the system never learned how to run without them thinking alongside it.

Strategic assistants don’t just earn trust — they design what trust replaces.

EA-Pros Team