Where Leadership Finds Its Rhythm: Katarzyna Kowalska on the Strategic Power of the Executive Assistant Role

Behind every organization that operates with clarity and calm, there is often a person working quietly at the intersection of strategy, people, and decisions, creating the conditions in which leadership can truly function. In this edition of the INSPIRE, we are honored to share the story of Katarzyna Kowalska, a Strategic C-level Executive Assistant whose career spans logistics, team leadership, and Industry 4.0 environments. Katarzyna’s journey reflects a deep understanding of systems, responsibility, and partnership, shaped not by visibility, but by impact. In this interview, she shares how years spent navigating complex, high-pressure environments taught her to turn chaos into structure, why true partnership with a CEO is built on trust and empathy, and how the Executive Assistant role quietly shapes the quality of decisions at the highest level. Her story challenges common stereotypes and offers a thoughtful perspective on leadership, influence, and the unseen architecture that keeps organizations running smoothly.

Katarzyna Kowalska | Chief Executive Assistant at explitia | Poland | LinkedIn

Chief Executive Assistant with extensive experience in logistics, team leadership, and working alongside CEOs in Industry 4.0 environments. Guided by a strong inner compass and calm determination, she brings clarity to complex processes by organizing priorities, filtering information, and building systems that genuinely support decision-making at the highest level. She directly supports the CEO, safeguarding the organization’s time, focus, and energy. She thrives in environments where calm, mindfulness, and trust form the foundation of effective leadership.

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Elizabeth Sutkowska: Katarzyna, your path to becoming a Chief Executive Assistant is full of diverse experiences, from logistics, to team management in the beauty industry, to now offering strategic support alongside the CEO in a high-tech, Industry 4.0 environment. What made you feel that this is the role where you truly belong, a space where you can fully spread your wings?

Katarzyna Kowalska: My path to becoming a Chief Executive Assistant was a natural result of the experiences I gathered over many years, often long before I was able to name them as such. I started working very early; my first jobs taught me responsibility, attentiveness, and respect for money. Direct contact with clients showed me how crucial communication and the ability to truly listen are. For nearly ten years, I worked in logistics, a demanding, male-dominated environment. It was there that I learned how to organize complex processes, work under pressure, and build systems that turn chaos into structure. Over time, I realized that these skills are just as important as physical strength or formal authority, and often far more sustainable.

Working as an assistant alongside another CEO became an important point of reference for me. It helped me understand which role I did not want to play. I missed agency, real impact, and space to co-create decisions. That was the moment when I clearly saw that if I were to work closely with a leader, I wanted to be a partner in processes, not merely an executor of tasks.

Managing a team gave me yet another perspective: responsibility for people, their emotions, conflicts, and results. Working alongside my current CEO in an Industry 4.0 environment was the moment when all of these experiences began to naturally come together.

Today, I know that the Executive Assistant role is exactly the space where I can fully use my competencies. I have always wanted to be close to business, strategy, and decision-making, without the need to stand in the spotlight. This role allows me to provide real support to both the leader and the organization in a way that is fully aligned with who I am.

Elizabeth: You work very closely with the CEO, forming a dynamic tandem built on trust, partnership, and a modern approach to the EA role. What values or specific practices make this collaboration so exceptional, and what could other leaders learn from it?

Katarzyna: Working very closely with a CEO is built first and foremost on trust, partnership, and a clear understanding of mutual roles. For me, it is essential who I work with, whether the leader inspires, creates space for learning, and serves as a real point of reference for business growth. Such a relationship naturally builds engagement and responsibility on both sides.

One of the foundations of our collaboration is empathy. The CEO role carries an enormous decision-making burden that often remains invisible to the rest of the organization. The pace of change, the scale of responsibility, and the constant need to make key decisions mean that a leader’s time and energy become one of the company’s most valuable resources. As an Executive Assistant, I am fully aware of this and consciously factor it into my daily work.

What makes this relationship exceptional is that it goes far beyond operational tasks. My role includes organizing priorities, filtering information, taking over selected day-to-day decisions, and proactively responding to moments of overload. This allows the CEO to focus on what is truly critical for the organization.

Equally important is a leader’s readiness to delegate responsibility and extend trust in areas where it is needed. That is when true partnership emerges, one that creates space for strategic and long-term thinking.

I believe other leaders can take away one simple but essential lesson from such collaboration: a well-defined Executive Assistant role is neither a cost nor merely administrative support. It is a real investment in decision quality, operational effectiveness, and leadership stability.

Elizabeth: Your daily work at Explitia involves technology, digital transformation, and process-optimization projects, areas that can challenge even experienced managers. Was there a moment or project that made you realize just how much strategic impact an Executive Assistant can have on a company’s decisions?

Katarzyna: There wasn’t a single project or one spectacular moment that suddenly revealed the strategic impact of the Executive Assistant role. In my experience, this impact is built quietly and over time. My CEO once said something that stayed with me deeply: that an Executive Assistant does many things no one notices, but the moment one of them is not done, everyone notices immediately. That statement carries immense responsibility.

Since then, I see even more clearly that my impact does not lie in making decisions on behalf of the leader, but in creating conditions in which decisions can be made calmly, thoughtfully, and based on the right information. In environments shaped by technology, digitalization, and process optimization, it is easy to become overwhelmed by excess data, topics, and urgent matters. My role is to filter this noise, organize priorities, and ensure that the organization’s energy is directed where it truly makes business sense.

During many of my CEO’s presentations, I have heard the company is compared to an organism, a system of connected vessels. While it is difficult to clearly define which “organ” the Executive Assistant represents, from my perspective this role circulates throughout the organization’s entire bloodstream. It exists at the intersection of strategy, operations, people, and technology.

My daily actions directly affect not only the CEO’s working comfort, but also the teams we collaborate with, the pace of projects, and the quality of internal communication. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the strategic impact of an EA does not reveal itself in a single moment, but it shows when the organization operates smoothly.

Elizabeth: You previously led teams, built customer relationships, developed business offerings, recruited, and trained people, and today all those strengths elevate your work as a strategic partner to the CEO. How have these earlier experiences shaped your approach as an Executive Assistant, and in what ways do they give you an advantage in this role?

Katarzyna: My approach as an Executive Assistant is built above all on calm, especially in moments when chaos emerges around me. Working closely with a visionary and creator who operates quickly, dynamically, and often on multiple levels at once, it is easy to lose focus. In such situations, my role is to discipline myself, maintain clarity, and return to what truly matters at that moment.

At the same time, I coordinate many threads circulating around the CEO: decisions, projects, conversations, and dependencies. A strong organization gives me an advantage here, allowing me to clearly distinguish between what the CEO needs immediately, because it directly impacts their next steps, and what can wait. This structuring applies not only to tasks, but also to energy and attention.

My previous experiences taught me how to work with very different people, across diverse environments and organizational cultures. Each had its own unique character. I learned that my role is not to change others, but to skillfully adapt to the leader’s style, the team, and the situation. This flexibility strongly shapes how I support the CEO today.

My working style naturally evolves year by year, but one thing remains constant: when you understand the value of your work and the amount of energy and heart you put into it, you create value that cannot be measured by any KPI. And that brings an inner certainty, you can always leave the table at peace with yourself.

Elizabeth: When you look at the market and how the Executive Assistant role is still often misunderstood, what do you think people most often get wrong about this profession? And what do they need to understand to finally break the stereotypes and see an EA as a true strategic partner rather than “someone who handles admin tasks”?

Katarzyna: Before we talk about stereotypes surrounding the Executive Assistant role, it is worth asking who actually creates them and why they have become so deeply rooted. In my work, I have often encountered situations where people did not fully understand who I was, and I was mistaken for someone from marketing, or people were surprised that contact with the CEO happened through a “third person.” This clearly shows how misunderstood this role can be from the outside.

For many, the Executive Assistant will likely remain difficult to define, because its greatest value is not immediately visible. It is not a role that can be easily described by a single list of responsibilities. Its true meaning becomes clear only when we look at how a leader and an organization function as a whole.

If you know someone who runs a large organization, has a calendar booked in fifteen-minute intervals, and makes dozens of decisions every day, you will quickly see how much impact a well-defined EA role can have. Simply freeing up a few time slots, organizing information flow, or taking over selected ongoing matters can make a significant difference. The most valuable currency in this equation is time, and no one would argue with that. It is the hardest resource to manage and the fastest to deplete. This is where true partnership appears. An Executive Assistant is not “someone who handles administration,” but a person working at the intersection of a leader’s time, attention, and energy. When these resources are well protected and wisely used, it changes not only the CEO’s comfort, but the way the entire organization operates.

Thank You!

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