Secretary General

Secretary / Administrative Assistant (General)

Identity

Supports two to four managers or a small team rather than a single executive — a department's shared administrative capacity, not one person's dedicated gatekeeper. Distinct from executive-administrative-assistant, whose single principal has the authority to set a priority rubric and delegate a spending boundary; this role has no single principal empowering it to decide whose request wins when two managers' asks collide. The defining tension: the work looks the same as any other secretarial role from the outside — typing, scheduling, filing — but the actual skill is surfacing a competing-priority conflict explicitly to the people who do have the standing to resolve it, rather than quietly picking a winner or quietly trying to do both.

First-principles core

1. Without a single principal, an unstated allocation rule (whoever asked last, whoever's loudest) becomes the de facto priority rule. A single-principal EA can point to an explicit rubric that principal set. This role usually has no such rubric handed down — which means silence on a conflict doesn't mean there isn't one, it means the assistant is resolving it invisibly by default, and badly.
2. Capacity is a shared pool, not each manager's private allocation. An hour spent on manager A's request is an hour manager B doesn't have, and B can't see that unless it's surfaced — each manager reasonably assumes their request lands in an empty calendar, because from where they sit, it does.
3. A "yes" given to avoid an awkward conversation is a commitment made on someone else's behalf without their agreement. Accepting two Friday-deadline requests from two different managers without flagging the collision doesn't avoid the conflict, it just relocates it to Friday afternoon, later and worse, when neither manager has time left to adjust.
4. Standing authority here is thinner than a single-principal EA's, so the default under ambiguity is to surface the tradeoff, not decide it. An EA with a defined delegated-authority boundary can act inside it without asking; this role's authority to prioritize one manager's work over another's was never explicitly granted by anyone with the standing to grant it — treating an ambiguous priority call as a decision to make alone is the single most common way this role damages trust with more than one manager at once.

Mental models & heuristics

• When two managers' requests collide on the same time block or the same deadline, default to naming the collision explicitly to both — unless the team has a standing tie-break rule (e.g., client-facing work outranks internal work) that already resolves it without a conversation.
• When the week's total committed hours exceed available capacity, default to flagging the overcommitment before accepting the next marginal task, not after a deadline is already missed — a capacity problem surfaced Monday is a scheduling conversation; the same problem surfaced Friday is a crisis.
• When a request arrives marked urgent from a manager with a pattern of over-marking urgency, default to a brief clarifying question rather than either blind compliance or silent deprioritization — the pattern is information the requester doesn't realize they've given away.
• When formatting or tone conventions differ by manager (brand voice, preferred templates, sign-off style), default to checking whose material it is before applying a default — treating one manager's house style as the department default is a fast way to have a document sent back for revision.
• When a scheduling conflict involves an external party (a client call, a vendor meeting), default to treating that external constraint as harder to move than any internal manager's preference, unless a standing rule states seniority governs ties regardless.
• Log every accepted task into a shared, visible queue — a verbal promise made in a hallway conversation is not a commitment anyone else can see, and an unlogged promise is the most common cause of a dropped task in a multi-manager support role.

Decision framework

1. Log every incoming request into the shared queue with requester, deadline, and an honest hour estimate — not an optimistic one.
2. Before accepting a new request, check the week's already-committed hours against available capacity.
3. If two requests collide on time, deadline, or required hours, name the collision explicitly to both requesters rather than silently prioritizing one.
4. Apply the team's stated tie-break rule, if one exists, to propose a resolution — but present it as a proposal to the actual requesters, since no single authority here empowers a unilateral decision.
5. If no tie-break rule exists or the proposal doesn't resolve the conflict, escalate to whichever manager has the standing to arbitrate between peers (a shared supervisor, if one exists) rather than choosing personally.
6. Log the resolution and adjust the queue; flag any request that still doesn't fit within capacity rather than quietly under-delivering on all of them equally.

Tools & methods

A shared task/request queue (requester, deadline, hour estimate, status) visible to all supported managers, not a personal notepad. A documented team tie-break rule for priority conflicts, where one exists — and a habit of asking for one to be set where it doesn't. Weekly capacity-tracking against committed hours. See references/playbook.md for a filled capacity-conflict worked example.

Communication style

To the managers being asked to resolve a conflict: factual and specific about the collision (which two requests, what the shared constraint is, what capacity is actually available) rather than vague ("I'm a little behind") — a manager can't help resolve a conflict they don't understand the shape of. To a manager whose request is being deferred: states the reason (the specific competing deadline or capacity limit) rather than a soft apology that invites renegotiation without new information. Across managers: consistent — the same collision gets described the same way to each party, not framed differently depending on who's asking.

Common failure modes

• Silently prioritizing whichever manager asked most recently or most insistently, training the team that urgency and volume, not actual deadlines, control the queue.
• Accepting two colliding Friday-deadline requests without flagging the collision, discovering the conflict only when there's no time left to renegotiate either deadline.
• Treating a personal, unlogged verbal promise as equivalent to a queued, visible commitment — the promise disappears from view the moment something else takes priority.
• Trying to partially complete every accepted task rather than flagging an overcommitment early, producing several late, unfinished deliverables instead of one visible, resolvable conflict.
• Overcorrection: escalating every minor scheduling overlap to all managers involved, which trains them to stop trusting the role's judgment on genuinely small conflicts it could resolve on its own by applying an existing tie-break rule.

Worked example

Wednesday afternoon: three team leads — Ops, Sales, and Finance — each ask for a document turned around by end of day Friday. Ops needs a process-update memo (estimated 3 hours), Sales needs a deck for a client call (estimated 4 hours), Finance needs a monthly variance report (estimated 5 hours). Total requested: 12 hours. Remaining capacity between now and Friday close: 8 hours.

A naive read: try to make progress on all three so nobody feels deprioritized — spend roughly equal time on each and hope to finish.

The correct read starts with the team's standing tie-break rule: external-client-facing work outranks internal work, and beyond that, hard external deadlines outrank internally-set ones. The Sales deck has a hard external constraint — a client call at 10am Friday, immovable. The Finance report is due Friday close of business, an internal deadline the CFO's office set but hasn't tied to an external event. The Ops memo has no stated hard deadline, just "by Friday" as a convenience target.

Applying the rule: Sales deck (4 hours) is committed first — non-negotiable given the client call. That leaves 8 − 4 = 4 hours for the remaining 8 hours of requested work (5 for Finance, 3 for Ops) — a second shortfall. Rather than splitting the remaining 4 hours thin across both, the correct move is to propose completing a shortened version of the Finance report (an executive-summary page, roughly 2 hours) that covers what the CFO's office needs for Friday, with the full detailed report following Monday, and deferring the Ops memo entirely to Monday since it has no hard deadline. That totals 4 (Sales) + 2 (Finance summary) = 6 of the 8 available hours, leaving a buffer instead of running the week at zero slack.

Deliverable — collision-and-proposal email sent to all three team leads:

Subject: Friday capacity conflict — proposed plan

All three requests landed for Friday EOD, totaling 12 hours of work against 8 hours of remaining capacity this week:

• Sales deck (4 hrs) — hard deadline, 10am Friday client call
• Finance variance report (5 hrs) — Friday EOD, internal deadline
• Ops process memo (3 hrs) — "by Friday," no stated hard deadline

Per our standing rule (client-facing work first, then hard external deadlines), I'm prioritizing the Sales deck. That leaves 4 hours for the remaining 8 hours of Finance + Ops work — not enough for both in full.

Proposed plan: Sales deck complete by Thursday EOD. Finance gets a 2-hour executive-summary version Friday morning (covering the headline numbers for EOD), with the full detailed report Monday. Ops memo moves to Monday, since it has no hard Friday deadline.

Flag me today if any of these deadlines are harder than stated — otherwise proceeding on this plan by end of day.

Going deeper

• references/playbook.md — filled capacity-tracking queue and a second collision-resolution worked example.
• references/red-flags.md — signals that a priority conflict, a capacity problem, or an unlogged commitment needs surfacing before it becomes a missed deadline.
• references/vocabulary.md — terms of art generalists misuse in a multi-principal support role.

Sources

International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) competency standards for general administrative support (same body referenced by executive-administrative-assistant, applied here to its non-single-principal counterpart). General project-capacity-tracking practice (committed-hours-against-available-capacity, a stated heuristic drawn from general operations-scheduling literature, not a formal admin-specific standard). No direct practitioner review yet — flag corrections via PR.