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The Pilot and the Navigator: What the Research Says About the EA and Chief of Staff Roles.
Updated: Sep 28
It is ten past two on a Thursday, and two things are happening in the same diary. At half past, an unhappy client is expecting a call that somebody promised them, and at three the board expects the executive in the room with the papers in order. Meanwhile, in the meeting that is running over, someone has leaned back and asked whether the whole programme is pointed in the right direction at all. One of those problems wants a steady hand on the controls in the next twenty minutes. The other wants somebody to look up from the instruments and ask where the aircraft is going. Very often, it is the same person being asked to do both.
In early 2025 I wrote about my own time in both seats, the Executive Assistant as the pilot and the Chief of Staff as the navigator, and the picture still feels right to me. What I did not know then is how much research sits underneath it. The pilot and the navigator turn out to be two distinct states of mind that psychologists and management researchers have measured for decades, each with its own strengths and its own blind spots, and the move between them has costs you can predict and plan for.
What you will get out of this
The idea from 1991 that explains why every organisation needs someone minding the present and someone scouting the future, and why the present always wins if nobody stops it
The two states of mind that deciding and doing put you in, and what they do to your sense of risk and time
Why the pilot and the navigator read the same risk so differently, and the study of more than 10,000 firm-years that found the pairing of the two paid off
Why "why" is harder to sell than "when", and what the research on vision, distance and meaning says about selling it anyway
What happens in your head when you switch seats during a single afternoon, and what happens to your identity when you change seats for good
How the two roles work best together, from studies of flight simulators, hospitals, co-chief executives and shared leadership in thousands of teams
The cockpit check: a tool that looks at one piece of work and tells you which seat it needs
The Cockpit Pages: three pages for sorting your week by seat, drawing the line between deciding and doing, and agreeing how the two seats work together
Two seats, one aircraft: what the research calls them
The research on people in these roles is thinner than it should be, and most of it comes from politics. Studies of chiefs of staff to presidents and prime ministers describe the job in a small number of recurring roles: an administrator who runs the machinery, an adviser who shapes the thinking, a guardian who protects the principal, and in later work a proxy who speaks for them. A large set of interviews with former staff described the role as the principal's right hand and occasionally their alter ego. The first corporate study, which combined 2,500 professional profiles with surveys and interviews, found the same sort of behind-the-scenes influence on the top team, even though the role rarely sits in it.
The assistant's side of the aircraft has been studied mostly as a problem of visibility. A 1994 study of secretarial work found a gap between the role organisations formally acknowledged and the labour actually performed, and that much of the intellectual and emotional work was invisible to the organisation while being essential to its goals. A later review identified three separate mechanisms that make work invisible: cultural, legal and spatial. If you have ever rescued a day that nobody knew was in danger, you have met at least one of them.
And there is a lovely, humbling finding from a study of 48 years of presidential diaries covering nine presidencies and 21 chiefs of staff. The researchers expected a strong chief of staff to change how the president spent the day, and found little evidence that they changed its length, its density or its make-up. The authors concluded that chiefs of staff do less managing up and more managing around. The navigator, it seems, rarely grabs the controls. The navigator changes what the pilot is flying towards.
The more useful map comes from a paper published in 1991 about how organisations learn. Its author split learning into two activities. Exploitation is refining and extending what you already know how to do: efficiency, execution, reliability. Exploration is searching for what you do not yet know: experiment, variation, risk. The two compete for the same time and attention, and they pay out on different schedules. The returns from exploitation are positive, near and predictable; the returns from exploration are uncertain, distant and often negative. So any system that is left to itself drifts towards exploitation, because it works this quarter, and in doing so it becomes effective in the short run and self-destructive in the long run.
That is the pilot and the navigator in one paragraph. The pilot exploits: this aircraft, this route, today, safely. The navigator explores: the other route, the other destination, the year after next. The point of the 1991 paper is that you need both, and that the present will crowd out the future unless somebody is deliberately paid to look up.
The present always has the louder voice, because its returns arrive this week. The navigator's first job is to make sure the future gets heard at all.
Later research asked how organisations hold both at once. A study of 4,195 people in 41 business units named the capacity contextual ambidexterity, meaning alignment and adaptability at the same time, and found it grew in units whose context combined stretch, discipline, support and trust, and that it went with better performance. A meta-analysis found the link between ambidexterity and performance was real but mixed, and depended heavily on the setting. And a study of global insurance firms over fifteen years found that keeping a fixed balance between the two helped when change was gradual and hurt when change was sudden, which suggests the balance itself has to be steered.
I learned the pilot's version of this long before I had words for it. As an EA I once spotted a double-booked afternoon with an irate client on one side and a board meeting on the other. Through what I can only describe as logistical acrobatics, one moved to the morning and the other became a video call. To the executive, it looked seamless. To me it felt like aerial stunts with a blindfold on. That is exploitation done well, and nobody writes a paper about it, which is rather the point of the 1994 study.
Try this. Take last week's diary and colour every block by seat: exploiting what already works, or exploring what might work next. Most people in these roles find the second colour is almost absent, and that when it does appear it was the first thing to be moved. If that is you, protect one exploring block next week and treat it with the same seriousness you would give a board meeting.
The research behind this section
Cohen (2002) used original survey data on six White House chiefs of staff from the Reagan and Bush administrations and described three major roles: administrator, adviser and guardian. Cohen and Hult (2020) discussed four major roles performed by chiefs of staff and their deputies: administrator, advisor, guardian and proxy. Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne (2001) synthesised interviews with more than eighty current and former White House staffers, including twenty who worked in or near the office of the chief of staff, and described the role as frequently the president's right hand and occasionally his alter ego. Stafford (2025) examined the Downing Street chief of staff since 1997, covering gatekeeping, closest adviser and institutional reform. Pickering, Bellens and Brans (2024) mapped the profiles of 56 chiefs of staff to prime ministers in four Westminster countries from 1990 to 2021. Zhou and colleagues (2024) combined 2,500 LinkedIn profiles of corporate chiefs of staff, surveys of 108 and in-depth interviews with 13, and found evidence of behind-the-scenes relevance to strategic leadership although the role is not typically part of the top team. Beckmann (2024) analysed presidents' daily work behaviours over 48 years, nine presidencies and 21 chiefs of staff and found little evidence that chiefs of staff affected the duration, density or composition of the president's workday, concluding that they do less managing up and more managing around. Wichroski (1994) found a discrepancy between the formally acknowledged roles and the actual labour of secretaries, much of it intellectual and emotional and invisible to organisations while essential to their goals. Hatton (2017) argued that work is made invisible through three intersecting mechanisms, cultural, legal and spatial. March (1991) distinguished exploration from exploitation in organisational learning, argued that the returns to exploitation are more certain, closer in time and closer in space, and that adaptive processes that refine exploitation faster than exploration are likely to become effective in the short run and self-destructive in the long run. Gibson and Birkinshaw (2004) collected data from 4,195 individuals in 41 business units and found that a context combining stretch, discipline, support and trust facilitated contextual ambidexterity, which mediated the link between these features and performance. Junni and colleagues (2013) meta-analysed the ambidexterity and performance relationship and found that positive results were to a large extent moderated by context and method, with ambidexterity particularly important in non-manufacturing industries and at higher levels of analysis. Luger, Raisch and Schimmer (2018) studied global insurance firms from 1999 to 2014 and found that maintaining a balanced exploration and exploitation orientation helped under incremental change and hurt under discontinuous change. Andriopoulos and Lewis (2009) studied five ambidextrous product design firms and described nested paradoxes of innovation, including the personal tension between discipline and passion.
Deciding and doing are different states of mind
Here is the research that I wish somebody had handed me on my first day as a Chief of Staff.
In 1990 a group of psychologists split every goal into phases. First you deliberate: should I do this at all, and which option is best? Then, once you have decided, you plan: when, where and how? Then you act, and afterwards you evaluate. They called the moment of decision crossing the Rubicon, and they proposed that each side of the river puts you in a different state of mind. Before the decision you are in a deliberative mindset, open and even-handed, weighing pros and cons. After it you are in an implemental mindset, narrowed on getting it done. Their first experiments found that each mindset tuned what people noticed and remembered, even on tasks that had nothing to do with the original decision.
Then came the findings that matter for the cockpit.
People in a deliberative mindset were more realistic. In a 1995 study, deliberating led to worse mood, greater perceived risk and a less rosy view of oneself than planning did. In a 2001 study, deliberating people chose easier tasks, overestimated their chances of success less, and leaned more on how they had actually performed in the past. In 2017, deliberating people took fewer risks in a behavioural risk task, and people in an implemental mindset felt less vulnerable to things going wrong.
People in an implemental mindset were more effective at the doing. A 2003 study found that people who had been asked to deliberate the merits of a task formed more pessimistic expectations about it and then underperformed, compared with people who had imagined carrying out a plan. And the optimism was not reckless: a 2004 set of experiments found that implemental people did not set wilder goals or inflate their predictions. They were simply more confident.
The practical twist is that each mindset is right for its own side of the river and wrong for the other. Keep deliberating after the decision and you second-guess your way into a poorer result. Start implementing before the decision and you commit to an option you never properly weighed. A study of auditors planning fraud detection showed the second risk vividly: auditors who worked from their usual plans spread extra hours across procedures, including less effective ones, while those who were pushed to deliberate identified potential fraud better and put their hours where they mattered.
I did something like that myself once, and I can report that it is not always popular. Partway through a strategy meeting as a Chief of Staff, I realised that what we needed was to rip up the plan in front of us rather than polish it. It did not win me many fans among the spreadsheet brigade, and the new approach worked out in the end. Looking back, what happened was that the room had crossed the Rubicon too early. We were busy implementing a decision that had never been properly made, and somebody had to drag us back to the other bank.
The pilot's gift is to stop deliberating once the decision is made. The navigator's gift is to notice when a decision was never really made at all.
Time is where the two mindsets are most treacherous. The classic 1994 work on the planning fallacy found that people underestimated how long their own tasks would take, though not other people's, because they built their forecast from the plan rather than from their past experience, and the bias vanished when people were made to connect their prediction to relevant past experiences. A 2015 study then found that an implemental mindset produced shorter time predictions, which were no more accurate. And a well-known 1993 paper argued that decision makers suffer from two opposite errors at once: timid choices, because they treat each risk as if it were unique rather than one of many, and bold forecasts, because they take the inside view and anchor on the plan.
Planning itself earns its keep. A meta-analysis of business planning found that planning helped performance on balance, and helped established businesses more than brand-new ones. And a two-year study of 136 adults facing a career change found that those who added a specific plan to their decision were more likely to have actually started retraining two years later. A later meta-analysis of if-then plans, which say "when this happens, I will do that", found they reliably helped people reach their goals.
So the two seats map onto the two banks of the river. The pilot's work is mostly on the doing side: the decision is made, and the job is to execute it cleanly, on time and without spilling anyone's tea. The navigator's work is mostly on the deciding side: to keep the options open for long enough, to bring in the evidence from the past, and to say out loud when the room has crossed before it was ready.
Try this. At the start of any meeting you support, write one line at the top of your notes: are we deciding or doing today? If it is deciding, make sure the options and the past evidence are on the table before anybody starts planning. If it is doing, gently park any attempt to reopen the decision into a named slot on another day. Both seats get easier the moment everyone knows which bank of the river they are standing on.
The research behind this section
Gollwitzer, Heckhausen and Steller (1990) established deliberative and implemental mindsets by having participants contemplate a personal change decision or plan an intended project, and found in two studies that each mindset tuned thought production and information processing towards congruent information. Taylor and Gollwitzer (1995) found that deliberation led to worsened mood, greater perceived risk and poorer self-perceptions relative to implementation, with control participants typically in between. Puca (2001) found that deliberative participants preferred less difficult tasks, overestimated their probability of success less and referred more to their past performance than implemental participants, with no difference in actual performance. Puca (2004) found in three experiments that people in an implemental mindset neither set more demanding goals nor inflated their performance predictions, while being more confident of reaching their goals. Keller and Gollwitzer (2017) found in two experiments that participants in an implemental mindset were more optimistic about their own risk of negative life events and that participants in a deliberative mindset showed less risk-taking behaviour on a behavioural risk task. Armor and Taylor (2003) found that participants induced to deliberate formed more pessimistic expectations about a task and underperformed relative to those who imagined implementing a plan. Rixom and Plumlee (2023) found in an experiment with auditors that those working under contingent rewards used deliberative mindsets, identified potential fraud better and planned more hours for effective procedures, while those working under accountability relied on implementation intentions and increased hours broadly, including on less effective procedures. Buehler, Griffin and Ross (1994) found that people underestimated their own but not others' task completion times, focused on plan-based scenarios rather than relevant past experiences, and that the optimistic bias was eliminated when participants were instructed to connect relevant past experiences with their predictions. Brandstätter and colleagues (2015) found that participants in an implemental mindset made shorter time predictions than those in a deliberative mindset, and that the predictions were equally biased. Kahneman and Lovallo (1993) argued that decision makers isolate the current choice from future opportunities, producing overly cautious attitudes to risk, and adopt an inside view anchored on plans and scenarios, producing overly optimistic forecasts. Brinckmann, Grichnik and Kapsa (2010) meta-analysed the relationship between business planning and performance in small firms and found it positive, and stronger for established firms than for new ones. Brandstätter and colleagues (2003) followed 136 East German participants and found that those whose goal intention to continue their education was furnished with an implementation intention were more successful in initiating vocational retraining two years later. Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) meta-analysed the effects of implementation intentions on goal achievement.
Why the two seats read risk so differently
The biggest difference I felt between the two jobs was the approach to risk. As an EA I wanted everything grounded in predictability. Faced with three overlapping meetings, I would reach for the spreadsheet and find a solution so smooth it was practically aerodynamic. As a Chief of Staff I found myself trading that control for bolder bets, and on one occasion I backed a partnership with a high-risk start-up when the safer choice was to stay with a tried-and-tested supplier. I lost sleep over it. The start-up came through, and brought innovation that reshaped our approach. I have often wondered whether I had become a braver person or had simply moved to a seat that asked a different question.
The research suggests it was mostly the seat.
Regulatory focus theory, from the late 1990s, describes two different motivational systems. A promotion focus is concerned with advancement, growth and gains: it wants to make sure you catch every opportunity. A prevention focus is concerned with safety, responsibility and avoiding losses: it wants to make sure you do not make a mistake. In the founding experiments, people put into a promotion focus showed a risky bias when deciding whether they had spotted something, generated more distinct alternatives, and persisted after failure. People put into a prevention focus showed a conservative bias, took longer to respond and quit sooner on difficult tasks. Neither was a personality; both were produced by how the task was framed.
Two meta-analyses have since established that the two systems are separate rather than opposite ends of one dial, a person can be high on both, and that they predict work behaviour over and above personality. Studies outside the laboratory tell the same story: a promotion focus went with more real-world risk taking, such as speeding, and a prevention focus with less.
Then come the twists, and they are the interesting part. A prevention focus is not simply risk-averse. In four studies, prevention-focused people took the risky option when it was the only way to get back to where they started, and chose the safe option when a safe route back existed. Pilots will do something bold to land the aircraft; what they will not do is gamble when there is a runway. And a promotion focus is not simply risk-seeking either: in a stock investment task, promotion-focused people took risks when they were stuck at zero and switched to the conservative option straight after a large gain.
The pilot is not timid and the navigator is not reckless. They are asking different questions of the same risk: what could go wrong, and what could we miss.
Now the part that belongs on the wall of every executive office. A study of chief executives and finance directors across more than 10,000 firm-years looked at what happened when a promotion-focused chief executive worked with a prevention-focused finance director. The chief executive's promotion focus went with more investment and better performance. The finance director's prevention focus pulled the investment back, and strengthened the link with performance. The pairing worked better still when the two were paid on similar plans, which gave them common objectives. A separate study of more than 3,000 chief executive and finance director pairs found the same shape with personality: extraverted chief executives took on more debt, and conscientious finance directors pulled it towards moderate levels.
That is the pilot and the navigator, measured in company accounts. The value was not in either person's attitude to risk. It was in having both attitudes present, listened to, and pointed at the same goal.
Try this. Before your next significant decision, ask the two questions separately and out loud. What could go wrong here that we would regret? What could we miss here that we would regret? Write the answers in two columns. If the two columns come from two different people, even better, and if they always come from the same people, consider swapping who asks which.
The research behind this section
Crowe and Higgins (1997) manipulated regulatory focus independently of valence and found that a promotion focus produced a risky response bias in a signal detection task, more distinct alternatives in a generation task and better persistence after failure, while a prevention focus produced a conservative bias, slower responses, more repetitive alternatives and quicker quitting on difficult tasks. Lanaj, Chang and Johnson (2012) meta-analysed regulatory focus and work outcomes and found that regulatory foci predicted unique variance in work behaviours after controlling for established personality, motivation and attitudinal predictors. Gorman and colleagues (2012) meta-analysed correlations from 77 studies and found that promotion and prevention focus are orthogonal constructs, each uniquely related to other variables. Hamstra, Bolderdijk and Veldstra (2011) found in naturalistic speeding and simulated risk taking that promotion focus was positively, and prevention focus negatively, related to risky behaviour. Scholer and colleagues (2010) found in four studies that prevention motivation predicted increased risk seeking when the risky option alone offered a return to the status quo, and risk aversion when a conservative option also offered that return. Zou, Scholer and Higgins (2014) found in a consequential stock investment paradigm that promotion-focused participants chose a relatively risky option when their portfolio was stuck at zero and switched to a relatively conservative option after a large gain. Firk and colleagues (2024) studied a longitudinal sample of more than 10,000 firm years and found that CEO promotion focus was positively associated with investment spending and firm performance, that CFO prevention focus weakened the association with investment spending and strengthened the association with firm performance, and that these effects were more pronounced when the two had similar compensation plans. Harrison and Malhotra (2024) studied more than 3,000 CEO and CFO pairs in S&P 1500 firms from 1997 to 2017 and found that more extraverted CEOs had higher financial leverage and that greater CFO conscientiousness buffered this towards moderate levels.
Why "why" is harder to sell than "when"
When I was an EA, motivating people revolved around deadlines and deliverables: what, by when, and is it ticked off? When I became a Chief of Staff, I realised that motivation needed people to believe in the reason behind the work. I was no longer asking people to action a task; I was asking them to buy into the why. And "why?" is a great deal harder to sell than "when?".
There is a body of research that explains exactly why. Action identification theory, from the 1980s, observed that any action can be described at different levels, from how it is done to why it is done. Filling in a spreadsheet is also preparing the budget, which is also deciding next year. Construal level theory later showed that the more distant something is, in time, in space, in social distance or in likelihood, the more abstractly people think about it. The future is naturally a "why" place, and the present is naturally a "how" place.
That gives each seat its own natural language. The pilot speaks in the concrete: times, steps, owners, the next action. The navigator speaks in the abstract: purpose, direction, the shape of the year. And the research is clear that neither language works everywhere.
A study of 2,206 employees in a telecoms company found that people were most satisfied when their direct supervisor gave them concrete feedback and when senior leaders further away shared an abstract vision, rather than the other way round. Two later experiments found the same fit: a vision was judged more effective when it came from a distance, and concrete goals when they came from close by. A daily study of 44 managers over fifteen working days found that on mornings when a manager was thinking at a higher, more abstract level, they communicated more vision that day, but only if being a leader was central to how they saw themselves.
Then there is the question of who is listening. In four experiments, novices responded better to new ideas framed in terms of why, and experts responded better to the same ideas framed in terms of how. That is a useful correction for any navigator who has pitched a big idea to a finance committee and wondered why the room went cold.
The most useful research here comes from two studies of how leaders make the why stick. The first, an archival study of the United States space programme in the 1960s, found that the leadership succeeded by building a structure of connections between the ultimate aspiration and people's daily tasks, so that employees came to describe their work less as the job in front of them and more as the long-term objective it served. Hence the title of the paper, taken from the famous story of the man who was not mopping the floors but helping to put a man on the moon. The second combined 151 hospitals with an experiment on 62 groups of employees and found that performance rose when leaders used a lot of vision imagery and only a few values, because it gave people a shared sense of the goal and helped them coordinate. The same research found that most leaders do the opposite: visions without images, and too many values. A follow-up found most leaders reached for abstract language that nobody could picture, and tested a way of getting senior executives to generate more vivid visions.
And the old-fashioned version works too. In a set of field experiments, fundraising callers who were shown the impact of their work on the people it helped performed better than those who were not. Across 44 studies and more than 23,000 people, meaningful work had large correlations with engagement, commitment and job satisfaction, though smaller ones with self-rated performance, which is a useful reminder that meaning makes people want to do the work more readily than it makes them better at it.
There is one finding that brings the two seats back together. A 2025 set of studies found that managers understood strategic problems best when they started concrete, gathering all the symptoms, and only then moved to abstract thinking about the underlying causes. Begin in the pilot's language, and finish in the navigator's.
Try this. Take the next piece of direction you have to pass on and write it twice: once as a why, with one picture somebody could see in their mind, and once as a when, with the next step, the owner and the date. Send the why to the people furthest from the work and the when to the people doing it, and give the people in the middle both.
The research behind this section
Vallacher and Wegner (1987) proposed action identification theory, in which any action can be identified at levels ranging from how it is performed to why or with what effect it is performed. Trope and Liberman (2010) set out construal level theory, in which the farther an object is removed from direct experience in time, space, social distance or hypotheticality, the higher and more abstract its construal. Berson and Halevy (2014) found in a study of 2,206 employees of a telecommunications organisation that job satisfaction was higher when direct supervisors gave concrete feedback and hierarchically distant leaders shared an abstract vision rather than vice versa, and replicated the construal fit in two further studies. Berson and colleagues (2015) proposed a construal-level framework integrating vision communication and goal setting. Vanderstukken and colleagues (2019) found in two experiments that supervisor effectiveness was higher when vision was communicated at a far distance and goals at a near distance. Venus and colleagues (2019) collected 394 matched morning and afternoon surveys from 44 managers over 15 consecutive workdays and found that a high-level construal in the morning was associated with vision communication that day only when leadership self-identity was high. Falchetti, Cattani and Ferriani (2022) found in four experiments that novices appreciated novel ideas framed in abstract why terms while experts appreciated them framed in concrete how terms. Carton (2018) analysed archival evidence on NASA in the 1960s and identified four sensegiving steps that helped employees see a stronger connection between their daily work and the organisation's ultimate aspirations. Carton, Murphy and Clark (2014) found in an archival study of 151 hospitals and an experiment with 62 groups of full-time employees that a large amount of vision imagery combined with a small number of values boosted performance by triggering a shared sense of the ultimate goal and enhancing coordination, and that leaders tend to communicate visions without imagery and over-use values. Carton and Lucas (2018) found across three experiments, including senior executives and members of the British government, that leaders favour abstract language that cannot easily be visualised and tested a tactic to help them generate more image-based visions. Grant (2008) found in three field experiments that a task significance intervention increased the job performance of fundraising callers, and that task significance increased the dedication and helping of lifeguards through perceived social impact and worth. Kipfelsberger and colleagues (2022) found in samples of 79 leaders and 871 employees and of 68 CEOs and 596 mid-level leaders that leaders' work meaningfulness transferred to followers through visionary leadership, shaped by dyadic tenure. Allan and colleagues (2019) meta-analysed 44 articles with 23,144 people and found correlations above .70 between meaningful work and engagement, commitment and job satisfaction, and small to moderate correlations with self-rated performance and citizenship behaviour. Park, Baer and Nickerson (2025) found in two experiments and a correlational study, including experienced executives, that managers benefited from concrete thinking first to identify the symptoms of a strategic problem and abstract thinking afterwards to theorise about its causes. Berson, Oreg and Wiesenfeld (2021) proposed that abstract construals of change help its initiation and concrete construals help its implementation.
Flying both seats, and changing seats for good
A great many people in this profession fly both seats, sometimes in the same hour. My own day still sounds like this: my EA brain says finish the emails, and my Chief of Staff brain insists on planning world domination. The research on doing both has good news and a warning.
The good news is that some people really are better at holding both, and that it can be built. A laboratory study of 181 people in a dynamic simulation found a particular set of cognitive abilities that predicted adaptive performance beyond general intelligence. A brain imaging study of expert decision makers found that exploiting leaned on the brain's reward circuits, while exploring leaned on attentional control, and that people with stronger attentional control made better decisions overall. A study of 716 managers found that those with more decision-making authority, more involvement in cross-functional work and more connections across the organisation were more ambidextrous, while having their tasks formally written down made no difference. And a network study of 79 senior managers found that those who did both had differently shaped networks: denser in some places, more varied and more informal.
The warning is that switching has a price. A study that coded 4,355 separate activities from twelve entrepreneurs found that exploring tended to be followed by more exploring, and exploiting by more exploiting, and that when multitasking was high, switching between the two modes was lower rather than higher. The research on attention residue explains the mechanism. In two experiments, people who moved on from an unfinished task kept thinking about it, and performed worse on the next one. A study of 477 task transitions by crew members in a space mission simulation found that the more absorbed people had been in one task, the more of it they carried into the next, good mood and distraction alike.
There is a practical fix, and it is small enough to use today. In four studies, people who were interrupted and wrote a brief ready-to-resume plan, noting where they had got to and what they would do first on their return, carried less residue into the interruption and performed better on it. For anyone who moves from the diary to the strategy paper and back again ten times a day, that is the difference between two seats and one very tired person.
There is also a subtle finding about how you hold the two roles in your head. A study of 120 global account managers found that keeping the two sets of role demands strictly apart made people less ambidextrous overall, unless they were working in cross-functional teams, where the separation helped. And a study of 1,657 middle managers at a national postal service found that being asked to be ambidextrous neither harmed nor helped their well-being on average, but that it sat less comfortably with the more conscientious. I will only observe that conscientiousness is not in short supply in this profession, and leave it there.
Nobody tells you that the hardest part of moving to the navigator's seat is that your hands still reach for the controls.
Then there is the move itself, when you change seats for good. The theory of work role transitions has long held that people either change themselves to fit a new role, change the role to fit themselves, or do some of both. A newer idea is the lingering identity: an identity rooted in a former role that persists well after the change. The theory argues that lingering is a natural response to the uncertainty of a new role, and that it can inspire people to reshape the new role around their strengths as easily as it can hold them back.
Two other ideas help with the landing. Leadership identity is co-constructed: people claim it, others grant it, and it only sticks once both have happened. For an EA moving into a Chief of Staff role in the same organisation, that is the whole challenge in a sentence, because the people around you have to grant a new identity to someone they already know in an old one. And people make these transitions partly through stories: self-narratives told in conversations and revised based on how others respond. A study of nurses moving into a new specialist role found that the professional identity they came from constrained how far they could enact the new one, especially where other professions guarded the boundary.
There is also a note of hope. People who had a clear and accessible picture of their hoped-for future working self behaved more proactively about their careers, and the effect showed up months later. The future is a navigator's country, and it seems it helps to have visited it before you move there.
People also differ in where their attention habitually sits in time. Researchers have built a measure of this temporal focus, and a review concluded that habitually dwelling on the past tends to be unhelpful, looking to the future tends to help, and focusing on the present has mixed effects. A meta-analysis of 212 studies found that a sense of the future predicted achievement and well-being over and above personality, and a study of profiles found that many people hold past, present and future in mind together, with consequences for how satisfied and committed they feel. The best version of this profession, I suspect, is exactly that profile: a pilot's grip on the present and a navigator's eye on the future, with enough memory of the past to avoid the planning fallacy.
And there is research on the tension itself. The paradox literature argues that competing demands like today and tomorrow are better held together than resolved by picking one. A study that developed a measure of the paradox mindset, the extent to which a person accepts tensions and is energised by them, found that people who scored higher performed better in their roles and innovated more, and that scarce time and money were a common source of the tension in the first place. If you have ever felt oddly alive on a day that pulled you in two directions, that is the finding.
Try this. If you fly both seats, give each its own block and end every pilot block with a two-line ready-to-resume note for the navigator work, and the other way round. If you are changing seats, write the three-sentence story you want colleagues to tell about why you moved, and tell it, in your own words, to the five people whose granting matters most.
The research behind this section
Good and Michel (2013) found in a laboratory study of 181 people in a dynamic microworld that a combination of cognitive abilities they termed individual ambidexterity explained unique variance in adaptive performance beyond general intelligence. Laureiro-Martínez and colleagues (2015) used functional magnetic resonance imaging with expert decision makers and found that exploitation activated regions associated with reward seeking, exploration relied on regions associated with attentional control, and stronger activation of attentional control circuits was associated with better decision-making performance. Mom, van den Bosch and Volberda (2009) studied 716 business unit and operational managers and found that decision-making authority, participation in cross-functional interfaces and connectedness to other organisation members were positively related to ambidexterity, while formalisation of tasks was not. Rogan and Mors (2014) analysed 1,449 ties in the networks of 79 senior managers in a consulting firm and found differences in density, contact heterogeneity and informality between managers who both explored and exploited and those who mainly did one. Klonek, Volery and Parker (2021) examined 4,355 behavioural activities from 12 entrepreneurs and found self-sustaining activity cycles, with exploration followed by exploration and exploitation by exploitation, and lower ambidextrous switching when multitasking was high. Rosing and Zacher (2017) examined the balance of explorative and exploitative behaviours in two diary studies. Schnellbächer, Heidenreich and Wald (2019) found in 415 employees that organisational architecture and context induced individual ambidexterity, with positive performance effects at team and department levels. Mom and colleagues (2019) studied 467 operational managers and 104 senior managers in 52 firms and found that ability- and motivation-enhancing HR practices increased manager ambidexterity partly through role breadth self-efficacy. Leroy (2009) found in two experiments that people had difficulty transitioning attention away from an unfinished task and that subsequent performance suffered. Leroy and Glomb (2018) found across four studies that anticipating time pressure on resuming an interrupted task caused attention residue and low performance on the interrupting task, and that a brief ready-to-resume plan mitigated the effect. Newton and colleagues (2020) studied 477 task transitions by 20 crew members in NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog and a laboratory study of 346 participants, and found that task engagement spilled over positively and also created attention residue that impeded the next task, with task completeness reducing the negative effect. Tempelaar and Rosenkranz (2019) studied 120 global account managers and found that role segmentation negatively influenced individual ambidexterity, but that in cross-functional teams its impact became positive. Moccia, Dawson and Darwish (2026) surveyed 1,657 middle managers at the Swiss Post and found that the demand for ambidexterity neither generally threatened nor improved well-being, with extraversion strengthening the relationship and conscientiousness and neuroticism weakening it. Ashforth, Kreiner and Fugate (2000) set out a theory of boundaries and micro role transitions between roles held at the same time. Nicholson (1984) proposed a theory of work role transitions linking adjustment modes to characteristics of the person, the role and the organisation. Wittman (2019) proposed that identities premised on former roles can linger well beyond role change as a response to ongoing uncertainty, and can inspire role crafting, neutral identification or disidentification. DeRue and Ashford (2010) proposed that leadership identity is co-constructed when individuals claim and grant leader and follower identities. Ibarra and Barbulescu (2010) proposed that people revise identities during work role transitions through narrative identity work in role-related interactions. Petriglieri (2011) modelled responses to identity threat. Currie, Finn and Martin (2010) followed nurses into a new genetics role over two years and found that professional identity and inter- and intra-professional competition constrained enactment of the new role. Ibarra, Wittman and Smith (2026) reviewed research on career transition and professional identity. Strauss, Griffin and Parker (2012) found across three studies that the salience of a future work self was positively related to proactive career behaviour, including a lagged effect over time. Shipp, Edwards and Lambert (2009) conceptualised temporal focus and developed a scale to measure it. Shipp and Aeon (2019) reviewed the evidence and concluded that characteristically thinking about the past is disadvantageous, thinking about the future advantageous, and thinking about the present mixed. Kooij and colleagues (2018) meta-analysed 212 studies and found that future time perspective predicted achievement, well-being and other outcomes over and above the Big Five personality traits. Shipp, Gabriel and Lambert (2022) used latent profile analysis to identify profiles of past, present and future focus and linked them to job satisfaction, affective commitment and withdrawal. Smith and Lewis (2011) set out a dynamic equilibrium model of paradox in organising, in which cyclical responses to paradoxical tensions enable peak performance in the present that enables success in the future. Miron-Spektor and colleagues (2018) developed a measure of paradox mindset across samples in four countries, identified resource scarcity as a source of tensions, and found that a paradox mindset helped individuals leverage tensions to improve in-role job performance and innovation.
How the pilot and the navigator work best together
In the cockpit, the pilot and the navigator are not rivals. They are two halves of one piece of work, and the research on how two halves become one whole is some of the most practical in this post.
Start with the shared picture. In a study that could hardly be more on the nose, 56 pairs of people flew a series of missions in a flight-combat simulator. The researchers measured how similar each pair's understanding was of the task and of each other, and found that the more their mental models converged, the better their teamwork and their performance. A meta-analysis of 65 studies later confirmed that what teams know together predicts performance over and above how they behave and how motivated they are. A newer meta-analysis of 107 studies and 7,778 people put the overall relationship at .35, and found it strongest where teams had the fewest other things holding them together.
Then there is knowing who knows what. Researchers call it a transactive memory system, and a meta-analysis of 76 studies found it linked to team performance across very different settings. The most interesting finding for this profession comes from a laboratory experiment which compared teams in which one central member held the knowledge of who knew what with teams in which that knowledge was spread evenly. When the information was hard to pull together, the teams with a central member did better, because that person acted as a catalyst for exchange. That is a fair description of what a good EA or Chief of Staff does for a leadership team. And a study of 60 teams found that the early work of clarifying who does what built both the shared picture and the who-knows-what, which then carried through to performance.
Next, sharing the leadership. Three meta-analyses have looked at teams where leadership is spread across members rather than held by one person, and all three found a positive link with effectiveness. The largest, across 42 samples, put it at .34, with sharing of the inspiring, new-genre forms of leadership doing more good than sharing of the traditional structuring kind. A study of 71 change management teams found shared leadership was a more useful predictor of effectiveness than leadership from the top alone.
There is a real disagreement here, and you deserve both halves. One meta-analysis found shared leadership mattered more when the work was complex. Another, with 50 effect sizes and more than 3,000 teams, found it mattered less. My reading is that the two meet in a finding from interviews with 71 members of global teams: shared leadership helped when it was coordinated, when people agreed who led on what and acted on that agreement, and did harm when it was highly shared and uncoordinated. Sharing on its own is not the ingredient; a clear division of the leading is.
The research at the very top of organisations says something similar. A study of 71 pairs of co-chief executives found firms did better as the power gap between the two grew, until the gap became very large, when it turned negative. And the evidence on second-in-command roles is split. A large ten-year study found that chief executives who had a chief operating officer delivered lower performance on average, while a later study of 153 firms found a strongly positive link that depended on the make-up of the wider top team. The honest conclusion is that a right-hand role does not help or hurt by existing. It helps when the division of labour fits the people and the problem.
Finally, the relationship itself. Relational coordination research, which began in airlines and hospitals, found that work across roles went better when the people involved had shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, supported by communication that was frequent, timely, accurate and focused on solving problems. A systematic review of nearly three decades of studies supported the theory. None of that needs a new job title. It needs the pilot and the navigator to talk.
Here is the ending of my original story, which the research turns out to support rather well. Without the pilot's steady hand, the navigator's bold ideas risk chaos. Without the navigator's sense of direction, the pilot's meticulous efficiency can end up flying beautifully to the wrong place. If you are lucky enough to have an EA and a Chief of Staff working together, you have two seats in one cockpit, and the evidence suggests the magic is in how clearly they divide the flying.
Try this. If you work alongside someone in the other seat, spend twenty minutes this month agreeing three things: who decides what, who knows what, and where the two of you will meet each week to make sure your pictures of the next month still match. If you do both jobs yourself, have the same conversation with your executive.
The research behind this section
Mathieu and colleagues (2000) tested 56 dyads flying missions in a flight-combat simulation and found that the convergence of team-based and task-based mental models related positively to team process and performance, with process fully mediating the effect. DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus (2010) meta-analysed 231 correlations from 65 studies and found that team cognition had strong positive relationships with team process, motivational states and performance, and explained incremental variance in performance after behavioural and motivational dynamics were controlled; a companion meta-analysis of 23 studies found shared mental models positively related to team performance regardless of how they were measured. Niler and colleagues (2021) meta-analysed 107 studies with 7,778 people and found an overall relationship between team cognition and performance of ρ = .35, ranging from .22 to .42 across conditions and strongest where there were few substitute enabling conditions. Bachrach and colleagues (2019) meta-analysed 76 studies of transactive memory systems representing 6,869 sampling units and examined contextual factors in the relationship with team performance. Lewis (2003) developed and validated a field measure of transactive memory systems across laboratory, consulting and technology teams. Mell, van Knippenberg and van Ginkel (2014) found in a team decision-making experiment that metaknowledge concentrated in one central member could give teams a performance advantage when the distribution of task information posed high coordination demands, through transactive retrieval and information elaboration. Pearsall, Ellis and Bell (2010) found in 60 teams that role identification behaviours built team mental models and transactive memory, which conveyed their effects to team performance. Wang, Waldman and Zhang (2014) meta-analysed 42 independent samples and found an overall positive relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness of ρ = .34, lower for shared traditional leadership (ρ = .18) than for shared new-genre leadership (ρ = .34), and stronger when work was more complex. Nicolaides and colleagues (2014) found meta-analytically that team confidence partially mediated the effects of shared leadership on team performance and that shared leadership explained unique variance beyond vertical leadership. D'Innocenzo, Mathieu and Kukenberger (2016) meta-analysed 50 effect sizes covering 3,198 teams and found a positive relationship, with lower effect sizes for more complex tasks. Pearce and Sims (2002) studied 71 change management teams and found both vertical and shared leadership related to effectiveness, with shared leadership the more useful predictor. Nordbäck and Espinosa (2019) interviewed 71 members and leaders of eight global virtual teams and found shared leadership more positive when coordinated implicitly and behaviourally, and potentially detrimental when highly shared and uncoordinated. Krause, Priem and Love (2015) studied 71 co-CEO pairs and found that increasing power gaps were positively associated with firm performance until they became very large, when the association turned negative. Hambrick and Cannella (2004) found in a large ten-year sample that CEOs who had COOs delivered lower organisational performance than those who did not. Marcel (2009) found in 153 firms in five industries a strong positive relationship between the presence of a COO and firm performance, contingent on broader top management team characteristics. Gittell (2000) described relational coordination, characterised by frequent, timely, problem-solving communication and by shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, and found it correlated with cross-functional liaisons, flexible work roles and related practices. Bolton, Logan and Gittell (2021) systematically reviewed empirical studies of relational coordination from 1991 to 2019 and found evidence supporting the theory.
The cockpit check
Everything in this post comes down to a question you can ask about any piece of work on your desk: which seat does this need? So here is a tool for that question.
Name the piece of work, then answer eight questions about where it is, how far ahead it reaches, how the risk looks and who it is for. The tool will tell you whether it is a pilot moment, a navigator moment or a handover between the two, what the research says about each part, and what to check, and it gives you a short note to copy.
Where to start
If you take one thing from all of this, make it the river. Before any piece of work, know whether you are deciding or doing. Most of the friction I have seen between the two seats, and inside one person trying to fly both, comes from deliberating when it is time to act, or acting on a decision nobody made. The research on mindsets could not be kinder to both seats: each is right on its own bank of the river.
After that, there are three moves worth making.
Ask both risk questions out loud, what could go wrong and what could we miss, and let each seat own one. Say the why to the people far from the work and the when to the people doing it. And when you switch seats, during the day or for good, leave yourself a two-line note on the way out and tell the story of the move to the people whose granting you need.
I have put the three pages I would use into a download: a seat check for sorting a week into pilot and navigator work, a Rubicon page for drawing the line between deciding and doing on one decision, and a two-seat agreement for the EA and Chief of Staff, or the EA and executive, to fill in together.
Having flown in both seats, I have never believed that one is the grown-up version of the other. They are two different kinds of excellence, and the research now says so in numbers: the present needs someone who will land it safely, the future needs someone who will look up, and the organisations that do best are the ones where those two people trust each other enough to share the cockpit.
The part of this that shows up in how you are seen at work sits inside what the Connected Leader Assessment calls Strategic Contribution: how well you connect the work in front of you to where the organisation is going, when you step back to ask whether the plan is right, and whether the people you support can see the future in what you bring them. It is the dimension that decides whether you are seen as the person who runs the day or the person who helps shape the year.
The assessment is free, takes about twelve minutes and gives you a read across all five dimensions. If you want to go further on this one, the Skill Sprints are short, focused programmes on a single dimension, and the Irreplaceable Audit is the place to see how much of your week sits in the pilot's seat and how much in the navigator's, and which of the two the organisation would miss first.
Stay savvy.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The cockpit check, the interactive tool in this post, free
The Cockpit Pages, the download in this post, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Strategic Contribution, the dimension this post sits in
The Irreplaceable Audit, forty-eight activities across four kinds of work, free, for seeing how much of your week is doing and how much is deciding
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on the EA and Chief of Staff Roles?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on doing and deciding, the present and the future, and how the two seats work best together, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where I could not confirm a figure from the paper itself, I have left the figure out rather than guess.
📃 Zhou and colleagues (2024) 2,500 profiles, 108 surveys, 13 interviews. The corporate chief of staff shapes strategy from behind the scenes. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518241267078
📃 Cohen (2002) Six chiefs of staff to a head of state: administrator, adviser and guardian. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2002.tb00002.x
📃 Walcott, Warshaw and Wayne (2001) Interviews with more than eighty staffers. The right hand, and occasionally the alter ego. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0360-4918.2001.00182.x
📃 Beckmann (2024) 48 years of presidential diaries. Chiefs of staff did less managing up and more managing around. https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12873
📃 Stafford (2025) The Downing Street chief of staff since 1997: gatekeeper, closest adviser, reformer. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-024-00256-3
📃 Pickering, Bellens and Brans (2024) Profiles of 56 chiefs of staff to prime ministers in four countries, 1990 to 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12834
📃 Cohen and Hult (2020) Four roles for the chief of staff: administrator, adviser, guardian and proxy. https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12646
📃 March (1991) Exploration and exploitation. Exploitation pays sooner and more surely, which is why it crowds out the future. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2.1.71
📃 Gibson and Birkinshaw (2004) 4,195 people in 41 business units. Stretch, discipline, support and trust built alignment and adaptability together. https://doi.org/10.2307/20159573
📃 Mom, van den Bosch and Volberda (2009) 716 managers. Authority, cross-functional work and connections went with doing both. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1090.0427
📃 Good and Michel (2013) 181 people in a dynamic simulation. The abilities to balance both predicted adaptive performance beyond intelligence. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2012.710663
📃 Rosing and Zacher (2017) Two diary studies on the balance between exploring and exploiting. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2016.1238358
📃 Tempelaar and Rosenkranz (2019) 120 account managers. Keeping the roles strictly apart hurt, except in cross-functional teams. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206317714312
📃 Klonek, Volery and Parker (2021) 4,355 activities from 12 entrepreneurs. Each mode fed itself, and multitasking reduced switching. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266242620943371
📃 Rogan and Mors (2014) 1,449 ties of 79 senior managers. People who did both had differently shaped networks. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0901
📃 Andriopoulos and Lewis (2009) Five design firms. Nested paradoxes, including discipline against passion. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1080.0406
📃 Moccia, Dawson and Darwish (2026) 1,657 middle managers. Being asked to do both neither harmed nor helped well-being on average. https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.70010
📃 Mom and colleagues (2019) 467 operational managers in 52 firms. HR practices built ambidexterity through role breadth confidence. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206318776775
📃 Schnellbächer, Heidenreich and Wald (2019) 415 employees. Structure and context induced individual ambidexterity, with performance benefits. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2019.02.002
📃 Luger, Raisch and Schimmer (2018) Global insurers, 1999 to 2014. A fixed balance helped under gradual change and hurt under sudden change. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1189
📃 Junni and colleagues (2013) Meta-analysis. Ambidexterity and performance: real, mixed, and dependent on the setting. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2012.0015
📃 Laureiro-Martínez and colleagues (2015) Brain imaging of expert decision makers. Exploring leaned on attentional control. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2221
📃 Gollwitzer, Heckhausen and Steller (1990) The deliberative and implemental mindsets, and how each tunes what people notice. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1119
📃 Armor and Taylor (2003) Deliberating about a task lowered expectations and then performance. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202238374
📃 Puca (2001) Deliberating people chose easier tasks and predicted their success more realistically. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1014815716476
📃 Puca (2004) Implemental optimism without overreach: no wilder goals, more confidence. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:moem.0000032311.13014.fa
📃 Keller and Gollwitzer (2017) The implemental mindset raised optimism about risks and risk taking. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000304
📃 Brandstätter and colleagues (2015) An implemental mindset shortened time predictions without making them more accurate. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000231
📃 Taylor and Gollwitzer (1995) Deliberation worsened mood and raised perceived risk; implementation did the opposite. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.2.213
📃 Brandstätter and colleagues (2003) 136 adults over two years. A decision plus a plan led to retraining more often. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320344000011
📃 Rixom and Plumlee (2023) Auditors pushed to deliberate planned fraud detection better than those following habit. https://doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.12867
📃 Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) Meta-analysis of if-then plans and goal achievement. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2601(06)38002-1
📃 Kahneman and Lovallo (1993) Timid choices and bold forecasts: two opposite errors in the same decision. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.39.1.17
📃 Buehler, Griffin and Ross (1994) The planning fallacy. People underestimated their own time, not others', until they used the past. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366
📃 Berson and colleagues (2015) Vision and goals, reconciled through psychological distance. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.07.011
📃 Berson and Halevy (2014) 2,206 employees. Concrete feedback from close by and abstract vision from far away worked best. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000017
📃 Falchetti, Cattani and Ferriani (2022) Four experiments. Novices liked the why; experts liked the how. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3329
📃 Venus and colleagues (2019) 44 managers over 15 days. Big-picture mornings led to vision, if leading was part of who they were. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206318761576
📃 Vanderstukken and colleagues (2019) Two experiments. Visions worked from a distance, goals from close by. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12626
📃 Park, Baer and Nickerson (2025) Managers understood strategic problems best by starting concrete and then going abstract. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19134
📃 Berson, Oreg and Wiesenfeld (2021) Abstract thinking helps change start; concrete thinking helps it stick. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2021.100148
📃 Trope and Liberman (2010) Construal level theory: the further away, the more abstract. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963
📃 Vallacher and Wegner (1987) Action identification: every action has a how and a why. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.94.1.3
📃 Carton (2018) NASA in the 1960s. Connecting daily tasks to the ultimate aspiration made work meaningful. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839217713748
📃 Carton, Murphy and Clark (2014) 151 hospitals and 62 groups. Vivid vision and few values raised performance. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0101
📃 Carton and Lucas (2018) Most leaders' visions cannot be pictured, and a tactic to fix it. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0375
📃 Kipfelsberger and colleagues (2022) Leaders' sense of meaning passed to followers through visionary leadership. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2649
📃 Grant (2008) Field experiments. Seeing the impact of their work raised callers' performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.108
📃 Allan and colleagues (2019) 44 studies, 23,144 people. Meaningful work and engagement, commitment and satisfaction. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12406
📃 Crowe and Higgins (1997) Promotion focus: risky bias, more alternatives. Prevention focus: conservative bias, more care. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1996.2675
📃 Lanaj, Chang and Johnson (2012) Meta-analysis. Regulatory focus predicted work behaviour beyond personality. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027723
📃 Gorman and colleagues (2012) 77 studies. Promotion and prevention are separate systems, not two ends of one dial. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2011.07.005
📃 Scholer and colleagues (2010) Prevention-focused people took risks when that was the only way back to safety. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019715
📃 Zou, Scholer and Higgins (2014) Promotion-focused investors took risks when stuck and played safe after a gain. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035391
📃 Hamstra, Bolderdijk and Veldstra (2011) Promotion focus went with more real-world risk taking, prevention with less. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2010.11.017
📃 Firk and colleagues (2024) More than 10,000 firm-years. A promotion-focused chief executive with a prevention-focused finance director paid off. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2024.101563
📃 Harrison and Malhotra (2024) 3,000 pairs. Conscientious finance directors moderated extraverted chief executives' borrowing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2023.101711
📃 Marcel (2009) 153 firms. Having a chief operating officer went with better performance, depending on the team. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.763
📃 Hambrick and Cannella (2004) Ten years of data. Chief executives with chief operating officers performed worse on average. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.407
📃 Krause, Priem and Love (2015) 71 co-chief executive pairs. Some power gap helped; a very large one hurt. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2325
📃 Wang, Waldman and Zhang (2014) 42 samples. Shared leadership and team effectiveness, rho = .34. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034531
📃 D'Innocenzo, Mathieu and Kukenberger (2016) 50 effect sizes, 3,198 teams. Shared leadership helped, less so on complex tasks. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206314525205
📃 Nicolaides and colleagues (2014) Shared leadership worked partly through team confidence, beyond vertical leadership. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.06.006
📃 Nordbäck and Espinosa (2019) Eight global teams. Shared leadership helped when coordinated and harmed when not. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2018.1558943
📃 Pearce and Sims (2002) 71 change teams. Shared leadership predicted effectiveness better than the top alone. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2699.6.2.172
📃 Mathieu and colleagues (2000) 56 pairs in a flight simulator. Shared mental models improved teamwork and performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.85.2.273
📃 DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus (2010) 65 studies. What teams know together predicts performance beyond behaviour and motivation. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017328
📃 DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus (2010) 23 studies. Shared mental models and team performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017455
📃 Niler and colleagues (2021) 107 studies, 7,778 people. Team cognition and performance, rho = .35. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041386620972112
📃 Bachrach and colleagues (2019) 76 studies. Knowing who knows what, in context. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000329
📃 Mell, van Knippenberg and van Ginkel (2014) One member who knew who knew what acted as a catalyst for the team. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0589
📃 Pearsall, Ellis and Bell (2010) 60 teams. Clarifying roles early built the shared picture and performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017781
📃 Lewis (2003) A field measure of transactive memory in teams. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.587
📃 Bolton, Logan and Gittell (2021) Review of 1991 to 2019. Shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886321991597
📃 Gittell (2000) Relational coordination and the practices that support it. https://doi.org/10.1080/095851900339747
📃 Shipp, Edwards and Lambert (2009) Temporal focus defined and measured: past, present and future. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.05.001
📃 Shipp and Aeon (2019) Review. Past focus hurts, future focus helps, present focus is mixed. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.005
📃 Shipp, Gabriel and Lambert (2022) Profiles of past, present and future focus, and how they relate to satisfaction and commitment. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000950
📃 Kooij and colleagues (2018) 212 studies. Future time perspective predicted outcomes beyond personality. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000306
📃 Strauss, Griffin and Parker (2012) A salient future work self led to more proactive career behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026423
📃 Leroy (2009) Attention residue: leaving a task unfinished costs you on the next one. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
📃 Leroy and Glomb (2018) Four studies. A brief ready-to-resume plan reduced attention residue. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1184
📃 Newton and colleagues (2020) 477 transitions in a NASA analog. Engagement carried over, and so did residue. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000428
📃 Ashforth, Kreiner and Fugate (2000) Boundaries and micro role transitions between roles held at once. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.3363315
📃 Nicholson (1984) A theory of work role transitions and how people adjust. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393172
📃 Wittman (2019) Lingering identities: former roles that persist after the move. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2015.0090
📃 Ibarra and Barbulescu (2010) Identity as narrative in work role transitions. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.35.1.zok135
📃 DeRue and Ashford (2010) Leadership identity is claimed and granted. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.35.4.zok627
📃 Petriglieri (2011) Responses to threats against a work identity. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0087
📃 Ibarra, Wittman and Smith (2026) Review of career transition and professional identity. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-020924-071546
📃 Miron-Spektor and colleagues (2018) The paradox mindset: accepting and energised by tensions, and better for it. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.0594
📃 Smith and Lewis (2011) A dynamic equilibrium theory of paradox in organising. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.59330958
📃 Currie, Finn and Martin (2010) Nurses in a new role, constrained by the identity they came from. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840610373199
📃 Wichroski (1994) The secretary: invisible labour essential to organisational goals. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.53.1.a1205g53j7334631
📃 Hatton (2017) Three mechanisms that make work invisible: cultural, legal and spatial. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017016674894
📃 Brinckmann, Grichnik and Kapsa (2010) Meta-analysis. Planning paid, more for established firms than new ones. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2008.10.007
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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