You Are Governing the Wrong Function

Why administrative leadership has outgrown the frameworks designed to govern it

The frameworks most HR functions use to govern administrative leadership were built for a conception of the role that no longer reflects how the function operates. The gap between the framework and the function is where the institutional cost lives.

This is not a minor calibration problem. It is a governance misalignment with specific consequences: administrative professionals assessed as high performers while important dimensions of the function remain ungoverned. Leadership systems absorbing coordination burdens that effective administrative leadership should reduce. Transitions managed informally, at institutional cost, because no one designed for the transfer of accumulated knowledge and context. And HR frameworks that, when something goes wrong, locate the problem in the individual rather than in the conditions the institution created — or failed to create.

I am not writing this as a critique of HR practice in general. I am writing it from a specific vantage point: a career that began in administrative roles, moved through executive leadership, and has since been devoted to understanding what makes administrative leadership effective at the institutional level. What I observed, from both sides of the executive relationship, is that HR's contribution to this function has been consistently limited by a framework problem — and that the problem is correctable once it is named accurately.

Begin with role design. Most role descriptions for administrative leadership positions are organized around tasks: what the person does, what systems they manage, what requests they fulfill. The organizing question is what the person produces. It is not what the institution depends on the function to maintain.

These are different questions with different answers. The first produces a job description. The second produces a governance document — one that reflects what the institution actually requires of the function, what conditions must be met for the function to operate effectively, and what the institution is responsible for creating and maintaining to make those conditions possible.

Role design organized around tasks tells a professional what to do. Role design built around conditions tells a professional what the institution needs them to ensure — and establishes the institutional accountability necessary to make that possible. The distinction matters because only the second approach gives HR a principled basis for evaluation, development, and intervention.

When the function fails, the first question HR asks determines what gets addressed. If the question is who failed, the institution corrects a person. If the question is which condition was absent, the institution corrects a structure.

The same distinction applies to evaluation. Current frameworks for administrative leadership typically emphasize outputs: requests fulfilled, timeliness of deliverables, accuracy of work product. These are measurable, which makes them attractive as evaluation criteria. They are also, by themselves, insufficient because they measure completion more readily than institutional effect.

An administrative professional can fulfill every request with timeliness and accuracy while the leader they support absorbs mounting coordination burdens and spends increasing attention on follow-through. By a task-based framework, that professional may appear to be performing well. But the more consequential questions remain unanswered: Is the institution moving? Is leadership capacity being preserved rather than consumed? Are priorities holding and commitments closing? If those questions are not part of how the function is governed, the problem is larger than individual performance. The conditions that should define success have not been established.

An evaluation framework capable of addressing this requires three questions that conventional task-based approaches often do not ask. Is execution reliable enough that the institution can depend on it without monitoring? Is the work producing institutional movement, or producing activity that leaves the institution where it was? Are the professional standards the function requires holding consistently, including when conditions most test them?

These are the questions the PIE Model™ — Performance, Impact, and Excellence — was developed to make governable. Performance addresses the reliability of execution. Impact addresses whether that execution produces institutional movement. Excellence addresses whether professional standards endure under pressure. Together, they shift the evaluation of administrative leadership from what was completed to the conditions the institution actually depends upon.

Development pathways reveal the same misalignment. Most development at this level focuses on skills: systems proficiency, technical tools, communication techniques, procedural knowledge. These are useful. They are not sufficient, and they are not always the limiting factor in whether administrative leadership performs at the level the institution requires.

The limiting factors often lie elsewhere. Understanding how an institution actually functions — not only as formally described, but as operationally experienced, with its informal commitments, political sensitivities, relationships, and decision patterns — takes time and proximity to develop and is rarely transferred deliberately. The discernment required to determine what to surface and what to hold, what to act on and what to route, what requires leadership attention and what can be resolved within the role, is not a capacity that training alone can produce. It develops through experience, institutional understanding, role clarity, and the conditions within which the professional is expected to exercise it.

The same is true of the professional conduct that separates administrative leadership that stabilizes leadership systems from administrative leadership that distorts them: discretion, boundary maintenance, restraint under pressure, and clarity about the limits of informal influence. These are governance concerns as much as development concerns.

Development organized around those realities looks different from development organized primarily around skills. It deepens institutional understanding, develops the professional maturity on which durable standards depend, and creates clarity about what the function is for — and where its limits lie.

HR cannot develop what it has not defined. And it cannot define what it has not examined. The examination begins with an honest account of what administrative leadership actually does within modern institutions.

There is also the question of transition. The administrative function is among the most context-intensive in an institution — not necessarily in the sense of technical expertise, but in accumulated institutional understanding: how decisions have been made, which commitments remain outstanding, which relationships matter, and what a predecessor knew that made the work legible in ways a successor may struggle to reconstruct.

Most institutions manage this knowledge as though it were an informal byproduct of tenure. It is not. It is a governance asset. Its loss at transition is one of the most consistent and least acknowledged sources of institutional cost that HR is positioned to address.

Designing for continuity means treating the transfer of institutional context as a governance process rather than an informal courtesy. It means establishing what knowledge must be preserved, how it will be documented, and what an incoming professional needs to receive — not only the procedural knowledge of what to do, but the institutional context of why it matters and how it developed. This sits squarely within HR's governance remit.

The practical argument is straightforward: redesign the governance of administrative leadership around three questions. Is execution reliable? Is the work producing institutional movement? Do professional standards hold under pressure? Those questions make visible what task-based frameworks routinely miss.

Not through expanded authority for administrative professionals. Not through title restructuring or symbolic recognition. Through role design that reflects what the institution actually depends on. Through evaluation criteria that measure the right conditions. Through development that addresses the actual limiting factors. Through transition protocols that preserve rather than dissipate institutional knowledge. These are governance decisions, and they sit within HR's authority and responsibility.

The function most HR frameworks were designed to govern is no longer the function institutions depend on. Closing that gap does not begin with a new title, another competency checklist, or another training program. It begins with an accurate account of the function itself — and governance designed accordingly.

Ambassador Yolande Y. Smith is a leadership strategist, former Ambassador, and founder of The Colmar Group Ltd. She is the creator of the PIE Model™ and the Excellence Series™, and the author of Administrative Leadership as a Strategic Asset and Beyond the Desk (Colmar Advisory Press, 2026). Learn more at www.thecolmargroupltd.com