Notes from the Pod — The Top 3 Soft Skills that Kelly Kovacs Mastered as EA to the CEO of Twitter

“Dick was the COO at the time and I joined as his assistant. I had never been an EA before, he had never had an EA before, so truly the blind leading the blind. 6 months later, he became the CEO so it was a wild ride for us.

I felt initially that our personalities and what he was looking for and what I could deliver was really perfectly matched.

I was an EA for at least 3, 4 years, and then I became Chief of Staff so in total 6-ish years at Twitter.”

“She calls her fans ‘Monsters’… Lady Gaga!

She decided she wanted to come into Twitter and when she came in, she had this insane dress on, this wild wig that was four or five feet tall. And actually she studied engineering in school, so she wanted to learn how we coded and what went into the coding of a Tweet.

The other one is Snoop Dogg coming in and smoking pot in our commons and basically all of our leadership team almost going to jail for that. That was a memorable experience.

So Lady Gaga and Snoop Dogg are pretty tied for first place here.”

“The very beginning of my working relationship with Dick (CEO of Twitter) is he continuously gave me more rope as he continued to trust me. So as he trusted me more and more, he would give me bigger and bigger projects to work on. I think that executing on those projects and doing a good job and having him feel like he could really trust that I was making the right decisions, just continued to elevate the challenges he would throw on my plate.

I’ve talked to some great EAs in eaMAFIA and in those early days, it’s really important to hustle. It’s not really in our vocab to say ‘this isn’t in my job description’. Instead we’re like ‘give it to us, I wanna take it on, I wanna show you and prove to you I can do this really well and I can get it done right.’ And so I think that really can take you to the next level.”

“I think the one skill I developed at Twitter is building relationships, which I don’t know is always top of mind for people. I always felt like it was important to take the time to meet the product manager, the engineer, the salesperson, and understand what they were working on.

Now anytime I needed something, I felt like I had already built this incredible trust and good repertoire with so many different employees that I could go to them and say ‘we need this like, today, and I know that sucks but could we do it?’ and they’re like ‘I love you and I’ll do anything for you.’ It’s always good to follow up with the box of cookies and whatever it is that they love. ❤️

There’s sometimes a certain type of mindset that an EA who’s supporting the CEO can have that I’ve seen that is not successful which is — you’re burning bridges, you kinda come off as a gatekeeper, and I don’t think that actually benefits you, the executive, and the company.

The more you open you can be, the more you can know about what people do and really appreciate what they’re doing, I think it can actually really help you in the end. Building relationships is really important and honestly to me I feel like it’s my secret weapon that anyone can really pick up and do.”

“One of the soft skills that I really have honed in on and I appreciate is actually [anticipating needs].

There’s a lot of down time when Dick would get on stage with someone famous like Kobe Bryant or Valerie Jarrett, who was senior advisor to President Obama for many years. There would be moments where we’d be in the green room and I knew we were gonna have like 5 or 10 minutes with Valerie, and I’m like what are we gonna talk about? What is gonna be said during those 10 minutes?

I know Dick’s gonna be on his phone cause he’s gonna feel uncomfortable, he’s not gonna know what to say, he’s gonna be like ‘oh hi, thank you so much for having us’, whatever, and so I would ahead of time look up Valerie Jarrett.

Lo and behold, she went to Michigan, and so did Dick! So I’m like what years did she go and what years did he go? Oh, she went in 1981 and he went in 1985 and she got her law degree there so then that’s all they talked about. I told Dick this little nugget of information, he’s like ‘Hey, fellow Michigan alum, go blue!’ and they strike up a conversation.

By the way, that ended up turning into an opportunity for Dick to speak at the Michigan commencement!”

“I really love wine, and that’s a problem. I actually have this incredible wine opener, it’s a house warming gift I now give to every single person. It’s the coolest thing. It’s non-electronic, you twist it, you just keep twisting, and the cork comes out. I don’t even understand the science behind it.”