How to improve the performance of your personal assistant.
Your personal assistant - perhaps known as your professional assistant, or secretary, or executive assistant - can be the key operative in any manager’s office. If highly trained in all aspects of office supervision, communication, human relations, and organisation, as well as in the basic skills of paper management and keyboarding, the personal assistant can be a true professional and your most valuable asset. To form a very effective team of two, consider the following...
1. Know what your assistant can and should do.
Today's top personal assistants must be as familiar with the management of people as they once were with paper and keyboard. Of course, core skills are still required - keyboarding, filing, telephone, screening of calls, mail and visitors, appointments and paperwork—but, the higher level assistants are called upon to display more sophisticated skills - composing letters, summarising reports and articles, supervising others and the office, scheduling your day, standing in for you at meetings, managing your calendar, tracking your jobs, and keeping you up to speed.
Good personal assistants are usually described as - helpful, hard-working, courteous, reliable, loyal, respectful, imaginative, level-headed, creative, resourceful, and efficient.
Do you really know where your personal assistant's strengths lie and what you want from the partnership? Take the time to sit with your assistant, to clarify expectations based on shared needs and goals, and to determine what steps are required to forge a quality team of two.
2. Meet daily to plan your day.
To minimise interruptions throughout the day, set aside time each morning to organise the day for you both - checking assignments, appointments and priorities, clarifying tasks, processing paper, discussing problems. A five-minute wrap-up session at the end of the day is also useful to assist planning for the next day.
3. Keep your assistant - and yourself - informed.
The more your assistant knows what you're doing, where you're going, when you'll be back, what's behind this memo, why this is important, and what your plans, goals and projects arabout what's going on than their bosses do. Use them as sounding boards, and the feedback you get may prove invaluable.
