Online Executive and Admin Assistant Training

A few tips for Anger & Irritability Management

May 06, 2009 at 06:37 PM | (0) Comments

anger Came across a blog post by Gretchen Rubin over at Huffingtonpost.com recently that gave 8 great tips for anger and irritability management.

All of her tips, which you can read by clicking HERE, are really good for helping manage these emotions while working as an assistant but we’ll only focus on three here today:

#4- Be realistic

You may want to pull your hair out when your boss wants to move that meeting that took you days to book and get everyone’s schedule to match up but if they have a tendency of shifting their meetings, that’s life. Be realistic when scheduling the meeting and tell yourself that it’s likely going to be re-scheduled. That way, you’ll be prepared when it does and will let such disruptions roll right off your back… can you quack like a duck? That might just help too.

#5- Don’t expect praise or appreciation

This is a big one. If you use your superior skills and tactics to get your boss that prime table that they asked for at that prime restaurant during a jam packed holiday weekend; great job. But that’s just it… accomplishing an almost impossible task is what you’re there for so don’t get bummed out if your boss doesn’t acknowledge such. If you really do need some praise, come on over here to ProAssisting, leave a blog comment telling us about your near impossible feat and WE will pat you on the back. Promise.

#7- Make a joke

I agree with Gretchen that it’s surprising how a joke during a moment of anger or irritation can really have an effect on your mood. 99.9% of the time, as an assistant, you’re not going to be dealing with brain surgery so making a lite joke about whatever mistake you’re currently dealing with will help you to keep things in perspective. Self deprecating humor, when you’re the one who screwed up, has done the trick for smoothing things over with my bosses in the past and it might just work for you too… IF you keep your mistakes and screw-ups to a minimum.

If you found these helpful, check out Gretchen’s post for her take on each tip above and the other 5 that weren’t highlighted here.

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Treat your Boss’s expenses as your own…

May 02, 2009 at 06:39 PM | (0) Comments

expenses-fr With the economy turned upside down, everyone these days is focusing on expenses. And companies are tightening their belts and cracking the whip where they may not have done previously.

My company just instituted its first expense policy guidelines. Up until now, they had always expected that employees would be price-conscientious while dining out or choosing a hotel. Unfortunately, people took advantage of this and we were seeing receipts for $1000 bottles of wine and expensive valet parking service on the company dime.

As an assistant, you will likely be reviewing bills for vendors and checking credit card statements for egregious purchases. A great way to view this part of your job is to treat your boss’s expenses as you would your own. Pretty simple.

If your own electric bill suddenly doubled, you would undoubtedly call the provider and find out why. You should take the same responsibility if something looks fishy or out of whack when your boss’s name is on the account. Notice a $4.00 charge on his credit card from an unknown source? Take the five minutes to call customer service and see what it is.

The same thing goes when making purchasing plane tickets or making hotel reservations for your boss. Even though she has made it very clear that she only stays at the Mandarin when traveling to London, if their rate has doubled since the last time she visited, she will want to know that before booking. In email correspondence, just simply noting the rate of hotel rooms, plane tickets, and other purchases is a good practice to get in the habit of.

Your boss may not mention it, but will appreciate that you care about fiscal responsibility. This will show your strong work ethic and respect of the company culture. And in the end, this will be a payoff for you as they know that you truly care about the job that you do and will compensate you appropriately.

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Beware of Golden Handcuffs

April 29, 2009 at 06:40 PM | (0) Comments

Can you have golden handcuffs as an Assistant?

Absolutely.

If you are not looking to be a career assistant, in our training we suggest before you hit your 2.5 year mark working as an assistant that you know where you want to progress to in your career. You then need to take this desire of yours and express it to your boss and human resource department well before an opportunity for you to make a career change presents itself.

If you don’t, you’re going to be type cast as an assistant and it will be much harder for you to make the switch to another position within your current company or at another company as something other than an assistant.

This is just a fact of life in the corporate world: become great at something and that’s what you’ll be known for. To use us as personal examples, both Stephanie and I have turned into career Executive/Personal Assistants. We both love our bosses, we have an immense amount of trust and responsibility placed on us from our bosses and we both get paid very well for our work which has afforded us a great life.

On the flip side though, we both say to ourselves, “What do we want to do when we grow up?”

This post is not meant to scare you away from being a career assistant, it’s just that we want you to be aware of how your boss, you co-workers and others in your industry will view your experience after working as an assistant for an extended length of time; we say four years or longer.

Lastly, we have to remind ourselves at times that our quality of life –which can’t be measured in dollars and cents– is very high for living in New York City AND that we have the time and money to do things like create this course outside of our day jobs… or write the next great American screenplay… or volunteer as a big sister… and having the freedom and time to do those things is very satisfying indeed.

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My First Office Friend

April 24, 2009 at 06:41 PM | (0) Comments

Handband After graduating college, I was offered a job as an editorial assistant at a high-powered Washington, DC consulting firm. We edited and produced all of the World Bank and IMF’s publications. I was so psyched since I had always loved to write and this sounded like the most glamorous job. Me, working for the World Bank?? Suhweet!

My first day on the job, I arrived to find a huge stack of paper and a tape dispenser on my desk. That’s all. My new boss, the editor-in-chief, came over and told me to go in the conference room and hang each sheet of paper on the wall, in chronological order. And it had to be done before the client arrived in 30 minutes. I didn’t ask any questions, I just hung.

Of course my mind was a flutter: How far apart should the pages be? Will there be enough wall space for 196 pages? Why the heck am I doing this???

But then I got to watch my boss work his magic on the document and in turn, the clients. He drew all over the pages and renumbered paragraphs with a marker. There were scribbles on each page that meant something to him…and eventually to me too. It was his way of seeing the big picture and figuring out how the flow of the document should go.

After the first few “wall sessions” with clients, I began to see how the documents really transformed under his crazy artist’s hand. Despite the sniggers around the office at my paper hanging responsibilities, I secretly enjoyed being part of these meetings, where the pages were being transformed into important publications. More importantly, I learned that it took about 20 minutes to hang a 200-page document on the wall. But man, I hated those cumbersome tape dispensers. There had to be a better way…

Right before heading home for the Christmas holiday, my boss left a Scotch handband tape dispenser on my desk as a gift. He didn’t say much in the way of praise or feedback but I knew that he appreciated my hard work.

Moral of the story? There might be easier ways to “skin a cat” so either look for those ways or ask someone else if they have any ideas. As for my new handband tape dispenser? Let’s just say it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.