[Update] Working with a Personal Assistant for the first time

Oh the irony! I write a post on administrative support and make two typos in the first paragraph. This feels like karma. I am resending for my own sanity.

I have worked with a handful of personal assistants over the years and it is a professional relationship that I have tended to struggle with.  Given the inherent one-sided power dynamic, I take full ownership for my shortcomings and the intention of this blog is to understand the challenges and what I can learn from my mistakes. As mentioned last week, I don’t currently have a personal assistant, so this feels like the right time to write this entry.

 

Let’s start with why the position of personal assistant exists and how it has changed.  In the not-so-distant past computers were not widely used in offices and all the apps that we now take for granted had not yet been invented.  Information was communicated in two ways: verbally or on paper.  Verbal communications happened at formal meetings or on the phone (which was still a 1 to 1 device).  The organization of meetings happened via paper diaries using contact details saved in a paper rolodex and the notes from meetings were recorded on paper and filed away.  Written communications for anything formal were typed so that they were easily understood.  All these activities took time and involved specialist skills which precluded them from being delegated to the junior members of the team.  Specialist secretarial skills such as short-hand (an easy method to take notes) and touch-typing were taught in vocational courses.  Without the presence of personal assistants, business would have been much harder to conduct, with less institutional memory from record keeping and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that it would have been a significant limitation on our system of commerce.

I started full time work in 1998.  My employer first handed all new joiners a laptop and access to the internet from their desks only one year earlier.  I purchased my first mobile phone before I started work and installed my first dial-up home internet connection earlier that summer.  I was in the tail-end of the Gen X workforce that had a fully analogue education but didn’t experience a fully analogue workplace.  That said, the tools were so primitive that the vestiges of the analogue period persisted.  My mobile phone provider was called One-to-One (later bought by Deutsche Telecom and rebranded T-Mobile).  The joke was that it should have been called One to No-One.  I remember standing outside with many fellow users with my phone thrust above my head trying to grab precious bars of service.  I once tried to hotspot my laptop with my phone on the spare seat of a moving train to download a single email.  For it to work I needed direct line of sight because it used the same infrared signal as an old TV remote control.  After an hour I gave up as the train moved too much and there were frequent dead zones.  All business records were still printed and kept in onsite file archives before being relocated to cheaper offsite storage after a year had passed.  The software we used was Lotus Notes, and I accidentally managed to delete the workspace in my first week and went a year without access to a proper electronic calendar tool.  The business had an on-site typing pool that would work in shifts to give 24hr coverage to type up all official reports and documents that we would then manually “reference” (checking every word, punctuation, and grammar before returning to the typing pool for corrections).  Fax machines were still the main source of electronic communication, and each department would have machines assigned to them with someone responsible for disseminating the incoming fax receipts and outgoing confirmations to the rightful owners.  Scanners did exist somewhere in the office, but their location was a well-kept secret, and they were fiendishly difficult to operate.  The office had a paging system if you needed to get hold of someone and didn’t know where they were sitting.   Photocopiers were not the multi-function devices you see today and they didn’t need to be connected to the internet.  The better you were at pulling apart a photocopier to solve for a paper jam and then restart a job with sorting and stapling intact, the higher your status and worth to the company.  But if the job was important and the time was pressing, the only staff sufficiently trusted to wrangle the copier into submission was the closest personal assistant.

In that firm every partner had their own personal assistant, and every manager shared a personal assistant.  Nothing would happen or get done without them.  With experience they would rise up the ranks, either in line with the career progression of the person they supported or jumping up to support a more senior leader when a vacancy emerged.  They were an invaluable resource and very talented in their chosen field.

The tides were already changing, and the advent of the digital age rendered many of the traditional skillsets of personal assistants redundant in less than 5 years.  As computers, smartphones and tablets became more functionally rich whilst easier to use, personal assistants were no longer essential in same way they had been.  The value proposition was no longer that some activities could only function with personal assistants, but that without the analogue bottlenecks the volume of communications had increased exponentially.  Managers could self-serve but as their portfolio increased a personal assistant helped them keep their heads above water.

All that makes sense to me, but I still found the first experiences of working with a personal assistant challenging.  Handing off control over my diary (and potentially inbox) to someone else when I was perfectly capable of managing these myself was anathema to me.  My first experiences were usually a share of a departmental PA or Team Assistant.  I always marveled at colleagues who spent more time with the Assistants telling them what they needed than the time it would have taken to do the work themselves.  My requirements were limited to helping secure meetings where senior execs were present (the assistants could connect with each other, move meetings around and secure valuable time), and submitting expenses (where I usually printed, labelled, and coded everything in advance for my own sanity). 

When I became general manager, I inherited my own personal assistant.  All the elements that could go wrong pretty much did.  The personal assistant had supported two predecessors before me.  One of the fundamental issues at play was that the business had originally hired an established local leader on the back of growth assumptions and strategic initiatives that turned out to be at variance with market reality and with no path to sustainable profit.  My immediate predecessor and I were tasked with correcting this misadventure.  With more modest but realistic ambitions, the perceived status of the manager role declined.  When I took on the role, the business was consolidated into a bigger region and the EVP title was downgraded to SVP.  This was still a promotion for me, but what I didn’t appreciate at the time was that this directly impacted my personal assistant’s role.  The status of the role that PAs support usually increases in line with their experience.  Any sudden reduction looks like a demotion and impacts their resume and their future earning potential. 

With regard to our working relationship, the biggest issue was solving the “personal assistant formula” (which I have just invented).  The formula is simple: the time saved from delegating tasks to an assistant needs to be higher than the time it takes to delegate and monitor those tasks.  Competency and personalities play a significant part in this.  The more successful a partnership, the quicker the time it takes to explain requirements, build trust and drive efficiency.  The gold standard is when the levels of trust are so high that you know the personal assistant will manage the tasks better than you and can anticipate your thoughts as issues arise.  I never got close to this standard, but the reason our balance was off was due primarily to point three.

The third issue was that there was insufficient work that I could easily delegate.  The EVP role had previously been more client and market facing.  As a consequence, diaries had been filled with more external meetings which generated more work for the personal assistant.  This had started to change before I took on the role and my immediate predecessor decided to share the assistant with me, which signaled that they probably didn’t have enough work to keep the assistant busy.  The original business leader had also preferred managing through layers with the personal assistant taking on some gate-keeping functions.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, it just isn’t my preferred approach.  I quickly found that there was a correlation between me not having enough work for the assistant and them feeling justifiably under-valued and bored.  I take full responsibility for this, and the remainder of the blog I will devote towards ideas for how I could have done or will do better in the future.

The first is to avoid taking on a personal assistant until the volume of work I need them to cover is substantially higher than the time it takes me to explain what I need.  If I inherit a personal assistant in the future before this threshold is met, I will ask them if they mind supporting other colleagues too or becoming a team assistant.  If this would represent a diminution in status, then a fairer conversation is trying to find an alternative position for the assistant that meets their requirements.

The second is ensuring that I use the resource more effectively.  I recently heard a senior exec talk about how he worked with his personal assistant, and it was a useful lightbulb moment.  Diary management is the obvious and simplest task to delegate, but inbox management always felt risky.  This exec would ask his PA to separate incoming mail into five folders: urgent, slower response, general news, information only and delete.     The exec could then prioritize their time accordingly and attack the most urgent issues first.  They would still check every folder, but in the right order and the biggest risk from error would result in something that needed a quick response getting a slower response.    I would immediately implement this process or something similar as it would be a genuine timesaver and needs very little handover.

My current employer operates an open plan policy with no private offices.  As is probably typical in every open plan office, meeting rooms are in high demand and short supply.  I have seen a small industry emerge where assistants are securing and trading meeting rooms for the execs they support.  This would be a significant benefit that saves time and delivers a better outcome than I can do myself. 

A couple of additional thoughts.  It is quite common for Personal Assistants to be treated as if they speak with the voice of the manager they support.  This can be helpful, where it is used to ensure that what you want to happen actually happens even if you aren’t physically present.  It can also be unhelpful where your authority is invoked when it isn’t required or isn’t desirable.  On the negative side I saw a few cases earlier in my career as an auditor where an exec had delegated their approvals without any oversight.  This shouldn’t happen as only the exec, not their assistant, has been given the authority to approve specific transactions and in one instance it led to a significant expenses fraud.   

Finally, it is worth the time and effort to observe the cultural traditions as they relate to personal assistants in the territory you are in.  In many parts of Asia that will involve red envelopes of money during the Lunar New Year.  In the US there is Administrative Professionals Day in April where a gift and a lunch is regarded as fair compensation for your assistant putting up with you for another year.  In the UK remembering and acknowledging birthdays is a good starting point.  The only difficulty is that the one person you would normally rely on to remind you and advise on gifts cannot be consulted (which is also confirmation of how helpful an assistant can be for the other 364 days.) 

This is the first time I have taken a step back to consider my experiences and I am keen to avoid mistakes in the future.  If you have any thoughts or guidance you would like to add then please put in the comments below.  This is an area where I consider myself to be very much the student and I am still learning.  Next week’s post is on feedback and coaching.