It's tough to be a coveted commodity. A luxury item, if you will. An item fought over by executives who want you for status, for skills you possess, and/or a stunning personality.
Really?
Admin Gal has a colleague who is a pawn in a power play. Her salary comes out of one budget, but she is utilized by the other executive she reports to. Budgets are being determined for the next year. The behind the scenes wrangling is getting to be bloody. Admin Gal has a feeling her friends salary will be shifting cost centers in the new year.
Until then, she is caught in the vortex of a power struggle of which she will only lose if she chooses sides.
Admin Gal has noticed that as people climb the corporate ladder, the rarefied air can sometimes go to people's head. As the titles of Managers, District Managers, Director etc. start getting attached to names, individuals can forget that they still must report to someone.
Frankly? When your boss says a meeting must take place, you shouldn't push back. You should say - Yes, sir/ma'am! Just because you sit in a management position, doesn't mean you don't have a chain of command you fall into.
When you say 'NO' to your boss enough times. Your boss will say 'No, we don't need you working here anymore.'
When asking for a favor to an Admin who does not support you, you the recipient of said favor should do everything in your power to make things easier for her.
If you do not, said Admin might do one or all of the following:
Conveniently move your task to the least priority pile. The pile that gets done when hell freezes over.
Mail your Visa application directly to the Kremlin, even though it was for Brazil.
Schedule hardware maintenance on computer without providing a replacement.
Cancel your smartphone contract and charge the cancellation fee to your personal credit card.
Revoke your access to all essential drives that contain anything that might be remotely useful in the day to day operations of your job.
As an Admin, we are required to be helpful, not be taken advantage of.
Dear Sales Person, Employee, and/or Person in General,
Administrative Assistants around the world are not creatures who sit around doing nothing. We are productive members of any business environment. We contribute to ongoing projects, we maintain office order, calendar cohesion, document management, personnel moral, in addition to a myriad of other tasks and projects that are assigned to our functions.
Copying our supervisors on an email about a task that is not priority will not miraculously cause it to surface to the top of the list. Flagging any correspondence with ‘HIGH PRIORITY’ only indicates your own sense of inflated ego.
To the sales people in specific, if an admin tells you their boss will not be meeting with you now or in the future – that is the truth. Sending the boss an email with available dates and times and copying the admin is the epitome of classlessness. Be prepared to be shut down.
We work with our bosses to prioritize our projects and tasks to benefit them, not for someone who is not in our organizational structure. While the persistence and ingenuity can be admired, the audacity can only be considered appalling.
A word to the wise, flagging, prioritizing, or copying our supervisors/bosses with your projects and tasks only makes us annoyed.
The old adage ‘better to say you’re sorry than to ask permission’ is getting really old where I work. On the food chain of reality, the people who are trying to get away with this are not high enough on the food chain to even merit a pass at this.
A manager – maybe, a director – okay, a vice president – if they must, the president of the business unit – no choice, he can do anything he wants. Anyone else, absolutely not. If you don’t book enough time for your meeting. That’s not my fault. It’s yours.
I’m really getting tired of having to kick people out of conference rooms because they think they are important enough to need a door. Just sitting in a room for 45 minutes after your meeting is done because you think the room is free is not correct behavior. Nor is it acceptable.
The Administrative Assistant has come a long way from the days of “Would you like cream with your coffee, sir?”
While we still might answer phones and take meeting notes, we also manage offices and projects, balance budgets, act as unofficial keepers of morale, and general ombudsman of schedules. Sometimes our job descriptions have us working in a more personal capacity to our employer, for example running small errands for your boss, helping them in small details in their personal lives all so they can have time to get their jobs done.
As Admins, we often have the pleasure of training people new to the experience of having an Administrative Assistant’s skills at their disposal. For the newly appointed manager who has never had access to administrative help. An experienced Admin will work hard at determining their needs and creating a partnership that will be beneficial to both in the long run.
My personal favorite is the new MBA or clueless collegiate graduate who comes into a department with an admin. Lo and behold, they are incapable of sending faxes, getting coffee, composing letters or other tasks they consider menial because ‘that’s what an Admin is for’.
While I am willing to offer assistance to those in need, they are secondary to my primary function. That function is to support the executives that too whom I report directly.
This Admin firmly believes in teaching people how to fish. You see, I have one to two top executives that take the majority of my time. If they ask me to send a fax or compose a letter, it is because they do not have time not because they are lazy.
After one or two instances of people not in my direct chain of command pawning their work off on to me, I will have a conversation with them. If that doesn’t work, woe be unto them. I will then bring out the big guns.
You see my executives do not like to have their resources wasted.
When offices consolidate, space becomes premium. Old habits of squatting wherever you want are hard to break.
Admin Gal has been forced into the role of Space Police. If a conference room has not been booked by the inhabitants, Admin Gal has to play Bad Cop. This is not fun when the person out ranks you. Evicting a Director, Vice President, or President is a dicey situation. But when it is a consultant, Admin Gal has no issue.
Granted their assigned space is limited, but so is the actual working space of the working environment of the company. Courtesy says you do not just plop yourself down and claim squatter rights. Where most of the time possession is 9 tenths of the law, when it comes to resource management, not so much.
Admin Gal is happy to try and find space for people. But don’t act like a toddler if you don’t want to be treated like one.
When an Admin is away, be it for vacation, training, or whatever, strange thing happen to their desks. Mountains of paper gravitate mysteriously to any flat surface forming precarious piles. Anything of questionable nature lands haphazardly on the desk chair, the desk or the floor around the desk. Plants mysteriously sicken and are never the same again, this Admin thinks they've been traumatized by what strange things they've witnessed. Needless to say, time off is a terrifying proposition.
While the time off is often needed and wanted, a small part of our brain way back in the back is ticking down the time to our return. Doing our best to ignore it, we turn off our cell phones, promising our selves we will ignore all calls from the office. We approach all computers like they are live ordinance, fighting the urge to log on to our email client just to get a jump- start.
Sometimes the urge is to strong and we give in, only to be horrified by the sheer volume of people ignoring the Out Of Office (OOO) message. The assumption that we will take care of them during our time off because they are special.
If the Admin is smart, they book a cruise were cell phone reception or internet connectivity is non-existent and have a long cold drink.
Contrary to popular opinion I am not a miracle worker, a maid or a butler, a childcare provider, a janitor, a dictionary or encyclopedia, an ATM, or whatever else the pointy-hair boss can think of. I often produce what is perceived as miracles, however it is simply know how to do my job well.
I can not properly set-up meetings, this includes conference rooms, call-in numbers, and invite attendees, without ALL the information. Just FYI, ESP does not come naturally in the role of Administrative Assistant.
Unless it is specifically spelled out in my job description/ contract, I am not required to pick up your dry-cleaning, walk your dogs, or oversee the contractors building your mega-mansion. This falls in the realm of a personal assistant, and that is a whole different kettle of fish.
Your children are adorable. But if they have to come into the office after school and I have deadlines, please keep them in your office. My desk is not for childcare or their entertainment.
I hope that this small tutorial can prove to be instructional in the use of an Administrative Assistant.
