The Modern-Day Assistant Baden, Switzerland

Let us give you the inside track – the most successful businesses understand how to use their Assistants as strategic business partners. The days of Assistants typing, answering phones, and doing gentle diary management are long gone. These days they are more likely to be found knee-deep in project management, strategic research, reports and financial forecasts.

Increasingly, executives are freeing up their time by utilizing their Assistants to fill the gaps where their weaknesses lie –  allowing them time and space to get on with the things they are best at. Just think of the implications this has for increasing bottom-line performance.

The first session is all about positioning. Lucy Brazier looks at the role – past, present and future – to explain why it has developed how it has. She explores the opportunities this creates for you to become a true business partner to your executive, including developing the partnership, establishing the ground rules, communicating, adapting to their style and maintaining a great partnership.

This course is designed to inspire, motivate, challenge, and excite you about the opportunities that exist in this role. It also provides very practical training, tools, and tips – real business solutions that you will take back to the office and implement immediately to improve your systems and productivity.

Becoming a leader at work can be a challenge, especially for an Assistant, but with today’s CEOs increasingly listing leadership skills as one of the key qualities that they want from their Assistant, Lucy will examine how personal leadership is the key to establishing yourself as a leader in the workplace and which skill sets you will need to cultivate to lead up and position yourself as the influential leader that your executive needs.

Communication is key and essential to any role, especially within the role of an Assistant. It is crucial that you have effective communication with your manager, to help build a stronger and more reliable working relationship.

With the skills from this session, you will be able to go back to your office and communicate more effectively not just with your manager, but with other work colleagues as well. In time, you will see how it will help you to save time and build self-confidence within your role.

We will explore how success as an Assistant begins with an understanding of yourself. During the session, we will look at the Belbin Psychometric testing exercise to explore strengths, weaknesses and where you fit into your team, Johari Window – opportunities from self-awareness, your beliefs, values and behaviours, your inner voice, how body language can make a difference and how important communication is.

A key skill for every Assistant is how to listen to understand rather than listen to answer. In this session, we will look at how misunderstandings occur, why failure to communicate properly can lead to toxic environments filled with politics and competing egos, and how failing to use emotional intelligence properly results in living at a low level of effectiveness, which ensures we will never achieve our greatest aspirations.

The relationship between an Assistant and their executives is crucial to a company’s success but with the average age that most managers get training sitting at 42, many executives have never had training in how to manage their Assistants. It, therefore, falls to the Assistant to train their executives how to use their skills to best advantage themselves and the company.

In this session we will explore:

• Why influential leadership skills are crucial to the role of an Assistant
• Strategically managing your executive(s) and key stakeholders
• Developing the business partnership with your executive
• Proactive vs reactive support
• Making the transition from support to strategic business partner

But what if you have more than one manager? In the new role, most Assistants are managing at least two people. It is challenging enough to work well with ONE executive, but if you are working for two – or MORE – the challenge is stressful at best. Are you dealing with two or more workloads, managing multiple communications and schedules, multiple projects and more?

We will also look at practical tips for productivity and time management that will ensure that you can prioritize, juggle, and support your numerous executives effectively and without stress.