The Modern-Day Assistant Cape Town
THE MODERN-DAY ASSISTANT AS A STRATEGIC BUSINESS PARTNER with LUCY BRAZIER
Join Lucy Brazier, OBE as she takes you on a fantastic journey exploring the role of the Modern Day Assistant.
Are you ready to embrace change and fulfil your potential?
Understand how to use the changes to the role and to the world of work to catapult you to success. Explore the opportunities for you to become a true strategic business partner to your executive. Learn tools to reset the ground rules. Achieve the structured communication that you need to drive success for both of you. And adapt your ways of working to your executive’s style to build a proactive partnership.
This 2 day course is designed to inspire, motivate, challenge, excite about the opportunities that exist in the role of the Executive Assistant. 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.
Lucy Brazier OBE is one of the world’s leading authorities on the administrative profession.
As CEO of Marcham Publishing, specialist publishers of Executive Support Magazine, a global training magazine dedicated to the professional development needs of senior and aspiring administrative professionals, Lucy works with the best trainers of Executive Assistants from around the world to deliver the most up to date and current training in the market.
Her passion is for the Assistant role to be truly recognised as a career and not just a job. Her formidable training expertise and speaking style have given her opportunities to train, present and emcee events in over 50 countries at over 450 events including Chairing the 2015 World Administrator Summit in Papua New Guinea and co-facilitating the same event in Frankfurt in 2018.
Lucy was awarded an OBE for services to Office Professionals on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2021.
Lucy's book, The Modern-Day Assistant: Build Your Influence and Boost Your Potential, based on the course, was awarded the 2024 International Book Award Career Book of the Year.
Suitability - Who should attend?
This course is designed for those in the following roles:
- Executive Assistant
- Management Assistant
- Administrative Business Partner
- Strategic Business Partner
- Office Manager
- Senior Assistant
- Executive Personal Assistant
- Executive Secretary
- Personal Assistant
- Personal Secretary
- Administration Manager
- Management Secretary
- Executive Personal Secretary
PLUS anyone else responsible for the support of the senior management and executives
This course will train you in the new skill sets necessary to ensure businesses are getting the best from their support.
Benefits of Attending:
- Understand the role and how you can add value to your Executive and your business
- Enhance your communication skills, understand body language & explore emotional intelligence
- Learn how to build a powerful business partnership
- Increase your productivity
- Master the art of managing more than one Executive
- How do you become strategic?
- Explore processes for problem-solving, decision-making & project management
- Learn to deal with multitasking, stress and overwhelm
Training Course Content
Day One
Introduction & course objectives
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 & financial forecasts.
Increasingly, Executives are freeing up their time by utilising 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 Modern Day Assistant as a strategic Business Partner:
This session is about positioning. Why has the Assistant role changed and how? It looks at the role past, present and future to explain why it has developed how it has. It explores the opportunities that this creates for you to become a true Business Partner to your Executive including developing the partnership, setting the ground rules, communication, adapting to style & maintaining a great partnership.
Strategically managing relationships & the expectations of your stakeholders:
Executive and Administrative Assistants hold a unique position within their companies which allows them to participate in true cross-company collaboration in a way that almost no other job role does. So why do most administrative professionals continue to operate in silos when collaboration is so good for business? Could it be that this is because we are confused between collaboration and teamwork? The two are not only very different skill sets but are not in any way interchangeable.
Managing more than one Executive:
In the new role, most Assistants are managing at least two people. It challenging enough to work well with ONE Executive, but if you’re 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?
This session will explore practical tips for productivity and time management that will ensure that you can prioritise, juggle and support your numerous Executives effectively and without stress.
Communication - the Assistant's key to advancement:
Communication is key and essential to any role, especially within the role of an assistant. It is crucial that you have strong 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 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.
What we will cover:
- Body Language & Voice
- Listening Skills
- Assistants as Connectors
- Productive Office Relationships
- Problem Solving
- Emotional Intelligence
- Different workstyles – flexible communication for different personality types
- Taking control without taking over
- Ongoing communication with your Executive
Building a Powerful Business Partnership with your Executive:
The relationship between an Assistant and their Executives is absolutely 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.
Day Two
Day two is the practical day of the course. Having spent day one looking at a change in mindset and positioning the Assistant as a strategic business partner, day two looks at the practical productivity, decision making and project management skills you will need to do this.
So you think you’re strategic - what does that mean?
Much has been made in recent times of the emergence of the Assistant as a Strategic Business Partner. The term is THE buzz word in the industry. But how do you become strategic? What does it mean? How to you change your day to day role to become the Assistant that your Executive needs in order to deliver at the highest levels.
In this this session we will look at why Businesses still need Assistants but why the landscape has changed, how to develop your business acumen to best support your executive and what skills are required to be a true Strategic Business Partner to your Executive.
- Why Businesses still need Assistants
- How to Develop your Business Acumen
- Business Ethics
Productivity
The Assistant’s role is to ensure that their Executive(s) are as effective as they can possibly be. In order to do this, their own productivity and systems must be operating at the highest levels of efficiently.
In this session we will look at systems and procedures including:
- setting boundaries
- diary management
- the myth of multitasking
- managing more than one executive
- procrastination
- time management.
Decision Making & Problem solving
With the changes to the role, many assistants are taking on more supervisory roles: Executives can help empower their assistants by making it clear that the assistant has real authority. The message the executive should convey is, “I trust this person to represent me and make decisions.”
This session will visit some classic decision making and problem solving processes to ensure the Assistant has confidence to look at all the options and weigh up the alternatives.
Introduction to Project Management
Project Management seems to be overtaking the Executive Assistant’s world these day. Whether or not your company calls it “Project Management” and deliberately applies its terminology and principles doesn’t matter; the reality is that Project Management is now part of every Assistant’s working life.
We’ll look at:
- The difference between routine work and a project
- Managing stakeholders and their expectations
- Understanding how to prepare for and plan a project
- Understanding how to monitor a project
- Understanding the purpose and ways of evaluating a project
We will then organise an event from start to finish using the techniques we have used to determine ROI and manage the project from a budget.
Stress - Getting Out of Overwhelm
And finally, we will talk about how you achieve all of this without blowing a fuse.
- Why is managing your stress important?
- What are the signs?
- Work/Life Balance
- How to avoid burnout
