The administrative profession is transforming — and so is the role of the Assistant. AI, automation, and changing business priorities mean that success today depends on strategic thinking, confidence, and leadership presence.
Led by Lucy Brazier OBE, this two-day course helps Administrative Assistants redefine their role as true business partners. It’s not a list of tools — it’s a total mindset shift.
Speak with clarity and authority.
Build calm, confident leadership presence.
Use AI to elevate your strategic contribution.
Lead projects that deliver measurable value.
Align your work to organisational goals.
Operate as a trusted business ally.
Your comprehensive learning journey
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 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 that this creates for you to become a true Business Partner to your Executive including developing the partnership, establishing the ground rules, communication, adapting to style & maintaining a great partnership.
This course is designed to inspire, motivate, challenge, excite 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 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:
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.
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 do you change your day-to-day role to become the Assistant that your Executive needs to deliver at the highest levels? In this keynote session, Lucy Brazier will look at how to develop your business acumen to best support your executive and what skills are required to futureproof your career in a post-COVID / AI world.
Learning objectives:
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:
For many assistants, working in the office from Monday to Friday will be a thing of the past. As offices reopen, many are turning to a hybrid model that allows people to work in the office some days and at home for others. While being able to work remotely offers more flexibility, there’s going to be a learning curve, for both companies and their employees.
In this interactive session, we will look at new ways of working, both in terms of your partnership with your executive and making your team feel supported and comfortable. We will cover what a successful hybrid work reality looks like, collaborative working practices, how to align days with your manager’s schedule and other colleagues you work frequently with, what the potential unclear implications could be and how to make the most of your time both in the office and at home.
We will also discuss what the unknowns are that concern you, how to implement systems and workflows to maximise your time wherever you are working from, and why it is so important to be proactive when it comes to communicating, collaborating, and providing status updates.
Project Management seems to be overtaking the Executive Assistant’s world these days. 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 will look at:
We will then organize an event from start to finish using the techniques we have used to determine ROI and manage the project from a budget.
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 and brand-new decision-making and problem-solving processes to ensure the Assistant has the confidence to look at all the options and weigh up the alternatives.
And finally, we will talk about how you achieve all of this without blowing a fuse.
Lucy Brazier OBE is one of the world's foremost authorities on the administrative profession and CEO of Marcham Publishing, home of Executive Support Magazine. She has trained assistants in more than 50 countries and works with leading global brands to restructure and elevate their business support functions. Her work on the Global Skills Matrix has redefined career paths and professional standards across the industry.
We offer tailored corporate and in-house versions of this programme. Speak with our Senior Training Advisors to discuss how The Modern-Day Assistant can transform your entire administrative function.
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