I haven't written a blog post in a while about anything other than rental property, or IT documentation. I married a wonderful Belarusian woman, had a kid, and am trying to push my software company more into intellectual property development. So, I'm not dead, and didn't give up on blog posts.
A huge part of my job as the CEO of Noventum Custom Software LLC consists of reading and responding to emails, scheduling meetings, looking at project status notes to determine if someone is stuck and needs some sort of direction, talking with leads, talking with clients, and general management tasks. A large portion of these tasks could be handled by a capable assistant.
A general policy of hiring a person needed with very limited guidance on what they will be doing, how they'll be evaluated, and what their expectations are, isn't a good. I'm trying to systematize job descriptions, responsibilities, expectations and evaluations as my software company, Noventum, grows to get more into repeatable hiring outcomes and to have good hiring policies and practices. This also helps people feel better when they know, clearly, in writing, what's expected of them. I've avoided a number of potentially disastrous programming hires by following these (generally accepted for the past fifty years...) human resources simple steps. It's more difficult for me to apply them to non-programmers, since it requires flexibility on my part, and empathy, especially into a discipline of which I am ignorant.
Part of expanding on my flexibility is reading to try and learn about executive and administrative assistants. The first book in my reading list is The New Executive Assistant by Jonathan McIlroy. I recommend this book to anyone capable, high level, and finding themselves spending three hours a day sorting emails instead of doing whatever it is they are awesome at.
The first thing to realize about this book is that it is written in Australian. I used to think that both Australian and American were dialects of English, but I'm not sure anymore. While reading this book, please realize that "diary" is Australian for "calendar" in American. It is not the case that Australian executives go around, writing in their journals/diaries every day about their inner feelings and dreams, and their assistants help with this. I believed that was the case for about the first fifty pages of the book, until finding this helpful Australian/American dictionary after realizing that there was no way such a situation was possible. There are other confusing Australian terms throughout, that only minorly hamper an American's understanding.
My ignorance before reading this book was such that I lacked basic vocabulary to describe anything related to an assistant. After reading this, the author made sure that everyone was on the same page when it came to vocabulary describing the executive/assistant partnership.
Another thing to realize is that the book is very much written for, and from the perspective of, the assistant. The author does generally keep this as neutral as possible, but his background, experiences, and general tone of the book, make it so that most of the focus is spend on actions the assistant can take to make this relationship work. As a capable person, you can infer what actions an executive should (probably) take to hold up their side of the relationship, but this is not explicitly as clear for as it is for the assistant.
After reading this book, I believe I now have the ability to write up a job description for an assistant that is more along the administrative assistant grade, with the potential to grow into an executive assistant. I feel like I can explain, delegate, and measure performance on, tasks to delegate to this assistant. In short, I feel like I have some hope of hiring someone to fill this role without learning through mistakes.
Overall, I think this is a good book.
I'm not going to move forward with any additional hiring until my state relaxes our COVID-19 lock down. Complying with all of the constantly shifting requirements is not helpful for business stability. My next steps will be to continue reading books and articles about executive, and administrative, assistants, and to work on a job description, performance evaluation templates and descriptions of the tasks I'd like to delegate. In short, I'll continue to prepare and learn, without taking any concrete action, yet.
Send me an email, give me a call, or leave a comment below, if you're interested in this book, or talking about hiring an assistant in general. I plan on writing at least two more blog posts about the additional two books I purchased on this subject.
