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Managing Hybrid Teams: Enabling Effective Virtual and Hybrid Work
April/May 2022 Volume 12 Issue 01
ISSN 2755-7561
What’s the Word on WordPress?
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The Essential Training Resource for the World’s Administrative Professionals
Interviewing Your Interviewer: Why I Talked a CEO Out of Hiring Me
The Mystery of EBIT and EBITDA
RICHARD ARNOTT UK
SARAH RICHSON Kenya
SUE FRANCE UK
RHONDA SCHARF Canada
VANIA ALESSI Italy
VICKIE SOKOL EVANS USA
MELISSA ESQUIBEL USA
MICHELLE BOWDITCH Australia
NINA AUNULA Finland
MELBA DUNCAN USA
PAULA MOIO Angola
PEPITA SOLER Brazil
DIANA BRANDL Germany
ETH LLOYD, MNZM New Zealand
HELEN MONUMENT The Netherlands
BONNIE LOW-KRAMEN USA
JOAN BURGE USA
LIZEBETH KOLOKO-GREEN France
MEET YOUR EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
The global authorities for our profession, the members of the Executive Support Magazine Editorial Board are experts in their fields, dedicated to ensuring the administrative profession remains at the forefront of business. Board members regularly share their expertise within the magazine and provide guidance and inspiration on future topics and issues that are important to administrative professionals around the world.
A New Era
At a recent meeting with a client where we were talking about how they could better utilise their administrative function, one of the board members asked me whether I felt that an Assistant could work remotely.
It seemed a strange question. Matthew (my former Executive Assistant) and I worked almost entirely remotely for nine years, and haven’t we all just spent the last two years doing just that?
Communication, of course, is key. As are the right resources. When I suggested that it wasn’t necessarily whether an Assistant COULD work from home but rather whether they had the right tools to do so, the board member realised they hadn’t thought of that. I was astounded. It hadn’t occurred to them that not everyone had a dedicated space to work from, an ergonomically friendly chair, or high-speed Wi-Fi.
The latest research from Accenture shows that 83% of employees want the option of hybrid working moving forwards. In fact, 47% say they would look for another job if their company didn’t offer a hybrid option.
Employees want the ability to have a flexible schedule, less commuting time and expense and more time with family. But they also want the space away from distractions, time with colleagues, better technology, routine and visibility.
And yet for many, there is real anxiety about returning to an office. We worry about safety because it’s not clear how it’s going to work. Transitions naturally spike our anxiety, and whenever we have stopped doing something for a period of time, we feel anxious about returning to it. Our routines have changed, as have our social relationships and boundaries, so it’s natural to feel a level of anxiety.
Our cover story this month is from the excellent Peter Ivanov. He explains how to manage hybrid teams and enable effective virtual and hybrid work. Peter will also be speaking at our 48-hour online conference in June, ES Global. His session is one you won’t want to miss.
Elsewhere in the new magazine is a profile of my EA, Franziska Lielje. Change is always hard, and as most of you know, Matthew left in January. After nine years of working together, it was always going to be an adjustment, but Fran is more than up to the job and as much as I miss Matt, this new chapter is an interesting and exciting one.
Matt has set up his own Virtual Assistant business with his wife, Kayleigh, and I am sure it will be hugely successful. We wish them both the very best of luck with their new venture. Thank you, Matt, for everything you have done over the last nine years to support both me and the Assistant community. We look forward to seeing you at Executive Support LIVE in July and to celebrating your contribution properly then.
It’s the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one.
Lucy Brazier OBE
CEO Marcham Publishing Lucy Brazier OBE [email protected] +44 (0)203 973 7752 Twitter @lucybrazier Skype lucy-brazier
Senior Editor Kathleen Drum [email protected]
Training Director Christian Russell [email protected]
Events Director Justin Roach [email protected]
Office Manager & EA to Lucy Brazier Franziska Lielje [email protected]
Sales Office, Javea, Spain +34 865 616 094
Sophie Douglas - Sales Manager [email protected]
Ana Fawdry – Account Manager [email protected]
Elaine Williams – Account Manager [email protected]
Rose McGowan - Marketing & Ecommerce Manager [email protected]
Wayne Tomlinson - Web Developer [email protected]
Design MAP Systems [email protected]
For all subscription enquiries please email [email protected]. Executive Support Magazine is also available as a corporate subscription in print or online.
Executive Support Magazine is published bi-monthly by Marcham Publishing
Marcham Publishing Parkshot House, 5 Kew Road Richmond, Surrey TW9 2PR United Kingdon +44 (0)203 973 7752
www.executivesupportmedia.com also available at:
Articles published in Executive Support Magazine are the opinion of the authors. The views reflected do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publishers.
© Marcham Publishing 2022 (except where otherwise stated). All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of Marcham Publishing.
ISSN 2046-3855.
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Managing Hybrid Teams: Enabling Effective Virtual and Hybrid Work Peter Ivanov details 12 tips to communicate, collaborate and co-create in hybrid teams
Newsletter Tools for Internal Communication Michelle Bowditch’s top tools to easily create engaging internal newsletters
Fran Lielje Fran Lielje is the Executive Assistant to Lucy Brazier, OBE and the Office Manager at Executive Support Media
What’s the Word on WordPress? Step outside your comfort zone and step into the world of web content by experimenting with WordPress, says Marie Herman
COVER STORY PROFILETECHNOLOGY
Interviewing Your Interviewer: Why I Talked a CEO out of Hiring Me Before you sell yourself for the role, let your interviewer sell you on the role, explains Megan Bishop
A Practical Guide to Choosing and Booking Professional Speakers Choosing a professional guest speaker can be a pleasure rather than a problem, explains Diana Boulter
What is Keeping the C-Suite Awake at Night? The C-Suite has had to be agile and continues to make difficult decisions, explains Thom Dennis
The Mystery of EBIT and EBITDA Do EBIT and EBITDA give a better indication of the true operational performance of the business? asks Richard Arnott
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CAREER DEVELOPMENT
EVENTS EXCELLENCE
BUSINESS STRATEGY AND ACUMENLEADERSHIP
TECHNOLOGY
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Everything You Need To Know About Achieving Career Success Create your own success and build a robust and sustainable career says Julia Schmidt
Active Awareness: The Essence of Resilience Active awareness implies we are the author of our experiences, explains Jason Liem
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22. 23. 25.CAREER DEVELOPMENT OPINION
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
HEALTH AND WELLBEING
The 12th World Administrators Summit The World Administrators Summit is a working meeting that discusses the issues challenging our profession across the globe, explains Helen Monument
My Journey to TEDx Bonnie Low-Kramen gives us a behind-the-scenes look at taking part in a virtual TEDx
TABLE OF CONTENTS
29. Advice for When You Hate Your Job Rhonda Scharf shares tips to help you create a better situation for yourself
Eliminating Networking Anxiety Chi Chi Okezie advises applying simple techniques and creating a plan to overcome networking anxiety
28. CAREER DEVELOPMENT
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
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TECHNOLOGYOPINION 37.36.
31. The Coding Evolution: The Bigger Picture Is coding truly the next skill and technology to learn as an administrative professional? asks Vonetta Watson
Track Your Time Traci Williams explains how to set up a spreadsheet so that you can track your time
Levelling Up in the 2022 Workplace How can virtual new starters feel more connected to their company? asks Tray Durrant
TECHNOLOGY 33. Going Green: The EA’s Role in Sustainability Pat Woods details eight best practices you can employ to move your organization to a more sustainable future
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
LEADERSHIP45.41.
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43. Organizational Change: Start SMALL for a Big Impact The Global Skills Matrix places Assistants firmly in the role of catalysts for successful organizational change, explains Aliina Rowe
How to Respond to Trolls How can you protect your career if someone is trolling you or your business? asks Amanda Hamilton
Holding on to Gratitude Your life script may not be within your own control, but the attitude you exhibit is, says Carole Spiers
The Benefits of Speaking More than One Language Knowing a foreign language can help with communication and building relationships, explains Carla Stefanut
CAREER DEVELOPMENTCOMMUNICATION
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
COVER STORY
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Managing Hybrid Teams: Enabling Effective Virtual and Hybrid Work Peter Ivanov details 12 tips to communicate, collaborate and co-create in hybrid teams
We’ve been working remotely for nearly two years, and with COVID-19 many companies have now introduced policies for hybrid working. In hybrid teams, some people are in the office and the rest are working from home or from other remote locations.
A client of mine has decided that their business will be working from home or remotely for 60% of the week, and the other 40% (two days a week) people will have to work in the office. The challenge here is to foster home-office productivity but also to enable this mix of people to communicate, collaborate and co-create in the best possible way.
During the pandemic and the challenge of remote work, people broadly responded in one of two ways. Introverted-thinking people thrived; they are mostly keen to continue to work from home. Extroverted- feeling people struggled with the extended amount of time at home; they can’t wait to get back to the office.
In a hybrid workspace, we need to take care of the needs of both types of people.
Psychological Safety
Google ran a project called “Google Aristotle” which researched the common characteristics of the best performing teams. During the data-heavy research, Google discovered that in their best performing teams, there was an equal share of talking during meetings: extroverts were quiet for some of the time and the introverts dared to speak up, so in the end they all had an equal share of talking and nearly equal contribution from every team member.
That was quite a discovery, but there were some exceptions. Google continued their research and discovered the one characteristic that, without exception, all the best performing teams had in common. They called it psychological safety and defined it as people feeling safe (and
brave) enough to take risks without being afraid that they will be laughed at, or if they fail it will have negative consequences for their career. The second aspect of psychological safety is that people show their vulnerabilities in front of the other team members. They show not just their perfect, shiny side, as we sometimes do on social media, but also their vulnerable side.
In hybrid teams, people are sometimes forced to work in the office for several days a week, whatever the policy of the company might be. There is also pressure on people who do not come into the office. Comments such as “We miss having you here in the office” or “We’re seeing more people in the office these days; it would be nice if you were around” are not helpful. We therefore need to ensure that people can share their concerns about being in the office or not. These aspects need to be openly discussed and addressed by the team in order to reach high performance.
The first five tips are about enabling psychological safety in hybrid teams.
1. Set the Scene as a Leader
Have an open conversation with all team members and consider individual needs. Let people speak up and express their needs, but also consider the need to work together and to be successful as a team.
2. Lead the Way
Kick off this discussion by sharing your individual needs and constraints. Lead the way by example. Some managers expect their people to behave in a way that creates psychological safety, to share their mistakes and concerns, but they as leaders do not do it themselves. So, share your challenges, your home situation, your considerations about when to come or not come to the office. If you open up and share your concerns and challenges, other team members will follow.
3. Take Baby Steps
You will not fix this in one meeting. Acknowledge and praise people who share and ensure that sharing is not penalized. Take small steps and reward behaviors showing psychological safety.
4. Share Positive Examples
Explain how the concerns and needs raised have been addressed successfully, and how transparency allowed the team to make the right decisions and enabled it to cater to the needs of the individual as well as the needs of the team.
5. Be a Watchdog
It is very important to watch comments and vocabulary. Comments such as “We want to see you more; we could really use you if you’re around” aren’t helpful. They put more pressure on team members, so try to reframe them in a positive way. It is your role as a leader to enable psychological safety. For example, you could say: “We miss your ideas and insights, your thoughtful perspective. We would also like to understand your constraints, so let us know how we can help.”
6. Visualize and Communicate in a Structured Way
The higher up the ladder you go, the more people you have to update. There are great tools that can help to update the whole team or department about current projects and priorities. Visualize the content of the meeting using smart tech tools. Make sure everyone contributes often, and in parallel. This is the key discovery of the Google project – if everyone feels safe to contribute their ideas, innovation emerges, and solutions start to take shape.
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7. Smart Tools – Mural, Conceptboard, Miro and Zoom Whiteboards
Support participants to interact simultaneously with the virtual board. Visually consume information. Prioritize information separated by departments, each with a different color. Move the most important information towards the middle and the less important to the outside.
Bonus Tip! Everyone Joins From Their Own Device
Ensure everything is accessible to everyone, and that all team members have a device with which they can follow along; otherwise some people will be in the office staring at a big screen, unable to participate online, whilst people working remotely will be communicating differently, sitting in front of their devices. My recommendation is that everyone join the online meeting from their own device: equal for everyone. It is important that everyone can take part in the conversation, and that everything gets shared. If you have co-located people, make sure there are no side conversations in the office room.
Any meetings longer than 15 minutes (the Harvard principle) need group interaction. Include reflective exercises, icebreakers and energizers to establish psychological safety. A good example is “pick your cat.” Show images with different cats in funny positions and ask the participants to select the one they like. Get people to feel. It’s a quick and fun way to start conversations and get everyone on board.
8. Foster a Remote- First Culture
Get your technology right. Use tools that allow you to work from anywhere and from
any device, whether private or an office mobile phone. Centralize communication onto a specific platform so that important messages aren’t missed. Include a video link in all meeting invitations so that people can join if they are remote.
9. Trust Your Employees to Fulfill Expectations
Trust that the work gets done. Many managers were afraid that people would binge-watch Netflix instead of working. As COVID has shown, this wasn’t the case. People worked more – not less. Switch to a results-based culture. Introduce smart goals. Measure the results using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Measure performance, not effort. If you trusted your team and they didn’t get it done, give them feedback and support. Develop team members to help them attain their goals next time.
10. Regularly Offer and Solicit Feedback
Ask for feedback for yourself. This is so crucial. Schedule a meeting once a month. Give and ask for feedback. “How has it been going? What’s going well? What challenges do you see? How can I (as a leader) better support you?” Listen to them.
11. Provide Opportunities for Social Connection
Use instant message channels for friendly chatter, Netflix recommendations, and pet photos. Reserve time at the start of meetings for personal updates and small talk. Start a bit earlier. Ask for people’s highlights. Just a few minutes can be enough. Schedule remote-friendly team gatherings and activities such as virtual trivia contests, virtual happy hours and shared productivity playlists. Set up a standing videoconference channel where
people can easily jump in and have lunch or coffee together if they want. Simulate the “water cooler” experience. Give team members space and encourage them to share and connect with each other, and praise them when they do so! You’ll be amazed by what happens.
12. Infrastructure and Office Location
Many companies have big spaces that do not get used completely. Google invested in futuristic offices and named them team pods, where they can wheel in the walls, chairs and whiteboards and create a space to work together. They also used an outdoor workspace – you, too, can go outdoors and have a conversation or just sit in a chair and think. Look out for innovations in that field; Google uses balloon walls to get some privacy.
Dos and Don’ts
Do
• Set clear priorities and objectives for everyone.
• Be inclusive; everyone must be on board. • Provide a space where people can share
their thoughts and their work. • Reflect on your biases and
predispositions. • Ask for feedback and provide feedback.
Don’t
• Don’t be rigid; be flexible. • Don’t ignore signs of stress from your
team – be empathetic. • Don’t forget about fun. Look for ways to
bring joy to work. • I wish you success in leading your own
hybrid teams in organizations!
If you wish to learn and practice more, join Peter’s self-paced online masterclass, “Leading Virtual and Hybrid Teams.”
the gravity of their team despite the geographical distance, age and cultural differences, whilst also delivering top business performance.
Peter is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Peter training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Peter Ivanov is a manager, entrepreneur and virtual teams expert with over 25 years of international experience. Peter recognized the growing importance of teams formed across multiple locations and has developed an innovative method for leading virtual teams. In 2007, a team led by Peter won the “Best of the Best” award for outstanding project management in establishing global shared services. As an expert in new leadership, Peter supports managers to retain
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Newsletter Tools for Internal Communication Michelle Bowditch’s top tools to easily create engaging internal newsletters
Businesses understand that audience engagement is key to ensuring their customers and target markets see and hear their brand. Most organisations would say that engaging with their staff is also essential for their business. Newsletters are a great way to boost morale and ensure you have an enthusiastic and motivated team.
Suggested Inclusions
Executive input
A brief note from the CEO or one of the C-Suite executives increases the connection between management and the team.
Celebrations
Employee milestones, business wins or customer feedback.
Professional development
Educational content or links to industry networking events and training.
Calendar
Keep staff abreast of what is coming up in the business and any events that they may be interested in by including links to the company calendar.
Consistency
Keep it simple and easy to read whilst ensuring you’re covering all the relevant
areas. Be consistent: choose a regular date(s) that you will communicate to your team.
Tools for Design
Flodesk
Flodesk is an email marketing provider with powerful automation, beautiful forms, and a simple interface. The design capabilities mean you can efficiently create striking, sleek newsletters or email marketing campaigns. Add your touch to their on- trend templates or build your design from scratch. You can load your logo and brand colours as well as include your images or access content from Unsplash. Their pricing structure is another reason to love them – no increase in pricing the more subscribers you have, and tagging and segmenting is so easy there’s no excuse not to do it!
Canva
Canva provides a user-friendly, creative tool at an affordable price. It is a desktop application and an app for your hand-held device. With both a free and paid version, it caters to all. Canva makes design easy
with its suite of templates for newsletters, brochures, templates infographics, social media graphics and flyers (the list goes on). It has things like fun animation effects to make your designs pop. You can link external sources or documents, integrate your profile with other handy tech such as Typeform or embed your design into your website. This is an app for anyone who loves to create beautiful content for any occasion.
Microsoft Sway
Microsoft Sway is part of Office365 and is a simple tool that is easy to use to create visual content for your newsletter, presentations, or other company communications. Start from scratch or utilise one of their templates to create a design that speaks to your team. You can share your Microsoft Sway project with co- workers, which is handy for collaborating on content for your internal newsletters. You can easily add files from your One Drive account or turn Word/OneNote content into a dynamic presentation in a few simple clicks.
Make communicating with your team a priority, whether at the company level or within your department. With a wealth of simple-to-use tools at your fingertips, creating engaging newsletters that speak to your team is easier than ever!
that it’s not a one size fits all; it’s about having the right mindset and customising solutions, and she equips her clients with both!
Michelle is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Michelle training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Michelle Bowditch is the founder of Door20a, a tech consulting agency supporting women in business and EAs to accelerate their careers to the next level. Through strategic coaching, she helps professionals amplify their workplace presence, master influence, and road map their ambitions into existence. Michelle’s “3Cs” (connection, collaboration and community) are the underpinning values that fuel her mission to educate people on the power of tech and explain
PROFILE
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FRAN LIELJE Fran Lielje is the Executive Assistant to Lucy Brazier, OBE and the
Office Manager at Executive Support Media
Can we start with a little background information? Where are you from and what do you do? I grew up in a very small town called “Bad Oeynhausen” in West Germany, which most people in Germany only recognize from the constant traffic jams along the motorway! I left my hometown in 2012 at the age of 13 to go to boarding school in the northeast of Germany, where I finished my A-Levels at the age of 17. The decision to go to university had already been made, so I applied at the International School of Management (ISM) in Hamburg to study Tourism and Event Management. During my studies, I had the opportunity to do an internship at the 5-star Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin and eventually ended up signing a contract with the hotel for a 3-year apprenticeship in hotel management, from which I graduated in 2016.
I then moved on to a beautiful German Island called Sylt to get additional, seasonal experience in the hotel business and then decided to support my parents’ business for a year. That is where I had my first experience in a Management Assistant role.
How did you become an Assistant?
To gain more experience in the administrative field, I decided to accept a job offer to work as an Office Manager in Amman, Jordan in 2017 for six months, and that’s when I realized how important the Assistant role is and that this was what I wanted to do going forward.
After returning from the Middle East, I worked as an Executive Assistant to the CEO of an event location and gourmet restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany until COVID-19 hit in March 2020. I moved to Spain and met Lucy. I am currently working as her Office Manager and Executive Assistant here at Executive Support Media.
What are the main challenges of your role?
With Lucy being one of the leading authorities on the administrative profession, she is in great demand, and so the main challenge of my role is to prioritize her commitments and to determine how to best utilize her time so she can be the most efficient. Another thing is to make sure our communication is consistent, especially
when she goes back to travelling the world. That way, the whole business has a clear direction, and the team can work efficiently and autonomously.
What are you enjoying most about your role?
What I love about working with Lucy is that I am constantly learning and growing and therefore the company is, too. Lucy and I work on an eye-to-eye level, which enables me to understand what the company’s goals are and be an active part in reaching them. She involves me in all the major business plans and decisions so that I can make sure everyone in the business is informed about changes and upcoming challenges. Another bonus will of course be the travelling and being able to meet all these amazing EAs in person. I believe it will enable me to fully understand the work Lucy does for the profession.
How do you find working with the new team, and being the go-between as well as managing Lucy?
I believe we have managed to put together a real “dream team.” The people who work
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at Executive Support Media genuinely care about the company and its success, which creates a unique working atmosphere. The Office Manager & EA role go hand in hand because we can only be successful if Lucy and the team are at their best. To ensure that, the “go-between” is particularly important to be able to ensure everyone’s expectations are met. This is a challenge, and it can get overwhelming easily, which is why it’s so important to have processes and procedures in place, communicate efficiently and trust each other.
Tell us the gossip! What is it really like to work at Executive Support Media?
That’s a good question. Working at Executive Support Media is like being at a family gathering every day. We care deeply about each other, we support and help each other, but we also have disagreements and discussions, make mistakes, and sometimes just get it wrong – like families do. But at the end of the day, we all have the same common goal, which is for everyone to be at their best and to create real change for the administrative profession. I believe we are doing a pretty good job at that so far.
You are a graduate of the ACEA training program. Tell us about taking part in the online course.
I am incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to do the ACEA course in 2021. It covers a wide range of subjects and gives useful tools and skills that I take advantage of every day. What I thought was the greatest learning outcome was the broader understanding of the importance of the Assistant role and how many opportunities there are to step up and take on more responsibility to lead your executive, and therefore your company, to success.
You recently travelled with Lucy to an in-person Modern Day Assistant course. Can you tell us a bit about that?
As I have got to know Lucy over the past 16 months, I have learned that the most
important thing for her is to be able to interact with Assistants on a personal level. That enables her to listen and understand their day-to-day struggles and therefore tailor her courses to fit their needs.
I realized early on in my role that I needed to get a better understanding of how teaching the full two-day Modern Day Assistant course impacts Lucy’s time, her energy, our communication and the overall work rhythm – especially now, when the course is once again being held live in different cities around the world.
Lucy invited me to London to experience just that, and I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to participate in the Modern Day Assistant course. Personally, I found the course extremely well structured, informative, and also interactive.
We began with understanding the history of the role and how it has been constantly evolving over the years. Throughout the course, Lucy focused on the opportunities that come with the role, especially now, with two years of being in a worldwide pandemic. She provided us with useful tools and resources to truly enable us to claim our seat at the table as equal business partners rather than in a pure support function. The course also includes some beautiful storytelling, which made it easy for us to take the information and transform it into an action plan.
I could really see how passionate Lucy is about supporting EAs to be the best they can possibly be, and I hope to stay in touch with the other EAs who joined us in London!
Why do you think the role of the Assistant is a valuable one?
After working for several different companies in different sectors, I have learned that Assistants are often taken advantage of and sadly only seen as the person you call when you want to get through to someone else – not realizing that the Assistant is the one who manages their executive’s time and therefore is the one they should really be talking to!
An Assistant is the glue that holds the business and its departments together and enables the executives to do what they are being paid to do. They are the employees who truly know what the challenges are
throughout the entire business, and their job is to make sure everyone is working as efficiently as they can. There is no better person in a business to do that.
What advice would you give someone starting out as an Assistant?
My advice to someone starting out as an Assistant would be:
Try to be as close as possible to your executive to understand how they work, how they would like to be communicated with, what their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are and therefore what their priorities are.
Make sure you understand the core business ideas and values and gain as much knowledge about the business as you can.
Always keep your skillset up to date and make sure you ask for training whenever you feel like you have some gaps, which we all do! And that’s okay; we just need to step up and work our way towards a seat at the table. Only then will you be able to free up your executive’s time so they can go out there and save the world.
So, what’s next for Fran Lielje? Where do you want to be in five years’ time?
I love working alongside Lucy and I feel very privileged to be able to do so. I am constantly learning, and I am convinced that the learning won’t stop for quite some time.
A lot of exciting things are happening this year: we just introduced our Masterclass Series, and Lucy will be travelling around the world to bring her signature course, “The Modern-Day Assistant as a Strategic Business Partner,” to EAs everywhere. Executive Support Global is happening in June and our annual ES Tech event will take place in September, so there are many new opportunities and more lives to change. That’s why I hope we will be working together for a long time – if she lets me!
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What’s the Word on WordPress?
Step outside your comfort zone and step into the world of web content by experimenting with WordPress, says Marie Herman
Have you been tasked with updating your company or department website in WordPress? Are you not sure how to get around and best use the program? Maybe you would just like to learn more about how to update websites in general and you recognize that thousands of companies use WordPress to manage their sites. This is a fabulous skill to add to your career arsenal. This article will cover the basics to get you up to speed and more comfortable working with this extremely popular program.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system. It originally started as a hosting platform for blogging, but it has expanded to provide much more robust options, including communities where people can connect, ecommerce sites for businesses to sell their products and hosting services for online courses. It is one of the most popular sites in the world. WordPress states that as of June 2021, it powers more than 40% of the top 10 million websites. That is a LOT of websites and a heck of a lot of companies using the software.
Why Is WordPress So Popular?
Free and open source
One of the main reasons WordPress is so popular is that it’s free! Yup, you read that right. WordPress is a free open-source software that is available to use on any webhost of your choice. Your webhosting service may have a WordPress option available on its control panel, but if they don’t, you can go to www.wordpress.org to learn more about it and download it.
Be careful that you don’t do your download from www.wordpress.com. That website is the for-profit hosting service. There is a charge to use that site, and it’s proprietary (so you can’t move your site to another webhosting service after you’ve created it).
For the purposes of this article, I am going to assume you already have WordPress installed on your computer.
Plugins
Another reason that WordPress is so popular is that there are tens of thousands of plugins available to expand the software’s functionality.
A plugin is a third-party software that connects (plugs in) to WordPress and allows it to do things that the software can’t do on its own. Plugins allow you to do things like help with SEO (search engine optimization, which makes it easier for search engines to find your site), automate and schedule your posts and content, create beautiful new design themes for your site, protect your site from hackers, develop forms to gather information and sell products, process payments on sales, add people to your mailing list, perform website analytics to learn more about who is visiting your site, and much more.
In a classic chicken-and-egg scenario, it’s difficult to know if WordPress became popular because there were so many plugins created for it or if people created plugins for WordPress because it was already so popular. I don’t know the answer to this deep philosophical question!
Having that functionality available creates almost limitless possibilities for what you can do on a website created with
WordPress. It also means you don’t have to invent your site from scratch. There are thousands (heck, maybe millions?) of templates available that you can fully customize however you like.
Ease of use
A third reason WordPress is so popular is that it is very easy to install and use. It boasts a “famous 5-minute installation.” The actual software, once installed, is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) with drag-and-drop options to create your webpages. Although there is an option to go in and modify the coding behind the scenes, it is not necessary to have any coding skills to create and maintain a WordPress website.
How Do You Get Around in WordPress?
You will sign into WordPress and go to your dashboard to set up your first page. Along the left-hand side, you will see a navigation menu with the following options.
Posts
This is where the articles you write will reside. You will use WordPress’s editor to create the actual posts, and you can schedule and manage those posts from this location. The distinguishing feature of posts is that they are dated. By default, WordPress will organize your blog on your website by the date of your posts, with newest content appearing first.
Media
This is the library where you manage your media (images, audio, videos, etc.). You can edit and delete files from your library.
Pages
Pages are similar to posts, but they are non-chronological (evergreen) – such as an About Us page, for example. Pages can
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include subpages, such as having a page called Staff under your About Us page.
Comments
The Comments section of your dashboard allows you to manage all the comments that visitors leave on your site. You can turn comments on or off for each post or do some combination of the two (like have the site automatically turn them off after a designated period of time). You can require that comments be approved before they are visible on your website. You can also set certain requirements, such as needing someone’s name and email address with their comments.
Appearance
You will go to appearance when you want to change the design on your page. This is where you can select a new theme, create a menu, select a background color, modify the color scheme, adjust the fonts and make other formatting changes of a global nature on your website.
Plugins
You will manage all the plugins on your site from the Plugins section of your dashboard. From this area, you can update your plugins, delete them, and modify their setup.
Users
You can control who has access to your site through the Users area. You can assign user roles to individuals that allow them different levels of permission for updating, creating and removing content.
Tools
This contains tools for certain site management tasks. You’ll see all available tools and have the option to import or export those tools to other content management systems.
Settings
You can modify configuration options for your website from the Settings area. This includes general options, as well as options affecting writing, reading, discussion, media and how links are handled too.
Roles in WordPress
To modify content on a WordPress site, you must have the appropriate permission
level. WordPress allows this through the Users section of the database. The various roles available include:
Super admin
This person will have full access to the WordPress site, including the ability to change the structure (create/manage sites), user roles, plugins and more. Most commonly this will be an Information Technology (IT) person, and there might be one or two others, but it’s rare to have a lot of super admin level users because the role is so powerful.
Administrator
This person has access to all the administration features within a single WordPress site. They can activate allowed plugins, edit/publish/delete their own and other people’s posts and pages and modify the theme. They can also promote or remove users.
Editor
This person can publish and manage or delete posts, including the posts of other users. They can also moderate comments, manage categories and upload files.
Author
This person can publish and manage their own posts. They do not have authority to modify or delete posts created by other people.
Contributor
This person can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them. Those posts must be approved by someone with a higher permission level.
Subscriber
This person can only manage their profile. They cannot create or modify any posts on the site. They can read the posts on the site.
Create Your First Post or Page
To create a new page, you will go to your dashboard and click on either Posts or Pages and click Add New.
WordPress will ask you to enter a title for the page. This title will be used to generate
the permanent link to that page or article. There is a button that will allow you to Add Media if you would like to incorporate some form of media, such as an image or an audio or video file.
Below that, you’ll see a toolbar that allows you to modify your text with bold, italic or strikethrough formatting. You also have options to add bullets, numbering and quotes or to adjust the alignment of the text. You can incorporate hyperlinks and other options.
Below that toolbar is a white box where you will be doing your typing. WordPress will provide a word count on your text.
You are able to add some custom fields which modify the way the post or page is displayed.
The Discussion section allows you to set your preferences related to comments and trackbacks. A trackback is when another website links to your website.
Post Author allows you to cite more than one author of the post or page.
Editing Your Post or Page
WordPress has two different editing modes.
Text
Text mode is going to include the coding that is being used in your post or page. It can look confusing if you are not familiar with coding language, but it’s easy to learn and allows you to make very precise adjustments to your pages.
Visual / Block Editor
The Block Editor creates your page with placeholders called blocks for the various parts. You can click and drag these boxes (similar to the way textboxes function in an Office document) and place them where you would like them to be. As you are moving items around, you will see a blue line indicating where the block will land when you release your mouse button.
Blocks can be placeholders for many different elements on your page or post. Examples include paragraphs of text, images, galleries (collections of multiple images), tables, videos, audio files, bulleted or numbered lists or other types of elements. Plugins may add additional types
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of content blocks, such as products in an ecommerce store or episodes of a podcast.
Your first block will always be the title. That title should be unique to that page.
After that, a paragraph is the default, but you can add anything you like. Just click the Plus symbol in the top left corner or below the block and select the kind of block content you prefer.
When you enter a new content block, you will see a corresponding toolbar and an associated Block Settings task pane that allows you to modify the formatting options of the content.
You can organize those blocks into Groups, which allows you to apply formatting options to every block in the group at once.
Once you have created a block, you can then save and reuse that block as much as you like.
To remove a block, just select it and press delete.
Publishing Your Post or Page Once you have created your post or page, it can be saved in a draft mode. You can go in and edit and modify it as you need to, and you can preview it to see how it will look on your website. But no one else will be able to see that page until you publish it. You will see the Publish button on the top right- hand side of your Posts or Pages area. The Publish task pane will show the status of your post, either Draft or Published.
There are a few visibility options for posts. They can be public, where anyone can see them. Alternatively, you can make them public but password protected. People will need the password to be able to view the post. If the visibility is set to private, only you will be able to see the posts.
As part of the publishing process, you can schedule your post to be published at a specific day and time if you wish, or you can have it go live immediately. If you need to, you can backdate a post when publishing it.
You might wish to apply categories when you are publishing your posts. Categories are keywords that you can use to organize your posts and allow people to find other posts on that topic. Tags can be used to further refine the categories into more niche topics.
Excerpts will show a summary or short paragraph from your post on the front page of your site. This function is not turned on by default. This way, on your homepage or in search results, more results will be shown on the page at one time, as it is not showing the full text of the articles. People will then click on a “read more” link to see the full article.
Trackbacks and pingbacks are notifications that other blogs or websites have linked to your post or page. Newer blogging systems will generate these notices automatically. Older systems may need to have the links posted manually.
I hope that this article has given you a good basic overview of how to get around in WordPress. There’s no need to be afraid of this software. It is very easy to use and very intuitive with many of its features. Step outside your comfort zone and step into the world of web content by experimenting with WordPress. It’s a fantastic skill to be able to include in your resumé or Curriculum Vitae (CV).
Specialist and Certified Administrative Professional exams. She is a regular contributor to Executive Support Magazine and also facilitates Organizational Management cohorts for IAAP.
Marie is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Marie training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Marie Herman, CAP, OM, ACS, MOSM. When it comes to career and professional development, Marie Herman knows how to take you from where you are to where you want to be. As the owner of MRH Enterprises LLC, Marie helps office professionals to advance their careers through certification and education. She teaches webinars and seminars on various technology and professional development topics and also provides highly-respected online certification study groups for the Microsoft Office
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Interviewing Your Interviewer: Why I Talked a CEO Out of Hiring Me Before you sell yourself for the role, let your interviewer sell you on the role, explains Megan Bishop
I talked a CEO out of hiring me.
This executive reached out to me directly to request an interview. I was surprised! After all, I’m used to a recruiter reaching out, not the CEO. I did a preliminary sweep of both the company and this CEO’s background on the internet before agreeing to a call. However, this situation was so unusual that I asked to have an information session before a formal interview.
Prioritize Getting Information
When we spoke, he confessed that he hadn’t worked with an Executive Assistant before. I was puzzled. From my research, I learned this executive had an impressive career leading diverse, complex businesses, complete with professional accolades and distinctions for being a leader in his industry. How had he not worked with an EA before?
The conversation pivoted from how we would work together to exploring the various levels of support that the modern Executive Assistant can offer. I cited information from Michelle Bowditch’s article Transactional Versus Strategic Executive Assistants, featured in the April/May 2021 issue of this magazine. What became clear was that he was looking for straightforward calendar management, and not much else. I proposed an EA who could partner with him on this preliminary focus of calendar management and from there they could
grow together into a strategic partnership over time… and candidly let him know that this person likely wasn’t me. Instead, I asked him to take a few days to reconsider his request and think through the commitment to a partnership that hiring an Executive Assistant represents. I also gave him tips on what to look for in an EA skillset that would match his needs with room to grow.
I’m thrilled to report that he took my advice and hired someone else. Uncomfortable and awkward? Yes. The right move for both of us? Absolutely!
Honor Your Skillset
After this experience, I firmly believe all administrative support professionals should approach their interviews proactively and strategically. When facing the looming job interview, honor your skillset and what brings you joy in your work by asking for an information session first.
Your questions about a role fit are valid and deserve ample time to be discussed. Too often interviews are rushed, agonizing
experiences where you work to match your answers to their “Tell me about a time when…” questions. If you’re lucky, you might have five minutes at the end to inquire about the team issues and how you can make an immediate impact, and to learn about the people you’ll support. With an informational session, you can explore the role and its perimeters first, and thus enter the interview as a powerhouse of confidence. The interview becomes a conversation and not a drill. You can speak confidently of your fit for the role because you’ve determined that the role fits your needs and wants.
Honor Your Career Happiness
I know that I could have absolutely delivered stellar calendar management for this executive. Thanks to the informational chat we had, I also know that’s about all he would want me to do. If I’d accepted this role, I would likely have ended up playing some tug- of-war to gain additional responsibilities on top of training an executive in how to work with an EA, and that simply isn’t where I’m at in my career. I honored that truth and did what I felt was right for us both. In this situation, it felt better to recommend he pair with an up-and-coming Assistant so they could develop a rich, strategic partnership together.
Before you sell yourself for the role, let your interviewer sell you on the role with an informational session.
curling, and she loves delivering goals through to their target. She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree with a focus in Project Management. She has adopted the motto “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam”: “I will either find a way or make one.” Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Megan Bishop is a tenured Executive Assistant with over 15 years of experience in the medical, retail, higher education, and technology industries. She is passionate about enabling teams and leaders to work at holistic maximum efficiency. To her, the partnership between Assistant and executive is a lot like the sport of
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A Practical Guide for Choosing and Booking Professional Speakers Choosing a professional guest speaker can be a pleasure rather than a problem, explains Diana Boulter
“…and while you’re thinking about the Annual Conference, could you just find a really good inspirational speaker to give the main keynote? The Awards Dinner in the evening needs a host or MC, too… ” Words to strike fear into the heart of any seasoned and experienced Assistant, let alone anyone given this task for the first time!
Choosing a guest speaker doesn’t have to be a problem, causing you stress and worry. It can be a pleasure, tapping into the wealth of experience and expertise many people are happy to share. It’s an opportunity to work with someone special and to create a successful event.
There are basic points to remember to save you time and make the process easier. To avoid stress and make this a pleasurable task, here is our practical guide, based on over 30 years of experience working with the best:
How to Find a Speaker
You can find speakers directly, maybe via on online search, but be aware that companies offering “a speaker for sale” may not have actually heard them or worked with them. They may not even have asked the speaker’s permission to “sell” them online. It’s better to contact a professional speaker bureau to find the right person, check all the details, avoid the pitfalls and negotiate the right fee.
Some speaker bureaux act as a search function; others act as an agent and will book any speaker if the brief is right and if the speaker agrees. Other companies manage their speakers (whom they know personally) and curate events, working with you to achieve excellent results.
A speaker bureau gets a fee for their services. This normally comes out of the total fee agreed, so you can end up paying less than if you had negotiated yourself. There are some superb guest speakers who are not on the internet but who
are sought out by “people in the know”. Whichever way you do it, be very clear about the basics before you start. The more information you provide upfront, the better the results will be and the easier the process will become.
Key Points to Consider
What do you want the speaker to do?
Be a keynote speaker for a main plenary session? Host or MC a conference or an awards event? Take part in a panel session? Take part in a Question & Answer session with the audience?
Event date and time of day? (For an international event, which time zone are you using?)
Venue? Exact location can be a critical factor if the speaker cannot get to that location.
Details of the audience? Number of delegates/guests? Demographic? Is this event for your staff and colleagues, or for customers, or to impress future clients?
What is the event? What are its aims or objectives?
Why do you need a speaker? (To add insight? To share their story? To inspire? Because the event is boring and needs livening up?!)
What does your boss want? (Does that matter?)
What is the budget allocated for the speaker(s)? Extra costs? These can include additional AV equipment if the speaker has special requirements, and/or speaker’s travel expenses and hotel costs depending on location and timing.
Additional Questions for a Virtual Event
Five years ago, virtual was used mainly for international and global events, but was not so common elsewhere. Now, it is used in many situations. But virtual events raise different questions and need careful handling to avoid problems later. Here are some of the main points to check from the start:
• Will the speaker be pre-recorded or working live?
• What platform are you using for the event, and how will attendees be verified?
• What contingency do you have if broadband fails on the day?
• Do you intend to record the speaker’s participation and use it in any way on your social media, website or other platforms? (Speakers often charge an extra fee for this and/or may decline to give permission for legal and copyright reasons.)
Important note: Some speakers don’t feel comfortable doing a virtual event, as they dislike the lack of personal connection with the audience. Hybrid events may be suitable in some cases if the speaker is happy to do this. Speakers might not want to tell you they don’t like hybrid or virtual, so they’ll turn down your invitation.
When arranging a public-access event, or ticketed event, you must provide full details of ticket pricing from the outset, and details of how you are advertising or promoting the event.
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Looking After Your Speaker
Remember that a speaker is a human being, not a robot. Like everyone else, they must be treated with courtesy, thoughtfulness and respect. You owe it to them (and to yourself) to look after them, make sure they are comfortable and enable them to give their best performance.
Some celebrities can be a nightmare to work with. Don’t say we didn’t warn you! (Forewarned is forearmed.) Alarm bells should be ringing very loudly if their 12-page rider has a long list of additional demands which will cost you a fortune (in plain language, this means extra clauses on a contract, forming an integral part of that contract).
The person you think you want may not be the right person for the job and may not want to speak anyway. Some well-known people are terrified of speaking at events.
Find out if the speaker has any special requirements. Not all disabilities are visible. For example, a speaker may have limited eyesight, but not wish to say so. In this case, it could be a challenge for them to find their way to the stage if everything is blacked out, all floors are black, and there is no lighting.
Your speaker may want access to a quiet room (known as a “green room”) before they go onstage so that they can collect their thoughts and focus. They won’t welcome random demands for autographs, selfies and quotes for social media. These are just annoying. Think how you would feel if you were in their shoes.
Make sure appropriate refreshments have been provided for the speaker – you’ll have checked this before the event, of course!
Media and Social Media
Pre-event
• Do you have permission to use photos of the speaker and their biography and details to promote the event? Check your facts. Don’t rely on online search information, which is often wrong!
• Are there any restrictions on copyright? (You won’t want to be sued for breach of copyright. Your employer won’t want the negative publicity.)
• Do you have the speaker’s written permission to mention their name and use their image on your social media in connection with your event?
• Are you expecting the speaker to promote your event via their social media? If so, ask, and check. (Some speakers won’t, or can’t, allow this.)
At the event
• Are you expecting the speaker to pose for photos with your CEO, other speakers, and/or guests? Has this been checked in advance, and specified on the contract?
• Is the speaker happy to have photos taken by guests on mobiles or devices whilst they are onstage?
• How are you dealing with requests for press or media interviews? You must always ask, usually weeks in advance, whether a speaker is happy to speak to the media and provide full details of the media outlet and the journalist for the speaker to consider. It is not acceptable, and is highly unprofessional, to expect a speaker to do interviews on the day.
Post-event
• Do you want to use photos of the speaker at your event, afterwards?
• On your company website?
• On social media? Again, ask the speaker in advance and get their written agreement.
The Small Print
Be very clear about all aspects of the contract for the speaker booking before you sign. Speakers get paid for speaking, just as you do for your professional work. They also get reimbursed for their travel expenses and for any hotel accommodation – this is also on the contract. It’s quite normal for the client (you) to book all travel and hotel arrangements.
Most reputable speakers and speaker bureaux require full payment upfront as standard procedure. It’s important to understand this so that you can comply with all details for payment and other contractual terms. You don’t want problems later.
And Finally…
Working alongside inspirational people, world champions, gold medallists, leading authors and thinkers, and outstanding achievers can be hugely rewarding. And it’ll look great on your next appraisal when everyone knows you did an excellent job.
Embrace the opportunity. You might find you enjoy it!
speakers include Dame Stella Rimington (the first woman to lead the British security service MI5), wildlife and conservation expert Joel Ashton, global digital strategist Tiffany St James, and the first British astronaut, Helen Sharman CMG OBE. Email [email protected].
Diana Boulter founded DBA Speakers in 1995, having previously worked in investment finance, the travel industry as a Tour Director across Europe, and running a British stately home. Known for her extensive connections, she now manages some of the world’s leading speakers across a wide range of topics. Her exclusive
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What Is Keeping the C-Suite Awake at Night? The C-Suite has had to be agile and continues to make difficult decisions, explains Thom Dennis
After another incredibly difficult year of uncertainty, angst, constant change, health concerns and logistical backlogs, the C-Suite has had to be agile and make difficult decisions without really knowing what the future might hold. The pandemic and our response to it have created great splits, partly depending on sector and size. Some companies have profited enormously, and others are in survival mode while markets and settings are continually transforming.
Here are some of the things keeping the C-Suite awake at night:
1. Pervading Uncertainty
People tend to seek reassurance and answers from leaders in times of
uncertainty; however, it isn’t always easy to provide them in this unpredictable day and age. The C-Suite are struggling to deal with their own anxieties of living in a tumultuous world. Making time to reflect and be present themselves whilst reassuring colleagues, clients and consumers is a priority. Boards and executive teams need to create the space to think proactively and further than the current quarter.
2. Cash Flow
In an uncertain world for most businesses, and with global trends exacerbating that uncertainty, CEOs, CFOs and sales directors are increasingly concerned about cash flow, especially as orders continue to be cancelled or delayed often with very
little notice. For some, this is pretty much all they are able to focus on.
3. Logistic Delays
Before coronavirus, most organisations could comfortably rely on supply chains. However, recent industry changes have seriously subverted this model; a small error in the supply chain can have disastrous repercussions for an entire operation. Having to factor in unknown delays and stretch out the operational and completion process has meant leaders have never had to plan more, as well as manage their customers’ expectations and be comfortable with not pleasing everybody. At the same time, the price of many commodities has risen far beyond any reasonable expectation, which has had
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change agent. For the last 29 years, Thom’s career has been dedicated to facilitating change through organisational change. He is passionate about resolving the breadth of issues around inclusion and strives to make changes against oppression in and out of the workplace.
Thom Dennis is the CEO of Serenity in Leadership. With an MSc in Change Agent Skills & Strategies, skills as an NLP Master Practitioner, 17 years’ experience as an officer in the Royal Marines and having extensively travelled around the world, Thom brings all his experience together as a facilitator, speaker, consultant, educator and
considerable knock-on effects, all of which need to be dealt with by CEOs and their teams.
4. Securing New Talent
Younger generations have very different work values, such as less institutional loyalty and shorter-term goals. They prioritise being a valued and respected part of the workplace. Young people are also more inclined to avoid certain companies if they do not align with their values, particularly in terms of equality, social conscience, and the environment. A high salary in return for extended working hours is considerably less appealing to today’s youth than past generations. Recruiters find themselves having to market their clients’ businesses in new and innovative ways to attract more talent, and this is made easier if the business has a clearly defined purpose which addresses its ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) awareness.
5. Fear of Failure
We can all feel unstable, unsure and insecure, but those in senior positions have been increasingly stifling their own feelings of doubt, for fear of it showing them up to be weak or unsuccessful during turbulent times. Many are feeling the need to conceal their uncertainty not just to their people, but also to the Board – a situation which can best be alleviated by the helpful and supportive ear of an executive coach. They are also trying to create transparency, honesty and openness within the workplace because they know that this builds trust.
6. Managing Risk
The regulatory environment seems to be getting increasingly tight, so today’s C-Suite actively avoids scandals for fear of damaging their company’s reputation,
brand and bottom line. Balancing the demands of good governance and caution without detrimentally affecting innovation and creativity is a challenge.
7. Environmental Concerns
Investors are increasingly applying the non-financial factors of ESG as part of their analysis process to identify material risks and growth opportunities. CEOs are under increasing pressure to plan, respond to, and address long-term decisions that affect depletion of limited resources, recycling, pollution and rising water levels. However, they also need to meet short-term financial obligations to shareholders, as well as address the concerns of the Board, and these three pulls are often in conflict.
8. Diversity and Social Pressure
CEOs understand the importance of diversity in the workplace and want to get it right, but have previously hoped that quota filling or box-checking might be enough. Identifying unconscious bias, stopping groupthink, and focusing on diversity, equality and inclusion are rightfully taking centre stage, but there is a new understanding that this needs to be done properly and systematically. This means expenditure and overcoming the reticence to commit resources now for long-term returns is a struggle for most CEOs.
9. Home vs Back to the Office
Working out how to return to the office (if that is indeed the desire), either full- or part-time, is an erroneous task because different people want different things. Whatever the new norm, it will vary
between companies and industries, so it is important to get it right in reconfiguring new contracts, developing company culture and listening to individuals’ needs. Recent recruits may have never even been within the company’s walls. UK bank NatWest, for instance, has said it expects just 13% of its 64,000 staff to work full- time in its offices in future. A third of the bank’s employees will be allowed to live and work anywhere in the UK and will only have to attend a NatWest building twice a month.
10. Nimble Competitive Edge
Some established industries report a rising concern for maintaining a competitive edge when the technology they use may fast become out of date, forcing huge expenditures to keep up with competitors. Newer businesses are used to being nimbler and can address client needs quickly. This has repeatedly been seen as a result of the pandemic and Brexit. Those who fail to adapt quickly to unpredictable changes are likely to suffer serious organisational damage. The adoption of new technology is being given high priority as part of the move to hybrid working practices.
11. Avoiding Burnout
Mental health and work/life balance are finally now being taken more seriously, and CEOs are having to re-educate themselves on how best to support themselves as well as colleagues and to avoid collapse. Prioritising wellbeing, allowing flexibility, supporting a good work/life balance and addressing burnout before it engulfs the team are top priorities.
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The Mystery of EBIT and EBITDA
Do EBIT and EBITDA give a better indication of the true operational performance of the business? asks Richard Arnott
In continuation of our series attempting to demystify finance, we will discuss a term or terms that will be heard frequently for those of you who work at for-profit organisations.
Many of you will have sat through operational or finance meetings and will have heard those attending fixating on something called EBIT and EBITDA. You have always intended to ask what it means, but by the time the meeting has finished and you have written up the Minutes or Actions and distributed them to everyone, something else has landed in your inbox or the Office Interrupter has appeared at your desk for one of their many daily “wee chats.”
Meaning
EBIT means “Earnings Before Interest and Taxation.”
EBITDA means “Earnings Before Interest and Taxation, Depreciation and Amortisation.”
Both are measures of profitability; however, they look at profits in different ways to give what some people claim to be a truer picture of operating profit.
Measuring Profit
Most of you will have heard of “gross profit” and “net profit.”
Gross profit
Gross profit is the measure of income received less the “cost of goods sold.” The cost of goods sold is the direct cost of the goods or services that your operation provides. Take the example of a cell phone retailer (let’s call them Phones4Me). Phones4Me buys cell phones from their supplier at $300 per unit and sells them to the public at $1,000 per unit.
The gross profit is revenue – cost of goods sold, or in this case $1,000 – $300 = $700.
Net profit
Net profit is the measure of revenues received less all costs incurred, not just the cost of the goods sold. In our example, let us assume that Phones4Me has additional costs of $800 to account for general expenses such as staff salaries, electricity, etc., plus Interest on loans taken out, plus Taxation on sales and profit, plus an allowance for Depreciation and Amortisation costs (we will look at Depreciation and Amortisation later in this article).
The net profit is revenue – cost of goods sold – expenses, or in this case $1,000 – $300 – $800 = -$100.
Phones4Me is reporting a net loss of $100.
Now let’s say that the total of all additional costs was $800, made up of:
• Interest ($100) • Taxation ($90) • Depreciation & Amortisation ($150) • General Expenses ($460)
Another way to look at the income or profit & loss statement would be:
The EBIT calculation adds interest and depreciation back into the equation, so EBIT would equal net profit of -$100 + interest ($100) + taxation ($90) = $90 EBIT. This is now a positive figure.
The EBITDA calculation adds the allowance of depreciation and amortisation back into the equation, so EBITDA would equal EBIT ($90) + depreciation & amortisation ($150) = $240 EBITDA (another positive figure and higher than EBIT!).
So, your executive is now delighted that EBIT is positive and EBITDA is also positive and higher than EBIT. Backs are being slapped and bonusses are being discussed due to their great performance.
But why? You made a loss, didn’t you?
Definitions
Before we progress further, we need to clarify the definitions being used.
Interest
Interest is the amount that the organisation is paying to finance any debt. It is the same as the interest you would pay on an automobile loan or a mortgage.
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transformation and change management within the financial services, utilities, logistics and infrastructure sectors. Richard sits on the Editorial Board of Executive Support Magazine and speaks at Executive Support LIVE. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Administrative Management (IAM) and a Fellow of the Institute of Occupational Learning.
Richard Arnott BA, FInstAM, FITOL is a Director of BMTG (UK) Ltd and is the author and lead presenter of the ACEA® program. In his career, Richard was an accomplished Managing Director, International Programme Director and Big 4 Management Consultant specialising in project/ programme management, strategic business
Taxation
Taxation is simply the amount that the organisation owes to the local tax authorities (again, similar to what you pay on your salary or other incomes).
Depreciation and amortisation
Depreciation and amortisation is an accounting practice that spreads the cost of capital equipment or other one-off expenses over an agreed period (in theory over the useful life of the asset). For example, if an organisation paid $900,000 for a new piece of machinery and that piece of machinery had an estimated useful life of 10 years, the organisation may decide not to hit the first- year profit & loss with the full $900,000. It may choose to spread this over the next 10 years, deducting a nominal $90,000 per year. For tangible assets, like a piece of equipment, we use the term “depreciation”; for intangible assets, like a patent or goodwill, we use the term “amortisation”. Otherwise, they are treated the same.
So Why the Delight?
Operational profit
The reason that some executives fixate on EBIT and EBITDA is that they believe it gives a better indication of the true operational performance of the business, excluding factors that are outside the control of management. For example, management do not dictate the interest rate being paid nor do they set the level of taxation, so excluding these in the EBIT calculation seems to be a fairer measure, especially if performance is being compared across states or countries where different interest rates and taxation regimes may exist. The argument is that it enables pure operational performance to be compared between similar operations.
Secondly, nominal costs such as depreciation of an asset could be based
on a decision taken five years previously by a totally different management team. The argument goes that the current operational management team should not have their performance measured based on previous management’s decisions, or indeed, mistakes. Hence, removing depreciation and amortisation costs as well as interest and taxation from the equation will give an even fairer measure of current performance. Hence EBITDA.
A further argument is that certain costs such as interest payments or depreciation will not last forever. For example, the company loan may be getting paid off in two years’ time, or the “useful life” period for a fixed asset is coming to an end, so in two years’ time there will be no interest or depreciation charges on the books. So why not recognise that now? This is the argument.
A good analogy is to think of yourself. Imagine that for this year and for the past 10 years, your annual expenses have been greater than your income. You are paying off a mortgage with a high interest rate and also a capital repayment, and you live in a state / country with high taxation. However, next year your mortgage is going to be paid off and you are moving to Costa Rica. Your salary will remain the same.
Today you might look in horror at your bank statement each month, but deep down you know that by this time next year, you are going to be financially flush. No more mortgage, no interest payments and lower tax bills, but the same income.
This is similar to what your executive is thinking. Despite the interest and depreciation costs today, they know, deep down, that the business is operationally profitable and once these extraneous costs are removed, then net profits will increase.
Bearing in mind that EBITDA is always higher than EBIT and EBIT is always higher than net
profit, what would you rather have your bonus based on?
Danger
Not everyone agrees with using EBIT or EBITDA in this way. Many claim it gives organisations a false sense of security and results in bonus payments that the organisation cannot afford. Probably the most famous opponent is Warren Buffett, who thinks that using EBITDA is like the tooth fairy paying for capital expenditure. Buffett says that organisations will always borrow, so they’ll always be paying interest (just for different reasons), and that successful organisations will always be investing in new capital equipment or intangible assets, so depreciation and amortisation will always be a factor.
Personally, I tend toward Buffett’s thinking. I have seen too many businesses where management have convinced themselves that due to positive EBIT and EBITDA figures, as opposed to a net loss, they are operationally sound and everyone deserves a bonus. I have seen organisations fold for not recognising this.
So next time your executives and colleagues start fixating on EBIT and EBITDA, ask yourself if their assumptions are correct. Are interest payments going to fall in the future? Is taxation abnormally high compared to other states / countries? Will there never be the same capital expenditure in the future as there has been historically?
The brave amongst you might also challenge your executive. Your executive may just be in what I call “the EBITDA groove.” It is the way they always measure performance; it was the way it was measured when they joined, and it has never been changed nor challenged.
Good luck!
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Active Awareness: The Essence of Resilience Active awareness implies we are the author of our experiences, explains Jason Liem
Do you remember the game Tetris? I think many of us got caught up in the absorbing and addictive video game created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. Since then, you can find the game in different versions and on many platforms. When we spend much time and attention playing Tetris, we succumb to the Tetris effect: we begin to think, dream and see mental images of Tetris.
According to Wikipedia, “People who have played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time can find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on the street. They may see coloured images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes. They may see such coloured, moving images when they are falling asleep…”
Training Your Brain
Let’s shift to a completely different phenomenon, which has to do with tax auditors. This profession spends 8 to 10 hours a day, on average, looking for errors. What happens when they get promoted to managing people? In a vast majority of cases, they can only see the mistakes and errors of their team members. They find it difficult to see when their team does well. Their brains are wired to catch mistakes so that the first thing they see is the problem.
If we have trained our brains to see all the fires that need extinguishing, the brain will draw our attention to them. If you are a presidential bodyguard, you must be hyper- vigilant to sketchy-looking characters. This exact mechanism also plays out if you are a pessimist or an optimist. One
will see obstacles, and the other will see opportunities.
You can train your brain to have a positive Tetris effect, whereby your brain starts to create a new pattern for how you look at the world instead of seeing all the fires you need to put out.
The Reticular Activating System
The reticular activating system (RAS) is a structure that starts above our spinal cord; it’s about two inches long and the width of a pencil.
Except for our sense of smell, all the other senses connect to the RAS. The RAS sits in our brain and senses and filters what sensory information gets through and what doesn’t. In other words, it acts as a bridge
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that connects the subconscious part of our brain with the conscious part of our brain.
At any given time, only a certain amount of information is helpful to your brain. For instance, if there’s a predator about to attack us, that’s the only information our brain needs to drive us to action – RUN! The RAS disregards irrelevant information like the colour of the surrounding flowers or the type of birdsong we hear.
The RAS only allows the sensory information relevant to our situation to get through – in this case, our survival. At the same time, it also actively blocks any other information.
The RAS and Behaviour
The first few times anyone gets into a car to learn to drive, it can be a nerve- racking experience – sweaty palms, a rush of excitement. But once driving becomes a well-worn habit, we no longer have to think about this skill. Instead, the skill of driving has become automated.
Once a skill has become a habit, any information around it is not as pertinent as when we were first learning to master that skill. In the case of driving, the RAS will actively block information connected with the automated driving skill. Instead, it will prioritise other details. For example, if the brake lights of the car ahead of us suddenly flashed red, our RAS would filter this information to our attention so we could react in time by hitting the brakes.
Let’s say you visit Japan and rent a car. Driving in Japan will be a different experience than how you are used to driving at home. You won’t be able to read the road signs if you don’t understand Japanese. Most likely, you will be used to different rules of the road.
Driving in Japan will feel very similar to how you felt the first time you ever drove. The reason is your RAS does not have any information to know what to filter, so it has to let everything through, stressing you out like before.
An Example of the RAS at Work
An excellent study that illustrates how the RAS works looked at couples with newborn babies who lived near airports.
The study found that both parents would sleep right through a plane taking off nearby, which was extremely loud – yet the mother would wake up if the baby stirred in the next room, which comparatively made a lot less noise than a thundering plane.
The mother operates on the thought that the welfare of her child is significantly more important than the sounds of a plane taking off. This thought programs the RAS to block out the sounds of a roaring jet engine but to be hypersensitive to the sounds of a stirring child in the next room.
Interestingly, the father often didn’t wake up for a crying baby. So, the researchers took the mother away for a few days, and guess what: Dad suddenly started waking up when the baby cried. Why? Because before, the information wasn’t necessary to him; the mother was there to tend to the child. But now that Mom has gone, it’s Dad’s job, so the information is essential, and the RAS lets it through.
Using the RAS to Change Behaviour and Reach Goals
Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, succinctly wrote: ‘Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you think about it.’
So far, we have established that only essential and relevant sensory information gets past our RAS, and what is defined as critical information is entirely specific to the individual. We can use this fundamental understanding to our advantage.
We can consciously decide what is important to us, and in turn, our RAS will draw our attention to any information that corroborates our interests.
I remember when my wife and I had our first child, Lukas. Everything associated with my baby boy became essential to me. So every time I walked into the grocery store, I started to see diapers, whereas I was utterly oblivious to them before my son was born. Likewise, when I walked down the street, I started to see baby strollers everywhere as well as the occasional pacifier accidentally discarded on a sidewalk.
I didn’t see baby-related things before because it wasn’t relevant to my narrative, but once my son became part of that
narrative, anything and everything that I connected as meaningful to my son was brought to my attention by my RAS.
We can experiment with our RAS with simple objectives. For example, the next time you go for a walk or run, give yourself a goal to be aware of things that would typically go under your radar – perhaps counting the number of church spires, yellow cars, dog walkers, mailboxes, or fire hydrants.
It does not matter what you choose. The list is endless. The goal is to consciously choose what you want to be aware of and program your RAS to filter for that variable.
When It Counts
Practicing this simple skill costs us nothing when we are out and about. I think of it more as an investment that has returns.
Practicing anything makes us more skilled, whether it’s bouncing a basketball, playing an instrument, or speaking a new language. For example, actively choosing to spot a particular object makes us proficient at doing it. If we do it enough times, it becomes a habit.
It is a curious exercise to do when you are out for a walk to see things you would not usually register. However, the actual return on investment of this skill is when we are not in a good place mentally or emotionally. Our minds tend to default to negative thinking and cumbersome emotions during these states.
The practice of using active awareness regarding what we want the RAS to bring to our attention acts as a secure rope that we can use to pull ourselves out of the sucking quagmire of rumination and overthinking.
Active Awareness Is the Essence of Resilience
We are knocked off our feet by an unhelpful state of mind, and we feel the pull to sink deeper into that state. But we have trained for this. So we stop the slippery slope and actively replace the RAS filter with one that serves us.
In Benjamin Hardy’s book, Personality Isn’t a Permanent, he suggests several tools we can use to engage our attention. I’ve included those that I actively use myself that I find work remarkably well.
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resilience programs to individuals and to teams. Learn more at www.MINDtalk.no. Subscribe to Jason’s free podcast, “It’s An Inside Job,” here: http://www.mindtalk.no/its-an-inside-job.html.
Jason is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Jason training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Jason W Birkevold Liem helps people to think about their thinking so they are better at managing themselves, others and situations. He achieves this through an informative and engaging process that educates people about the brain, cognitive psychology and interpersonal communication. As a result, clients are better able to face their professional and private challenges with more confidence, certainty and clarity. Through his company, MINDtalk, he designs and delivers brain-based leadership and personal
The 3/24
Think of three new things you are grateful for in the last 24 hours. The critical point here is the word new. Our brains get better at it by actively searching for novel and positive experiences each day. This active awareness strengthens these neural networks, and over a short period, we become more adept at noticing the positives that are already latent in the environment.
The Doubler
Think of one positive experience you have had over the last 24 hours, and then write down every detail in bullet form about that one experience. That list may include what you were thinking, saying, doing, where you were, and what was going on. Here is the salient point: The brain can’t distinguish between visualisation and authentic experience. So the most effective method is to write down the details of the incident.
When you journal about a positive experience, your brain doubles it for you.
If we continuously do this for 21 days, our brain creates a habit of automatically connecting the dots for us. Our RAS begins to bring this information automatically to our attention. This habit transforms how the brain and body work.
Active Awareness
Active awareness is the essence of resilience. Where we choose to invest our attention is what we have flagged as important. When something is important to us, it means we have assigned value to it, and we have given it meaning. This meaning defines the search parameters of the RAS, which in turn creates the lens of how we perceive the world around us. It determines what we pay attention to and how we either engage or disengage with the world.
Psychologists found that when people view themselves as depressed, they don’t notice or pay attention to the moments when they are feeling good throughout a given day.
Additionally, when we view ourselves as depressed, the only memories that readily come to mind align with our current viewpoints. Our entire past becomes coloured by our present identity. What once may have been good experiences are filtered by your current narrative.
What happens when we encounter stress and struggle? Stress is the great litmus test of how we are using the skill of active awareness. Are we embracing the struggle, or are we disengaging from it? What is our narrative around the source of the stress? What are the labels we are sticking to the situation and ourselves?
Resilience is about changing how we perceive stress – embracing the struggle. As we’ve explored in one of my previous articles, Learning: Embracing the Struggle, the struggle is a signpost indicating that we should head in the direction of learning, growth, and development.
Stress can strengthen us, but whether it fortifies us or not depends on the meaning we give to it. Active awareness implies we are the author of our experience. We confront our reality intentionally, not reactively. We are the ones who intentionally assign meaning to our experience. We are the ones formulating the story.
Conclusion
The Reticular Activating System is a tiny portion of the brain, but it has enormous implications based on how we use it. Use the skill of active awareness so that it works for you and not against you. As with all things, we have the freedom and the choice to ascribe whatever meaning we would like. The question is, do we do it reactively or intentionally?
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The 12th World Administrators Summit The World Administrators Summit is a working meeting that discusses the issues challenging our profession across the globe, explains Helen Monument
It hardly seems any time at all since the 11th World Administrators Summit was held online in 2020. But here at WA-Alliance HQ, we’re already working behind the scenes to make the 12th WA-Summit as successful as the last one.
We thought long and hard about a face-to- face Summit, planned to be held prior to the IAAP Summit in Nashville, Tennessee in July this year. Sadly, the uncertain world of COVID restrictions threw us too many unknowns and risks, so we have decided to continue with the online format and again spread the event over two Saturdays, 15th and 22nd October 2022.
A Two-day Working Meeting
The World Administrators Summit is not a conference; it’s a working meeting, open to credentialed delegates who come together to actively discuss the issues that are challenging our profession across the globe, bringing to the table the voices of their associations, networks or countries.
Day 1 is focused on four facilitated discussion groups, and on Day 2 the actions and recommendations from those groups are presented to all the Delegates for approval before we share those outcomes with the world. We’re delighted that Lucy Brazier, Heather Baker, Karen Nanninga and Juanita Mort have again agreed to be our facilitators.
We have chosen the four discussion topics from the Summit survey input that was completed at the start of this year and have distilled that data into the most urgent topics that the respondents believe the Summit should focus on. Full details of the Summit, including the agenda, can be found on the WA-Summit website: www.wa-summit.com
What’s Expected of a Delegate?
Crucial to the success of the Summit discussion topics is the pre-work we send out to the Delegates. They are expected to consult with the members of their association or network in their country on each of the four topics so that they can bring those opinions and concerns to the Summit for all to hear and discuss. All consultation documents and information is sent to the Delegates well in advance so that they have plenty of time to gather feedback from their members before the Summit in October.
We have decided this year to expand the reach of the Summit by increasing the number of delegates allowed from each
country from three to five. We’re also allowing Observers to attend again, who don’t take an active part, but watch and listen to the discussions to learn more about the work done at the Summit.
Delegates are usually appointed by their association or network. It is not necessary for an association or network to be a member of the WA-Alliance in order to attend, but Delegates must meet specific criteria set out in the Delegate Credential form.
Feedback from the 11th WA-Summit
At the 11th WA-Summit in 2021, 69 delegates attended from 27 countries. Collectively, they represented the voices of over 200,000 administrative professionals.
Our post-Summit survey told us that 98% of the attendees found the Summit to be productive or very productive. Here’s what one Delegate wrote:
“I feel like I’ve benefited from participating in a variety of ways. I expressed my opinion, I met attitudes different from mine, I learned things I did not know and, above all, I was involved in shaping a better future for administrative Assistants.”
elevate the global administrative community. Helen is a stimulating, knowledgeable and entertaining conference speaker.
Helen is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Helen training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Helen Monument inspires and encourages Assistants to be the best they can be by sharing 30 years of experience as a management support professional. Her career has taken her from Secretary to Office Manager and Business Support Team Leader, so she understands the profession inside out. Helen now offers coaching, counselling, mentoring and training to Assistants at all levels. She is also the Chair of the World Administrators Alliance, whose aims are to guide, influence, positively develop and
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My Journey to TEDx
Bonnie Low-Kramen gives us a behind-the-scenes look at taking part in a virtual TEDx
I didn’t expect to be giving a TEDx talk in 2022. It was not part of my plan or even on my bucket list. That’s how life goes sometimes, with unexpected twists and turns and moments that can change everything. My 14-minute TEDx talk is called “The Real Reasons People Quit” and was posted to TED.com on February 25, 2022, but the journey began nearly a year before.
How It Began
I was reading my Rutgers Alumni magazine and spotted a small article about a business professor doing work on issues of racism and discrimination. I reached out to Dr. Holmes by email to see if I could learn more about how he was approaching these issues with his business students and to tell him about my work with Assistants and leaders.
That email turned into a Zoom call, which led to an invitation to give two virtual presentations at Rutgers Camden in March 2021. One presentation was for the business students, and one was for the university staff. After it was over, I corresponded with one student who had a strong response to what I shared about leading in the workplace.
I heard from that student again in August 2021. Pariti Sutaria was the lead organizer of the TEDxRutgersCamden event scheduled for 2022. Would I be interested in applying to speak at the event? Yes.
Even though I watch lots of TED talks, had attended two TEDx events in person, and had even applied to speak at two others in the past few years, I had no idea what happened behind the scenes.
As a first-time TEDx speaker, the whole experience was something of a rollercoaster. The only thing that came easy was my topic. Speaking about what is really going on in our workplace is a subject that is at the forefront of my mind every day.
The TEDx Process
The TED franchise is a well-oiled machine with tried-and-true policies, protocols, and practices. The student organizers of Rutgers Camden were committed to their first-ever TEDx event, determined to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” As a speaker, the deadlines were frequent and formidable and a little daunting.
Even the process to apply to speak was a major commitment. I had to submit both the written script and a video of me delivering the talk. The application represented script version 1. The final talk was version 13.
Once receiving the happy news via email that my talk was accepted, I was then sent a packet of numerous legal documents to review and sign, including my commitment to hit specific deadlines and adhere to the TED policies. And so, my journey with TEDxRutgersCamden began.
As part of the prep, the student organizers urged us to read TED founder Chris Anderson’s book about delivering TED talks. I was taken with his idea to fall in love with every word, with every sentence of my talk. I thought I was in love around version 5, but then came the coaching. Each speaker was assigned a coach, and
the talented Rebecca Massoud gave me important and subtle input. Then came the fact-checking and suggestions for changes which made me think and re-think my word choices and sentence structures. For example, in version 10, I spoke the actual name of an airline in one anecdote and was given feedback not to use the brand name. Got it.
My Words Are Personal
I am a writer, first and foremost, and my words are personal. Very personal. I don’t think I have ever had my words analyzed so intently. I admit to being annoyed at times. The script needed to be memorized; no teleprompters or notes allowed. Therefore, every script change meant changing my memorization. I felt torn between wanting a great script and just wanting the changes to stop.
I found myself thinking about my former employer, actress Olympia Dukakis, who called herself a “thespian nun,” as she would memorize lines for days on end. Script changes were all part of her work, with changed pages delivered in different colors. I remember thinking how time-consuming it was to memorize whole scripts for plays or movies. Like everything, memorization is just plain old hard work.
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the Top 7 Conferences to Attend since 2018 and was featured in Forbes. She is a sought-after keynote speaker and trainer at conferences and corporations around the world.
Bonnie is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Bonnie training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Bonnie Low-Kramen is recognized as one of the world’s most respected and inspirational thought leaders on workplace issues. Her work has taken her to 14 countries and 38 states. She worked as the Personal Assistant to Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis for 25 years until 2011. Her TEDx talk is called “The Real Reasons People Quit.” Her “Be the Ultimate Assistant” workshop (which she co-teaches with Vickie Sokol Evans) has been named one of
The TEDx process gave me the chance to reflect on the feedback. While I did not accept all the changes, the truth is that the edits, suggested changes, and the revisions on the revisions all served to make my talk stronger. More than once, I thought I was finally done editing. Wrong.
From version 1 to version 13, the words are still my words, and the thoughts are still my thoughts, only clearer. I didn’t think it would happen, but I fell deeply in love with every sentence, with every word. I can stand behind the words and feel gratitude for the TEDx process, which supported me to be a better writer and speaker.
Another COVID Curveball
All along, we thought the event would be live in a 600-seat theatre in January 2022. The COVID numbers in New Jersey changed all that. In December, the decision was made to make the event a virtual one via videos streamed online on February 5, 2022.
When going virtual became official, I was not surprised. My first thought was, wow, these students were just thrown a massive curveball and they handled the adversity with grace, good sense, and solid communication. I felt proud of them. Pivoting from a live event to a virtual one is a challenge for the most experienced of us, and here they were in their twenties, doing this during a global pandemic. Impressive.
Planning to be in front of a live audience versus shooting a video are two very different ways of thinking. Wardrobe was one of the things that changed – no pun intended. You don’t dress the same for being fifty feet away from people and seeing your whole body compared to planning to be seen only from the waist up on camera. So many choices and new decisions to make, and all of them took time and discussion. The clock was ticking, and the days were flying.
The Shoot
Shooting the final video on January 20 in my home studio took the entire day. Seven full takes and about twenty false starts. Barking dogs and lawnmowers distracted my focus. I am beyond grateful to my partner, Robert Sanders, who organized the lighting, the sound, and the whole video setup in front of a green screen so that I could drop my preferred photo into the background.
When the time came to press “Send” on the final video to go to the Rutgers students, I hesitated for a moment. I thought to myself – Did I do my best? Am I ready to send this as “the one”? The answer to both questions was yes. It was 6 p.m. and I was ready for a glass of wine! I was physically and emotionally wiped out. The final video was sent into cyberspace. I felt like I had run a marathon.
Going Live (Stream)
The day finally arrived. Saturday, February 5. The livestream on YouTube was to begin at noon ET. My dear friend Vickie Sokol Evans flew in to be with Robert and me to watch together. There were balloons, flowers, food, and champagne, plus a few more good friends gathered in our Florida living room for our watch party.
As I got dressed, I knew that I was involved in doing something important, something that will matter and that I would never forget.
My video now had an audience of hundreds and then thousands. No matter what was about to happen, I loved the words I said.
The Response
The response to my ideas around the real reasons people quit their jobs hit a nerve globally. I talked about toxic work environments that permitted workplace
bullying, sexual harassment, too low compensation, and little to no support for training. The staff of the world wrote to me to say, “Yes, that is exactly why I quit.”
I asked viewers to share my talk with their leaders and HR professionals and recruiters and their colleagues. They are doing that, and I am hopeful. All the work for the talk was about making the workplace a safer and better place for the people who populate it. I want it to be better for our children and grandchildren. Don’t you?
This TEDx talk was my first. Despite the hard work, I hope it won’t be my last. One day, I will have an opportunity to stand on that red circle in front of a live audience talking about more ideas worth sharing. Or maybe not. In the meantime, my goal is to keep doing the work that matters to me and sharing ideas with my words. The words I love.
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Everything You Need To Know About Achieving Career Success Create your own success and build a robust and sustainable career says Julia Schmidt
When we think about our career journey, our efforts to grow, our commitment to learning, and everything that forms our plans and actions to achieve success, we can all agree that success is the feeling we experience when we attain our objectives.
We also know that success means different things to different people. It can be associated with happiness, living up to your potential, enjoying life and wealth, writing a symphony, becoming an entrepreneur or a published author, or just becoming the best professional you can be.
Let’s check some quotes about success that remind us that success is a positive outcome that is closely related to effort, learning, goal-setting, actions, and improvement.
Inspiring and Motivating Quotes
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” Colin Powell
“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” Conrad Hilton
“I never dreamed about success; I worked for it.” Estee Lauder
“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” Benjamin Franklin
“Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success.” David Joseph Schwartz
“Success is not a destination, but the road that you’re on. Being successful means that you’re working hard and walking your walk every day. You can only live your dream by working hard towards it. That’s living your dream.” – Marlon Wayans
The above quotes focus on elements crucial to achieving success in our career and embracing it as a process, not a destination.
Key Elements for Achieving Success
Here are some of the key elements I have identified during my career journey, or that have been inspired by reading about the topic. These are my key elements; you can elaborate your own essentials and make a list that will support you in achieving your moments of success.
Listen
Actively listening to team members, co- workers, advisors, and mentors will help you acquire different perspectives. The best way to help yourself and your team achieve confidence is to listen to what each person has to say. When you listen while people express their ideas, thoughts, and solutions, you are teaching yourselves and developing competence, which is essential in achieving and maintaining success. Listening is magic!
Be curious
Dr. Dianne Hamilton, in the book “Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential”, explains that “curiosity, by definition, takes us out of our comfort zone. It is part of our DNA and is no different from our pursuit of food, water, or sex. Our bodies are programmed to be curious and reward us when we exercise curiosity.”
Be committed
Knowing why you are on your career road and doing everything you can to keep in the right direction will drive you forward. Staying committed involves dedication, discipline, optimism, and positive thoughts. As the 14th and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, notes, “Just one small positive
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thought in the morning can change your whole day.” So, can you imagine how big a difference it can make in a whole career life?
Be resilient
Being resilient means practicing flexibility, tolerance, and positive thinking. I usually study the different ways to attain my goals by thinking: “I want to attain this goal well, and for that I need to …” The best way to avoid stress, increased frustration, uncertainty, and fear is by seeing the big picture, being prepared, and avoiding procrastination.
Know what not to do
In executing your strategy, you will face many things that nee to be handled. If you try to focus on too much, you will scatter your energy and lose your effectiveness. The faster pace and exciting results in the executing phase will open doors to more opportunities. However, increased opportunity can also increase your distraction from your primary purpose. To succeed, sort out major issues from minor ones. Selectively disengage from some strategic activities so that you can powerfully engage in the most relevant.
Take care of yourself
The pursuit of your goals, accomplishments, and success demands hard work, dedication, time, and extraordinary effort and focus. Therefore, you must understand that “there is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest”, to quote Alan Cohen, author of many inspirational books. So, take time for yourself each day to do what helps you recharge your batteries. The whetstone that sharpens our mind is our body: what we eat, how we sleep, how we exercise.
Don’t forget your family
A job is just a job. If you are married to your job from the beginning of your career, prepare to be alone when you retire. Take your family with you on your career journey. Do not abandon them. We need people! We need to keep the best people we have around us in our lives, to attain our goals, improve performance, and understand the big picture.
Juggle your expectations and deadlines
Your career journey is a long trip with many incidents, detours, roadblocks,
potholes, and surprises. Some beautiful paths during our career journey cannot be discovered without getting lost, finding new ways, creating new expectations, or embracing flexibility. Any career success is about juggling expectations and deadlines in a structured and resilient way. So, read the topics carefully in this article about accepting failure, knowing what to do, being resilient, being accountable, keeping a log of activities, being realistic, being organized, staying focused, and taking care of yourself. They will help you solve the puzzle.
Follow your core values
They support your vision, shape your behavior, and reflect your personal and professional standards. They are your principles and beliefs. In your career journey, every time you notice that what you are doing is not in keeping with what you stand for or believe, then you have to stop, reflect, and do your self-assessments. Your values are the toolset that will open the doors to success.
Accept the possibility of failure
There is no success without failure. So, the main question you must ask yourself every day is, “What can I learn from my failures?” We fail in order to grow. Without ever failing, we would never progress in our goals. Times columnist David Brooks said that “Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning.” If we want to reach our potential and great moments of success, we need to be courageous enough to be imperfect.
Be an enabler
A common personality trait of an enabler is to be helpful. By empowering others, you will be enabling positive behaviour in yourself, allowing growth and development.
Keep a log of activities
To accomplish your long-term goals, you have to make continuous progress on a day- to-day basis. Also, keep yourself organized, as there is much information you need to work with to form your strategy and create the actions that will help you attain your goals. To ensure that you move towards your goals, day after day, keep a log of all the specific tasks you need to accomplish every day. Create an objective for each day and list the activities accordingly. For each
day, ask yourself, “How are today’s tasks bringing me closer to my long-term goals?”
Be accountable
In the workplace, employee accountability is the responsibility to complete the assigned tasks, perform the duties required by the job, and be ready to fulfill any new activities to help the organization attain its goals. In planning and executing your career strategy, the same is required. You need to follow your mission, set and follow your career goals, create your activity log, and do one task at a time. It is also imperative that you emphasize your strengths, value your time, evaluate your performance, embrace feedback as a gift, and reward yourself in your moments of success.
Stay focused
Have a plan and follow your activity log, know the objective for the day and work to complete it without distractions. If social media use prevents you from dedicating enough time to fulfill your goals, eliminate it from your operational day. Owning your time and administrating it will help you create a career-focused workspace. The single greatest obstacle to being focused in this digital age is your technology, including computers, tablets, and smartphones. I have no pings, vibrations, or other notifications signaling that a voicemail, email, text message, or social media update has arrived. That gives me more control over at least 50% of my time.
Focus on the positive
We will be surrounded by positive and negative situations, ideas, results, and people on our way up to success. When we concentrate on what is not working well, our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) becomes activated. It is meant to notify us of danger and prepare us to fight. We then spend valuable energy on paying attention to things that will not help us grow faster neurologically. This is the exact opposite of what happens when we emphasize the positive.
Know your Why
We need a career strategy because we need to know the “Why” of what we are doing, to follow the right paths to achieve our dreams and goals, and understand the importance of our work in the grand scheme of things. Our career strategy helps us structure the tasks we need to perform, ensure
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Secretary Guide to Building a Successful Career Strategy, available now on Amazon.
Julia is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Julia training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Julia Schmidt is an award-winning Executive Assistant with over 20 years of experience working in different industries. She is known for being a passionate advocate for people development and in helping others succeed and embrace their leadership skills. Julia is an active networker and mentor and a proud graduate of the University of Norway with a master’s degree in Portuguese Language and Literature and has also studied Business Administration. Follow Julia on LinkedIn. Julia is the author of The Executive
competitive advantage, accelerate growth, and enhance engagement. Knowing the Why enables us to view and understand the big picture and think and act strategically in a consistent way.
Be a realist
No one knows you better than yourself. Break your strategy plan into realistic tasks, manageable pieces and set solid deadlines for achieving it. Do not let failure deflect you from the path. Once you have all your ducks in a row, take a deep breath and dive in. Move! Take action!
Taking time to pause and reflect
Typically, the moments of success are times to pause and reflect on the journey. When the rush of growth is over, and you are awaiting new challenges and more hard work, you have a unique opportunity to detect the patterns that will help you advance your career and your next steps. Plan your time of pause and reflection to match the impact of your victories, whether the accomplishments are big or small. Think about the factors that contributed to your growth. Think about the decisions and actions you took that helped you achieve success. Think about what delayed your progress. What would you do differently?
Once you have paused to consider all these questions, and have learned how you have grown and accomplished your victories, take time to celebrate. You did it! Relish your accomplishments!
To help you in this process of pause, reflection, and identifying patterns, I would like to recommend you use a powerful self-assessment tool. I call it the Success Moments Assessment.
Success Moments Assessment Step 1
Keep in mind that your career is a journey that embraces both personal and professional sides. Take a blank piece of paper and divide it into two columns: column A for Private Life and column B for Professional Life. In each column, list ten moments of success you have experienced. They can be from the past year or any time in the past. Choose what is relevant for you.
Step 2
After you finish your list, you will assess your three preferred success moments and link them to accomplishments. So, on another piece of blank paper, make a table with two columns and three rows. In column #1, you will write your three preferred career success moments (each one in one row), and in column #2, you will note the accomplishments that led to each success moment (following their respective row). You can list as many accomplishments you want as you look for patterns.
Check this example from my career to help you understand how to start filling in the table:
Suppose that one of my preferred success moments is when I got promoted from Executive Assistant to Senior Executive Assistant. So, that is what I will write in column #1: Promotion from EA to Senior EA in 2018. In column #2, I will write the accomplishments related to the promotion:
1. Increased company knowledge 2. Good results in improving the company’s
internal communication 3. Successful onboarding of the new CEO
Step 3
• To identify the patterns, answer these questions about your feelings and reflections regarding your great success moments:
• Did these moments give you motivation? • Were they related to specific career
goals? • Did they make you feel proud of your job
and career?
What did this exercise tell you about
• your true source of motivation, • benefitting from your strengths, • being prepared, • embracing hard work, and • setting goals?
How can you make these moments of success happen again? How can you apply your learning from the existing patterns? Do this exercise two to three times a year. It will be like giving yourself a performance review. Create an action plan and road map to maximize your results and help you build a robust and sustainable career.
Create your own success!
This article is adapted from Julia’s book The Executive Secretary Guide to Building a Successful Career Strategy, available on Amazon.
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Eliminating Networking Anxiety
Chi Chi Okezie advises applying simple techniques and creating a plan to overcome networking anxiety
Networking is an excellent way to build your career, brand, skillsets, development, leadership, etc. Unfortunately, many times we find ourselves shying away from networking, and procrastinating due to anxiety.
In this article, let’s focus on how to mitigate various aspects of anxiety. Our primary goal is to produce effective and efficient networking outcomes. Applying simple techniques and putting a plan in place can offer solutions to common setbacks.
Fear of the Unknown
Often, we know the necessity of networking but fail to be consistent due to the fear of the unknown. The best tip is to focus on the reason and / or outcome(s) for your networking goals. Ask these questions:
• What are three positive outcomes achieved from attending this event?
• What value can I offer to the people I meet at this function?
• How can my story or journey inspire others?
• How can connecting with new people enhance my network(s)?
• How can attending this event lead to more successful encounters?
Taking the focus away from any anxious thoughts and redirecting it toward your role at the event is empowering. Getting hold of your emotions and being positive about the outcome(s) of the event can motivate you to attend more events.
Seek Out Support
Networking is not meant to be done alone. Reach out and lean on your current networks, co-workers, colleagues and trusted friends. This ultimately requires maintaining and fostering relationships and involves being authentic and transparent about your current state of being. Schedule time to properly connect and share your objectives. Be open to constructive feedback and different perspectives in order to make progress. Ask these questions:
• Do I need additional support? • If so, who can I reach out to for
assistance? • Does my current network enable safe
spaces and self-expression? • Am I ready to change and do I believe
there is something better for me? • Am I willing to use the helpful advice /
feedback to develop? • If not, where am I getting stuck?
• Can I use this experience to motivate and encourage others?
Follow Through
As you are navigating through your networking journey, do not give up. Stay committed to accomplishing your goals. Do not compare yourself to others or think there is only one path to success. Create helpful habits, affirmations and reminders to help you stay on course. Listen to useful podcasts, read relevant publications and engage with like-minded individuals. Establish a schedule or timeline for networking and connecting with others. Join or get active in groups that share your values and understand your needs.
Reach out and set aside time to monitor your progress, share wins and evaluate your methods. Ask these questions:
• Am I moving forward in my endeavors? • If not, where am I getting stuck? • Have I increased my confidence and self-
awareness? • What new things am I learning and
applying to my networking? • Where do I see myself 3 / 6 / 9 months
from now?
Things are not always going to be perfect; expect to be a work in progress. Do not get discouraged. Your transformation is a key indicator of your growth and development. Above all, the most important takeaway is to find value in yourself and share it with others.
Networking Day by the City of Jonesboro, GA, on November 13th. Chi Chi is also an award-winning author, trainer, speaker and blogger. Visit the company’s official website to connect and learn more: snseminars.com.
Chi Chi Okezie is the owner and producer of SIMPLEnetworking, LLC, a consulting firm based in Metro Atlanta, GA, USA which specializes in business networking, diversity and inclusion. Her company was granted a Proclamation for Business
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Hate Your Job? Here’s Some Practical Advice Rhonda Scharf shares tips to help you create a better situation for yourself
We all have days when we don’t feel like going to work. But have you ever reached a point where you dreaded going into work? When you basically disliked everything about your job?
Maybe you kept putting one foot in front of the other while looking for another job – searching for anything that would get you away from where you were.
If that’s where you are right now, you are not alone.
It is a really difficult situation, especially during the pandemic, because we know that not everyone is able to quit the job they hate while waiting for a job they love to appear. You still have to pay the bills. Walking away isn’t an option for most people.
So, we stay. We stay in the job we hate, and each day it pulls us further and further away from the things we love.
But there is hope! Here are five great pieces of advice – tips to help give you the momentum to keep going and eventually create a better situation for yourself. These aren’t “think positive and you’ll be okay” motivational candies. Instead, they’re practical and useful. They’ll help you keep going even though the going is tough.
1. Put You First
To take care of anything (or anyone), you need to ensure that your mental and physical health come first. Choose what is best for you before choosing what is best
for the company. That means you need to prioritize your rest, diet, and work/life balance.
Sometimes when we really hate our job, it is due to unreasonable demands and hours. Are you overworked? Do you have any time in your life for anything but work?
Start making sure that your job is not the only thing you do each day. Ensure that each day or week you carve out time:
• to shop for healthy food (instead of always doing takeaway on the run)
• to get eight hours of sleep each night (or at the very least, six)
• to enjoy a hobby (and if you need to find one, start looking)
• to do your job hunting
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Rhonda is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Rhonda training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Rhonda Scharf, CSP, HoF, GSF is a Certified Speaking Professional, Hall of Fame, trainer and author based in Ottawa. She helps organizations feel motivated and educated through her interactive, realistic and fun training programs and keynote speeches. If your team needs a boost by increasing their effectiveness and efficiency, then Rhonda will get you On the Right Track. Rhonda is the author of Alexa is Stealing Your Job, available now on Amazon.
• for friends and family (whom you enjoy being around)
• for exercise and • for anything else that brings you joy
We can get overwhelmed when we’re unhappy and that can paralyze us, preventing us from taking any action toward self-help. You can avoid that paralysis by putting your basic needs first. It’s not being selfish – it’s being smart, and in the long run you’ll be helping not only yourself but the ones you love.
2. Focus on This Hour or This Moment
Don’t let panic about your future take over. You can’t worry that you’ll never get another job you love, that this job will ruin your motivation forever, or that it will hurt you in the long run.
Focus on what you are doing this hour or at this moment. It makes sense that your extreme unhappiness finds you struggling – that would be the case for anyone in your situation. Give yourself permission to be unhappy with your job, but don’t project that unhappiness onto your future.
Be as present and mindful as you can be at the moment you are in. Don’t worry about the future right now; just focus on this hour or this moment.
3. Diagnose the Dislike
It is essential to figure out what it is about your current job that has made you so unhappy. Is it the tasks? The company? The culture? Your boss? To ensure you don’t fall into the same trap again in the future, you need to reflect on what it is you want and what you don’t want.
Will money make the difference? Is it who you work with? Are your co-workers the
reason you don’t feel happy? Do you feel like you don’t belong? Is there something you’re being asked to do that doesn’t sit right with you? Do you feel like your opinion isn’t valued or you’re being disrespected?
Ask yourself what you want. What are you motivated by? What did you like about your other jobs? Do you need flexibility, meaningful work, respect, great co- workers, a different location, collaborative working, or something else?
Write down all of the things you dislike about your job. Then write down the things you really like about it. Pros and cons. Once you see them on paper, it will be easier to spot what you need to adjust (if possible). You’ll also pick out things that will be non- negotiable for your next job.
This reflection will take time, but if you sit down daily and think about everything that happened at work each day, and how the day went, it will help you identify where the issues lie and where the gaps are. That will be an enormous help in your job search.
4. Implement Systems and Routines
Daily routines can help to keep us from feeling overwhelmed. Have a regular personal routine that you follow Monday to Friday. For instance: sleep, work, exercise, and routines while at work. Use to-do lists to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed while you are at work and routines for the after-work hours to ensure you are doing things other than work.
Systems and routines allow you to focus on what you can control. Just working and then falling into bed until the next day doesn’t give you control at all.
It can also be helpful to set milestones each day, such as walking 7,000 steps or being in bed by 11 p.m. Ensure you are eating healthy
foods and not drinking too much. Once you’re in your dream job, you can relax a bit more. But until then, having some rules and accountability will help you feel more in control of your future.
5. Ask for Help
This is the step many people shy away from. Just because you’re in a job that isn’t a good fit for you, does not mean there is anything wrong with you. You should not be ashamed of your situation in any way. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot – you wouldn’t judge the other person, you’d help them.
So, reach out to your network for support, job leads, and a listening ear. The social media channels for Executive Support Magazine are strong, and I can guarantee your plea will not go unanswered if you ask this community for help. Obviously, be aware that people at your current organization may be able to read your posts, so keep that in mind.
And don’t assume that because your unhappiness is so obvious to you, your co- workers see it as well. People aren’t mind readers, so don’t wait for them to come to you with assistance. Also, many people don’t know how to offer support when it hasn’t been asked for. So don’t assume they don’t care – set yourself up for success by speaking up and asking for what you need.
Being in a job you hate isn’t nearly as uncommon as it may feel to you right now. However, passively accepting that you just aren’t a good fit and continuing to suffer in your ill-fitting job isn’t healthy for you or your family.
Stay positive, keep doing what you need to do, implement the suggestions in this article – and eventually you’ll discover what you need in your next job.
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To fairly answer this question, we should first examine the ‘Modern Workplace and Worker,’ the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and coding as a transferable skill.
Setting the Stage
In 2016, I made one of the boldest moves in my career: I decided to step away from my role as Director of Technology and Education for a non-profit outreach. Why? I wanted to extend my reach beyond one community and help springboard training, tool up, and reskill the next generation of the workforce. Simply put, I wanted to be an intricate part of the next industrial and technological revolution. I believe that we live in a world that is technology-inspired and people-driven.
Let’s fast forward to September 2018, in my 11th year at the Microsoft Ignite Conference (for IT pros, developers, and software architects). The driving theme over the week-long conference was edge computing, AI (artificial intelligence), IoT (internet of things), and how companies worldwide were implementing innovative technologies to drive efficiencies: the modern workplace and worker.
Upon my return, I wrote an article, Shift Happens. The article addresses adopting
the ‘Modern Workplace and Worker,’ ongoing technology shifts, and mindset. I heard countless claims of organizational complacency and a disregard for digital transformation; however, some understood and were appreciative of the training gained. It was time to reevaluate our adaptability. If you were not ready, it was time to get ready regardless of where your organization stood in the technological evolution. And BOOM – on March 11, 2020, our world and the way we interact and work shifted to the modern workplace and worker.
The Modern Workplace and Worker
The modern workplace is a term that identifies organizations that recognize the technological evolution and are willing to provide workers with the necessary technology and tools that drive collaboration and efficiency. However, merely utilizing the term to refer to one’s company does not make it a modern workplace; it is rooted in two methodological principles.
Becoming a modern workplace can be challenging. It is a collaborative endeavor! We must understand that shifting is not easy nor just about technology; it is about the positive change that technology can bring through the people, projects,
and processes it touches. However, this requires forward-thinking organizations that deeply desire a collaborative workforce and recognize that digital tools and technology can drive positive change.
Second, there are endless possibilities with the adoption of the modern workplace, which leads to the modern worker. Modern workers must be flexible, adaptable, and clearly understand that digital tools and technologies springboard productivity and efficiency; thus, how you work as an individual, with a team, and within your organization all play a significant role in your adaptability. The ability to seamlessly automate the collection of customer information and to track and schedule jobs and tasks at various data points can help you say goodbye to disconnected systems and processes – and create efficient workflow.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)
Did you know that we are currently in the Fourth Industrial Revolution? This concept was first introduced in 2015 by an article and book written by Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum:
The Coding Evolution: The Bigger Picture Is coding truly the next skill and technology to learn as an administrative professional? asks Vonetta Watson
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Vonetta Watson MA Ed., CPC, MCT, is the owner of TechGem Educational Technologies and is a 20-year veteran, SME, facilitator, instructor, mentor, trainer, speaker, author, coach, consultant, and software migration and implementation specialist. As an Instructional Technology and Software Education Specialist, she is an enthusiastic, dedicated, and committed educator with an innate ability to understand and motivate
“…together shape a future that works for all by putting people first, empowering them, and constantly reminding ourselves that all of these new technologies are first and foremost tools made by people for people.” ~ Professor Klaus Schwab
Professor Schwab’s words speak volumes. We create, use, and maintain technology, no matter the type. This also means that we must learn how to use technologies and evolve as the technologies evolve – become a modern worker. Previous revolutions took time to gain momentum and were prolongations of one another; however, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is unique and accelerated by 2020’s paradigm shift. Workforce expectations are rapidly shifting. To keep pace, we must close the skills gap, be open to shifts, and develop transferable skills. Where will your skills land you in the UniWorkVerse?
The Coding Evolution
Is coding truly the next in-demand job skill to learn as an administrative professional? This is not a simple yes or no answer, nor does it answer what coding language you should learn. The demand for coders and coding skills has been afoot since 2016, with predictions of being one of the most in-demand jobs over the following years. Why? Because coding is the language of our world and vital to businesses.
As administrative professionals, learning and adapting to software with minimal code is crucial. Coding is also transferable to tech-adjacent jobs, roles, and functions. It enhances creativity and writing skills, critical thinking, problem- solving, and a clear understanding of the proper technologies to use and when. Coding may seem like a new buzzword; I assure you it is not. The concept of coding has been around since the 1800s – yes, the 1800s.
We all use code every day in the form of no-code or low-code. I started coding in my twenties. It was a social media platform similar to Facebook, but there was no app; it was all online. I was excited to create my page. I adorned it with media, animation, the works. I did not realize that a little knowledge of HyperText Markup Language code (HTML 2) would stay with me forever and would not only move me into other technologies but also inspire me to learn HTML 3, 4, 5, and CSS as well as a little Java, Swift, and Python.
Bill Gates says that coding is not complex; it’s just “a little mathematics” and “If” statements (sound familiar?). Where are my Excel users? How many of you write your formulas or piggyback on functions? Excel is comprised of syntax codes. When you write a formula, you are essentially coding. When you master Excel, this opens the door to applications such as SQL or Power BI, for example. The office applications you use every day utilize coding regardless of the industry or software. Once you understand the backbone of that code, it makes it easier for you to adapt. A great example is SQL, which is used in Oracle and Ingres; of course, the code’s derivatives make it proprietary.
No-Code and Low-Code
Software such as BettyBlocks, KissFlow, Microsoft PowerApps, and Google App Maker are considered low-code applications. They offer quick, easy, drag- and-drop interfaces for fast, seamless software development with minimal code and in specific situations. No-code is precisely what it says: no code is required. Apps that come to mind are Mailchimp, Bubble App Builder, AirTable, Zapier, and Survey Monkey, allowing for a quick build and integration into almost any platform with the click of a button.
Begin Your Coding Journey
So, where do you go from here? Forward! Be creative and drive innovation. Begin your journey with what you know; you can upskill more quickly. If you are a Microsoft Word user, then step into Visual Basic. Google Suite user, AppSheet. Just for fun, try building a no-code app with your family or a group. Want to challenge yourself outside of work? Take an online course for Python, R, Ruby, or Go. The possibilities are endless! Learn, grow, and go!
learners into the twenty-first century using unique combinations of educational technology.
Vonetta is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Vonetta training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Tech Fun Fact
The world’s first recorded coder was an English female mathematician and writer, Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace). Lovelace is noted for writing the world’s first machine algorithm for Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, or the Analytical Engine, which was considered the first-ever computer.
(Ada Lovelace watercolor portrait by Alfred Edward Chalon – Science Museum Group, public domain)
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Going Green: The EA’s Role in Sustainability Pat Woods details eight best practices you can employ to move your organization to a more sustainable future
I am writing this article from my home office here in Costa Rica whilst dealing with the challenges of 24°C/75°F temperature year-round, three beautiful oceans, 200 volcanoes and the majority of the land mass blanketed with dense rainforests full of exotic plant and animal life. It’s a tough life, but someone has to live it! As I sit here in my little adopted country and formulate the concepts of this article, I am reminded of the words of our President, Carlos Alvarado Quesada:
“Today, humankind is in a quest for answers to the pressing convergence of crises, both sanitary and climatic as well as economic and energetic. Given our moral authority in these four major areas, Costa Rica is ready to lead the process in order to achieve, by 2030, the conservation of at least 30% of land and marine areas worldwide.”
Therefore, in line with the theme of this article and noting that just as thousands
of pieces make up a puzzle (representing a beautiful depiction), each of us can do our part, both at work and at home, to complete this beautiful puzzle of planet Earth. I do not plan to address your home recycling habits, but I do want to show how as an EA, you can make a strategic contribution to the green initiatives of your organization.
What Is Meant by Sustainability?
I could give you the official definition from UNESCO (addressing society, environment and economics), but perhaps a simple illustration will make more sense. Imagine that I am conducting the ACEA (Advanced Certificate for the Executive Assistant) course in your hometown and you invite me to stay over the weekend in your holiday home, which is a short drive from the training site. You indicate that you have
stocked the kitchen with more than enough food and beverage and the unit has just undergone a thorough cleaning – all given to me free of charge with only the simple request that when I depart, I leave the unit exactly how I found it.
Assuming I am both a decent and appreciative fellow, I would gladly comply with your request with a heartfelt thank you for your hospitality. If just the opposite, I would eat your food, drink your beverages, break your dishes and trash your place. Think of planet Earth as that holiday home, which we check into when we are born, and then the big question arises: When it is time for checkout, how will we leave it?
This is sustainability in a nutshell. As a further explanation of our theme, borrow some color pencils and then remove the green pencil because we are going to color this completed puzzle – you guessed it –
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GREEN. So here, with a dash of clarity, are three common terms that are sometimes used interchangeably or in some cases even confused.
Going green
This refers to all aspects of environmentally friendly products, from fashion to buildings to the movement as a whole.
Eco-friendly
This means that a product, practice or activity will not harm the environment.
Sustainability
This is the philosophy that what we do today will not deplete resources for future generations.
So here is a key question: Is your company involved in green initiatives?
Which major companies are setting the pace with sustainability?
Company Main Initiative
Tesla Electric-powered vehicles
United Airlines
Fuel-efficient airplanes
Coca-Cola Water conservation
Toyota Carbon footprint reduction
Target Eco-clothing
Starbucks Coffee tables from recycled coffee grounds
Dell Safe product disposal
McDonalds Energy-efficient appliances
Bank of America
Electronic statements
Google Energy-efficient data centers
If you work for any of these companies, then congratulations and keep up the good work. If not, what role can you as an EA have in these exciting and value-contributing initiatives?
Best Practices
Consider these eight best practices. Some you can make a direct contribution to, and others you can champion by working with other functions in your organization.
1. Champion a Recycling Program
Perhaps not the most glamourous part of your job description, but you may wish to walk around the offices and breakrooms in your company and look for plastic containers and cardboard items in the trash can as well as organic waste (defined as food waste and food-soiled packages). Now you have a good case for recycling containers in centralized areas of your company. Other items, such as ink and toner cartridges, can be placed in special identified bins and then shipped back to the manufacturer or a designated dealer. This later activity is referred to as IR (Investment Recovery), which is noted in point 6 below.
2. Move Toward a Paperless Office
If we could get in a time machine and go back to 1975 and visit the offices of Xerox’s California Research Center, the head, George E. Pake, would tell us:
“…in 1995, my office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with a keyboard sitting on my desk. I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button. I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”
If Mr. Pake were alive today and paid a visit to your office or those of your senior leadership, would he still feel the same way? Here are some practical ways that the EA can move in this direction. Instead of making numerous trips to the copy machine, encourage your executives to make use of (e.g.) Google Docs, which will allow you and your colleagues to work on a document or spreadsheet in real time, or consider using a service such as Dropbox as an inexpensive way to store and share files via the cloud. If you are still in the world of faxing (the fax machine is not in a museum just yet), services such as eFax.com can send them as paperless emails.
3. Some May Refuse – But You Insist on Reuse
According to American Express, approximately 4 million pens are thrown away every day! As an alternative, can
you or your colleagues purchase reusable pens? Then the cartridges can be replaced, which in the long run will be a cost savings for your organization. Other key areas, such as marker boards in place of large paper pads and taking digital notes instead of sticky notes, will go a long way to reduce the waste. What about plates, cups and cutlery in the breakroom? When these are used one time and then thrown away, the plastic material contributes to 150 million tons of waste each year (source: NRDC – Natural Resources Defense Council). Can you replace these with multiple-use, washable substitutes?
4. Plant a Great Idea
Has your organization ever thought about putting plants in the offices (or adding more to those already there)? Have you ever heard of the biophilia hypothesis? It is the suggestion that humans possess a desire to seek connections with nature.
Consider some key benefits backed up by studies:
Cleaner air
According to research from Dr. Fraser Torpy, Director of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, indoor plants can help reduce carbon dioxide levels by about 10% in air-conditioned offices and 25% in buildings without air conditioning.
Stress reduction
Dr. Torpy’s research also documented a 37% decrease in tension and anxiety and a 38% reduction in fatigue.
5. Don’t Procrastinate – Donate
The good news is that the EA can champion donation. If your firm is like most, you replace your computers and other electronic devices on a periodic basis. What happens to these items? Even though you might believe that your firm does not generate any hazardous waste, if put out for disposal, the innards of computers constitute hazardous waste, which can be a sticky issue with (e.g.) U.S. government EPA divisions. In contrast, you can avoid these issues by making a school or non-profit very happy and even incur a tax write-off.
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Missouri State University, Patrick is conducting professional development trainings for key corporations, including “Negotiations in the 21st Century.” Patrick is excited to be working with BMTG (UK) Ltd as a facilitator for the Advanced Certificate for the Executive Assistant: ACEA® program. He divides his time between Dallas, Texas (U.S.) and Costa Rica.
Patrick S. Woods is an international trainer and highly experienced senior executive who specializes in procurement, supply chain management and executive leadership training. Patrick has had the phenomenal opportunity to work with over 300 companies in the U.S., Asia, the Netherlands, the Middle East, Africa, India and Central America. Now, in a collaboration with
Best practices 1-5 are your internal focus, whilst the following best practices are externally focused, primarily with your suppliers and vendors.
6. One Person’s Garbage Is Another Person’s Treasure – IR
This phrase is a modern version of the 17th century proverb which used “man” in place of “person,” but in the context of our discussion, we can replace “person” with “organization.” This forms the basis of IR (Investment Recovery), which in many key organizations means taking those items we don’t need any longer and selling them either back to the original suppliers or on the open market, perhaps through some type of dealer or agent. As purchasing functions become more strategic, this is becoming a major KPI (Key Performance Indicator). As an EA, you may not have direct involvement here, but you can start the conversation with the procurement department.
7. Work with Green Suppliers and Vendors
Back in the 1980s, I worked for a major U.S. manufacturing firm that pushed all of us buyers to source products from Mexico, the primary reason being Mexico had little to no standards regarding the disposal of hazardous waste. This meant that Mexican vendors could offer lower pricing than U.S. vendors since they did not have to build in the cost of EPA restrictions and dumping at EPA-approved sites. During one visit to a supplier in Mexico, I witnessed them dumping hazardous liquids into the local drainage, which would end up in the water supply of the adjoining residential neighborhoods. I think I even saw the liquid glowing!
But since waste has no knowledge of international borders, it was coming up through the water streams back to the U.S. anyhow! Fast forward to today and green initiatives are a global focus. As an example, look at the United Nations’ efforts (particularly Principles 7-9): https://www. unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/mission/ principles.
This best practice is applicable to the EA as either the direct purchaser of products, or, similar to number 6 above, the EA can start the conversation here with the purchasing department.
Four key tasks
• Communicate green and sustainable expectations to suppliers and vendors.
• Educate the organization on these initiatives.
• Write green and sustainable expectations in contracts and purchase orders.
• Monitor suppliers and vendors for compliance.
8. Market These Initiatives (and Yourself) within the Business
Before you implement the seven practices above, as with any major initiative, you have to market them internally. Keep in mind that you have two major audiences: the user functions (how will this affect us?) and senior management (how will this deliver value to the organization?). Explain the top benefits of going green and being sustainable and then explain your action plan and the resources required. You can start small and build from there. Not only will this benefit your organization, but it will also make you a hero.
Conclusion
Going green and sustainability are like that puzzle I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Each individual piece is critical to the final picture – in this case, the organization you support as an EA. You can be that piece of the puzzle by either leading the team or championing all or some of the best practices listed above. I wish you success in these strategic initiatives. I leave you with “pura vida,” which is Costa Rican for “living life to the fullest”!
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Levelling Up in the 2022 Workplace
How can virtual new starters feel more connected to their company? asks Tray Durrant
Remote working during the pandemic has prevented some onboarders and employees from being able to dive deep into a company. There is also limited opportunity for learning through osmosis, which particularly affects more junior staff. Both have the potential to result in a skill shortage in 12-18 months. What can companies and candidates do to level up?
One of the biggest challenges of working from home during the COVID era has been the onboarding of new employees, and employee engagement generally. Companies quickly adapted to changing induction programmes and onboarded candidates via Teams and webinars to try to integrate individuals into their company culture and working practices. While it has certainly prevented the moments of ‘accidental creativity’ by the water cooler, and limited opportunities for social interaction and the making of new friends in the workplace, training and hard skills themselves have not suffered.
Companies have been agile and have quickly replaced the tangible elements of training by inducting new employees online. This has been great in terms of learning who’s who, how the company’s internal functions are set up, the marketing strategies and best practices – all of which are well documented. What is interesting to note is the loss of soft skills, particularly at the junior end of the market.
Fundamentally, all executive support employees need to offer a balance of hard
and soft skills. In terms of hard skills, they should be proficient in problem-solving, quick thinking and strategic planning to produce first-class resources that provide the executive with all relevant information at their fingertips. On the soft skills side, a positive mindset and the ability to navigate a myriad of scenarios and conversations, be proactive and reactive and initiate and manage up are all characteristics of successful senior support roles.
The ability to communicate, and to acquire people skills, is truly an art form, and whilst some people have an innate ability to interact effectively, it is one of those skills which is often honed through practice. Interacting on a Teams call is not quite the same as getting together face-to-face, reading non-verbal signals and mirroring others’ actions.
Many junior staff who may have offered ideas and made constructive input in a face-to-face meeting might stay quiet on a Teams call, especially when you add in the extra dimension of potential technical glitches. Often, while remote meetings get done and the points are actioned, it is what hasn’t happened or what wasn’t discussed that is lost.
It will be interesting to see, as more time is spent in the office, how the culture of individual businesses changes. With existing employees, culture can be maintained to a degree when remote working, but that becomes harder and harder as new hires are made and full teams aren’t all in the office at the same time. One scenario would be for this to evolve into workplaces becoming more homogenous across all industries. The skills required for a certain sector, for example, are often strikingly similar across competing companies in that industry – what has historically set companies apart, however, is of course the differing culture that is unique to each business.
One of the things that helps candidates and businesses to ensure new hires assimilate into the heart of an organisation is seemingly straightforward ‘getting to know you’ exercises. It is good during the onboarding process to get more people from different functions within a firm to showcase their department or, where appropriate, set up shadowing days or half-days so new starters get a real feel for that area, the business and the people that work there. It’s also good to set tasks and challenges that allow the new starter to ask questions, to discover for themselves who can answer their specific questions. Anything that allows existing employees and new starters to become engaged directly with each other is of benefit, especially if they are in departments that will be working together.
receptionists, team Assistants, office managers and PAs to Executive Assistants and Chief of Staff roles. www.bainandgray.com
Tray Durrant is the Executive Director of Bain and Gray, thought leader in executive support recruitment. Bain and Gray source the very best candidates in London in support roles ranging from
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Track Your Time
Traci Williams explains how to set up a spreadsheet so that you can track your time
I used to get really upset with myself for never seeming to get to the end of my to-do list each week.
Every week, I thought I’d been careful with working out how long tasks would take and making sure I had enough time to get them all done, but every Friday evening, I’d be left with incomplete tasks, and I’d have to work over the weekend to catch up.
I decided to keep track of what I did with my time so I could hopefully find out where I was going wrong. It goes without saying that I used a spreadsheet to help me.
It’s a very simple spreadsheet and uses the following functions:
• Named Ranges • Data Validation • Countif
In isolation, all simple functions, but very powerful when all three are used together.
The process of building the spreadsheet is as follows:
1. Create a List of Categories
I started by making a simple list of the categories of time I wanted to track, on a sheet named ‘Lookup’:
As you can see, this list is on the range B3:B12, so if I wanted to refer to this list on another sheet, the cell reference would need to also include the sheet name AND
dollar symbols to freeze the cell references, so it would look like this:
=’Lookup’!$B$3:$B$12
All those dollar symbols can make it difficult to read, especially if you’re using Column ‘S’ and/or Row ‘5’ too. So, I always prefer to give that range of cells a name so I can refer to that name instead of the cell references.
Named range
The simplest (and quickest) way to create the named range is to highlight the entire range including the heading (e.g., B2:B12). Then go to the Formulas ribbon and select ‘Create from Selection’:
THIRTY EIGHT
This screen will appear; select ‘Top row’ and press OK.
The top row will be used for the name of the range but will not be included within the range. This is what we need, as that is just the heading, not one of the categories.
You can use the ‘Name Manager’ from the ‘Formulas’ ribbon (above) to edit or amend (or delete) any of the named ranges after they are created.
Note
I colour code everything, so the cells above are green, as this reminds me that these are the cells included in my named range.
2. Create a Daily Sheet
I started with another blank sheet, naming the sheet ‘Monday’, and typed Monday’s date into cell B1. I then formatted the date so it would include the day of the week as well as the date, month & year.
In cell B4, I entered the start time for the working day as 07:00 – not that I start every day at 7 a.m., but I could if I needed to.
I decided I wanted to analyse how I spent my time in 15-minute intervals, so in the row below, I entered the time 15 minutes later (i.e., 07:15). You could make this 30-minute intervals by entering the time as 07:30.
Note
Times in Excel are expressed with the colon ( : ) separator.
To repeat these intervals for the duration of the day, highlight the two cells together; you will see a tiny square at the bottom right of the selection:
Hover the mouse over this square until it turns into a black cross, then hold down the left mouse button, keep it pressed and drag the cells down the sheet until approx. row 70 (if in 15-min intervals). This will repeat the sequence of intervals down the sheet until approx. 23:45.
Include headings at the tops of the columns, and format the cells to make it easier to read:
Column D (Type) is where we want to enter the relevant category so that we can analyse the type of time used. I am prone to typos (no matter how careful I try to be), so I would include ‘Data Validation’ in this column, which means I can restrict what can be entered into the cells. In this instance, it would be a ‘pick list’ to prevent typos.
Data validation
To start, highlight all the cells where you want to include the pick list, then go to the ‘Data’ ribbon and select ‘Data Validation’:
This screen will then appear:
In the ‘Allow’ box, I have selected ‘List’, which is how we can create the pick list.
In the ‘Source’ box, we need to tell it where the list is, and this is where we would usually see the cell reference mentioned above (=’Lookup’!$B$3:$B$12). However, as we have a named range, we can use that now. AND there is a lovely keyboard shortcut we can use to find it, too.
Make sure the cursor is flashing in the ‘Source’ box, then press the F3 key on the keyboard and the list below will appear:
Select the relevant named range and press OK. This will go back to the screen above, and you should press OK again to complete the data validation.
You will then see (on every cell that was selected) an arrow appear to the right of
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be. Her mission with Excel Ace is to help people to love it as much as she does, or at the very least, not be afraid of it.
Traci is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Traci training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Traci Williams is a self-confessed spreadsheet geek and has spent more than half of her life working with Excel spreadsheets. She has an infectious enthusiasm and a genuine passion for showing people how simple Excel can be and how much time they can save by using it correctly, and she even makes it seem like fun! Traci founded Excel Ace in 2008, leaving her career in accountancy, as she was frustrated at not having enough time to show colleagues how ‘ACE’ and simple Excel could
the cell, which contains the pick list from our list of categories on the ‘Lookup’ sheet.
Now you can simply select from that list in order to populate the cell. This makes it quicker to enter and prevents typos or different categories being used.
This sheet can now be used to enter the tasks completed every 15 minutes of the day and allocate them to a category.
3. Create Summary Table Using Formula
We now need to include some formulas to summarise the information.
The summary table needs to have a row for each category, and they should be linked to the ‘Lookup’ sheet.
In cell G4, begin entering a formula by pressing the = key, then simply navigate to the Lookup sheet, select cell B3 and press enter.
This will include the value from cell B3 (on the Lookup sheet) on the ‘Monday’ sheet. If the value on the ‘Lookup’ sheet should change, so, too, will the value on the ‘Monday’ sheet.
This formula can be copied down to row 13 and it will automatically update the row numbers as it moves down.
In column H we will include a formula to calculate the total minutes for each category, and that will be a ‘Countif’
formula. Before you enter the formula, I recommend selecting some categories in column D, just so there is some data to check if it is working.
Select cell H4 and enter the formula:
=COUNTIF($D$4:$D$71,G4)*15
This formula is saying:
Count how many items are in the range of D4:D71, where the value is equal to cell G4, then multiply the answer by 15 (as I’m using 15-minute intervals).
On row 4, this means: Count how many times ‘Admin’ appears in column D, then multiply it by 15 mins.
Note
The cell reference $D$4:$D$71 includes dollar symbols. This is so that it stays the same when the formula is copied down into the other rows. Conversely, the cell reference G4 does NOT contain any dollar symbols, so the row number WILL update as this formula is copied down into the other rows.
This formula can now be copied down into the rows to row 13, and include a sum total at the bottom:
These numbers now show the total time spent on each activity and can be compared
to what the planned time was supposed to be.
You could then format the sheet to make it more appealing and copy the sheet, so you have one for each day of the week.
For me, this file was invaluable as I completed it honestly and accurately for a couple of weeks. On reviewing the results, I realised I was spending approx. 40% of my week on tasks such as travelling / admin and (over-running) meetings. This helped me to plan my time more realistically to include time for these things.
Also, inadvertently, I realised I became more productive, as I knew that every chunk of time was being monitored, and therefore, I tried to make sure I was always doing something productive.
If you don’t have the time to make your own file but would like to try the concept, you can download the FREE template from my website: https://www.excelace.co.uk/ standard-products/ace-time-tracker/
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Holding on to Gratitude
Your life script may not be within your own control, but the attitude you exhibit is, says Carole Spiers
Time flies by so fast that it is hard to appreciate that we are already well into 2022. You have many things to be thankful for over the last twelve months but, like the rest of us, you have also had your challenges.
Maybe your ‘life script’ did not turn out as you would have liked – but then, life often throws up unexpected challenges to be overcome, such as health issues or relationship problems. That is the order of our lives and with a new year ahead of us, it is worth remembering to be grateful for what we do have – our family, our friends, our work and all those special moments in our lives.
Of course, it is easy to feel sorry for ourselves when things go wrong. Maybe you didn’t get that promotion you wanted, or you lost a personal relationship. Your health may have deteriorated. Such issues are often tough calls to handle, particularly if they come together.
But that doesn’t really help us to move on. In order to do that, we need to take full responsibility for what is in, and out, of our control. There is no point in wasting time, energy or even money on that over which you have no control. However, there is a point in accepting a particular situation as it stands and seeing how you can amend your life script to take account of it. Your life script may not be within your own control, but the attitude you exhibit in your approach to
the situations you encounter is within your determination and can positively influence outcomes in your favour.
Making a Difference
I used to work as a volunteer at a charity for the homeless in the UK called CRISIS, and on Christmas day I would go to a large building in London, together with other volunteers, to sit and talk with those who were sleeping rough in the streets of London – having been excluded from family and friends for a variety of reasons, and then become dependent on handouts from a charity.
I met with people, young and old, all of whom had no possessions, no money and no job. Working with CRISIS over many years taught me so much. When the homeless came together on Christmas day, they were given a warm, soft mattress on which to sleep, hot food to eat and warm clothes to keep out the cold and snow.
Alex, a middle-aged man, was one such person with whom I sat all those years ago. I remember him saying to me that he was filled with such warmth and gratitude towards all those who helped, listened and who were just there for him during those hard times. Alex showed me that he wasn’t angry over what he didn’t have, but he was so grateful for the kindness he received that day we talked. Many years have gone since then, but even now, I remember Alex, and his face, as if it were only yesterday.
So, I ask you, in looking back over the year so far, what is it for which you should be grateful? If things did not go as planned, what learning came out of the experience that you can take with you on your life’s journey?
I don’t know what your special moments have been. I don’t know who is special to you. But I do know that it is good to reflect on this for the coming year.
Let me end with words from AA Milne’s children’s story, ‘Winnie the Pooh’: “Piglet noticed that even though he had a very small heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
help if you are interested in learning about tools and strategies that help teams to reduce stress, build resilience and improve health and wellbeing.
Carole is also part of our Speaker Bureau. If you are interested in Carole training your Assistants or speaking at your event, either virtually or in person, please visit executivesupportmagazine.com/speaker-bureau.
Carole Spiers FISMA, FPSA, MIHPE is the Chair of the International Stress Management Association (ISMAUK) and founder of International Stress Awareness Week. She is an acknowledged authority on corporate stress and CEO of the Carole Spiers Group (London), an International Stress Management & Employee Wellbeing Consultancy. Carole is also a BBC guest broadcaster and author of Show Stress Who’s Boss! and Tolley’s Managing Stress in the Workplace. Carole will be pleased to
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How to Respond to Trolls
How can you protect your career if someone is trolling you or your business? asks Amanda Hamilton
These days the word ‘troll’ has a completely different connotation to the way we used it a decade ago. It used to be a phrase to express ‘the seeking out of’, e.g. “I’m trolling for jobs.” Now it is used in a negative way, often to denote an individual posting online to provoke a particular group or community towards an emotional response, to encourage aggression and to taint and manipulate other people’s perceptions of such a group, individual or business.
The fact is, it is so easy to do. We have any number of social media outlets which create the perfect platform for this. It can be an unprovoked attack that can emotionally affect the recipient or even destroy a business. If someone is bad-mouthing your work or your professionalism, it could well affect your career quite severely.
If You Are on the Receiving End of a Troll, What Can You Do?
The first and most important tip is this: Do not ignore it! This is a difficult thing to address since it may evoke extreme emotions. Nevertheless, you should respond if you can, and in a calm and reasonable way, as soon as possible.
Trolling is like bullying. The troller is confident enough to do it knowing that there will be a few sheep-like individuals who will join in and back them up. So, in the same way as you would confront a bully head-on, you confront the online troll to try to defuse the situation.
I would suggest approaching it in a way such as:
• “You are entitled, of course, to your opinion, but I would invite you to meet me, or have a face-to-face Zoom call with me to discuss this in person.”
• “I’m afraid you are wrong in your assumptions for the following reasons…”
• “Let me put you right on a few inaccuracies in your comments…”
Of course, what you do not want to do is to get embroiled in a whole batch of further comments, so you need to think very carefully about how to approach the response and make it as ‘closed’ as possible (i.e., do not leave it open for further comment, and think hard before you reply to the reply – if the troll does reply).
FORTY TWO
recognised professional paralegal qualifications for those looking for a career as a paralegal professional. To find a qualified paralegal in England, visit the National Paralegal Register: https://www.nationalparalegals.co.uk/national- paralegal-register/
Amanda Hamilton is Chief Executive of the National Association of Licensed Paralegals (NALP), a non-profit membership body and the only paralegal body that is recognised as an awarding organisation by Ofqual (the regulator of qualifications in England). Through its Centres around the country, NALP offers accredited and
Let me give you an example: I had a close friend who was an extremely balanced and non-aggressive person. She was asked to do something for an acquaintance free of charge that would enhance that person’s business. It involved a performance in front of a large audience, which my friend had never done before. She felt aggrieved since the acquaintance was an experienced performer and teacher and did not offer any support on the night. After the event and a glass too many of red wine, my friend posted something on the Facebook Group page that she later regretted. It was not aggressive, but it was perceived by the acquaintance to be an insult and degrading in the eyes of her fellow group members. However, the acquaintance promptly sent a private message to my friend saying that it would be better to discuss this face to face. It worked, and within a few minutes of their meeting and after a chat, my friend apologised to her and posted a retraction and apology on the Group page. She has never posted anything derogatory since. She learned her lesson and realised how easy it is these days to say something you later regret, but only when it is too late to prevent the posting.
Responding on Behalf of a Business
The above advice also applies to a business. If you are an office manager or an Assistant, working in a company or firm, and you are responsible for responding to contact forms and social media enquiries, you may come across such trolling. Someone makes a bad comment about your company or firm, so what do you do?
Well, if possible, the same as above. In other words, you should respond in a calm and reasonable way, if you can. Of course, once again, it depends on the kind of comment made. If it is just a question of “Don’t go near this company, they’re rubbish…”, then perhaps a quick response such as: “We are
sorry you felt it necessary to make such a comment on social media… perhaps you would like to explain why you believe this by contacting us directly so that we can do something about it.”
Quite often, the reason a comment like this is made is because the individual has not received the result they would have liked – in other words, sour grapes (for example, if they wanted a refund and were not legally entitled to it, or if they believe they were treated badly or unfairly).
At other times it could be more serious, bordering on defamatory or unjustifiably nasty. This can be a difficult situation to defuse, and it may take a fair bit of diplomacy to respond with the right sort of wording. You want to try to encourage this individual to use proper channels if they have a genuine complaint or grievance, without incurring a chain of responses.
Most companies / businesses have a complaints policy for customers to follow, and you could send a link for them to channel their complaint. They will only do so if it is genuine. It may well be that some ‘trolls’ just invoke and encourage comments for the sake of it. In these circumstances, it may be appropriate to contact the social media company directly and report them.
Previously, when there was no such notion of social media or emails, making a complaint involved having to put a lot of thought and planning into writing a letter and sending it through the post. There was no such thing as a throwaway comment which could instantaneously be posted, without much thought or effort.
Don’t Ignore It
If you find yourself, personally, the target of trolling, whether in a personal or professional situation, or if your organisation has become a target, it may
not always be possible to defuse a situation, but the worst thing you or your organisation can do is to ignore it.
If you attempt to defuse the situation without success, you may have to turn to legal methods. A ‘Cease and Desist’ letter could be sent (if you know who the ‘troll’ is and their postal or email address). This informs the person to cease what they are doing under threat of legal action. If that fails to work, a claim for compensation based on harassment could be made through the courts. However, this should really be the last resort, as litigation is not only a costly business, it is also extremely time-consuming.
One final tip: People often refer to ‘defamation.’ This is a legal term that describes someone making a false verbal (slander) or written (libel) statement about an individual or business which damages their reputation, resulting in financial loss. However, the burden lies with the person making such an allegation to prove that financial loss has been suffered as a direct result of such defamation. If that can be proved, then it may be worth taking legal action. But beware! Beyond being a costly and time-consuming process, as mentioned above, there is no funding to assist you.
All the above actions, of course, may be negated if the reviewer or ‘troll’ is anonymous, but if you are aware of who they are, then there may be a possibility of alternative dispute resolution such as mediation. This could be considered an alternative to settling the issue via litigation through the courts.
If you need legal advice or assistance, you can always approach a paralegal who will offer you access to justice at a more reasonable cost than a solicitor. To find a qualified paralegal in England, visit the National Paralegal Register: https:// www.nationalparalegals.co.uk/national- paralegal-register/
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The Benefits of Speaking More Than One Language Knowing a foreign language can help with communication and building relationships, explains Carla Stefanut
When I was in college, a friend used to say that we studied foreign languages because we were “talkative girls” and that we needed more than one language to be able to communicate. Fair enough, and not far from the truth! I have always been a social person.
Initially I took foreign language studies simply because I enjoyed travelling, and my native Italian is seldom spoken outside my country. I started with English and French, then German and more recently Spanish, because my job required it.
At the beginning it took quite a lot of effort to learn the grammar and vocabulary of the Anglo/German languages. After a while I became more intrigued by the cultural differences that emerged from familiarity with a foreign language. It is my opinion that every language mirrors the “soul” and not just the culture of the country.
Once college and studying abroad were over, I found it very easy to find a job. I was
first hired temporarily as an interpreter in the international company I still work at, and after a couple of temporary contracts, I was offered a permanent position at the Press Office to help with translation of foreign language press releases. I moved up through the company because of my language abilities.
Travelling the World
I worked with different C-level managers and directors and often acted as an interpreter. I organized and accompanied Italian delegations abroad and accompanied foreign delegations inside Italy. It was a great opportunity to visit new countries and expanded and improved my knowledge of foreign markets and politics.
I also saw well-known public figures in action. I will never forget being at the opening of the International Fair in New Delhi, India, where I was in the front row
with the Italian press. I saw Rajiv Gandhi make his opening speech; a few months later, he was assassinated. There are many other highlights: Ehud Barak, the (former) Israeli Prime Minister at the Tel Aviv Fair, Bono and the Edge from U2 at the Joe Bastianich Restaurant in New York, where I organized dinners for Italian delegations. The possibility of business travel was exciting and fulfilling. I feel I have been very fortunate and privileged.
Enhancing Relationships
For Assistants, knowing a foreign language can help with communication and building relationships. People feel more at ease if you can speak their native language or, if you are not fluent, try to speak as much as you can. Fluency in a foreign language smooths communication between your executive and a third party when you act as interpreter, and this can sometimes be an invaluable asset for a favourable outcome of a meeting or talks.
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has taken on the position of Ambassador to raise awareness of the fundamental role Assistants play within organizations and companies. Carla’s nickname is “Ms. Socialize”, as networking and connecting people come easily to her. Her personal motto is “learn from the best”.
Carla V. Stefanut is the Senior Executive Assistant to the Chairman of Fondazione Fiera Milano. She is celebrating 30 years as an Assistant and can proudly say that she is a passionate advocate of the profession. Carla is a member of the Italian community of EAs, Secretary.it. She
Being a multilingual Assistant also requires a flexible mindset, and in writing, accuracy is paramount. Many times, Assistants are asked to write for or on behalf of their executives. Therefore, it is very important to know the habits and values of the (foreign) person you are writing to. In my country we are still very formal, especially in institutions. We still address people as “Mr” or “Mrs”, whereas in some countries this could be considered old-fashioned and outdated. It is important to never directly translate phrases or sayings from one language to another. Different culture = different expressions. It is very easy to make a mistake.
English Is a “Must” Not a “Plus”
Being a non-native English speaker, I tell my less-experienced Assistant colleagues that speaking English is not a “plus” anymore, but a “must.” So, when approaching language learning, try to improve your skill, keep up-to-date with the evolution and learn at least one other language fluently. Some companies insist on a second language. A German company would surely hire you if you were proficient in German.
Bilingual Assistants
I have many colleagues and friends who speak more than one language, but I have chosen to ask questions of two of them who are bilingual: Vania Alessi, co-founder of Secretary.it, and Thiphaine Serena Grego, Executive Assistant at the National Motorways Company. They both are Italian- French bilingual on their maternal side: Vania’s mother is Belgian and Tiphaine’s is French.
Vania Alessi
I asked Vania if being able to speak a second language from birth and being so familiar
with a culture different from that of Italy influenced her upbringing.
Vania: “Diversity is definitely a plus. Being raised in a multilingual environment has helped me switch from French to Italian and to quickly adapt my behavior with peers, my ‘slang’ and most of all it taught me to be very respectful of habits and ideas when dealing with people from all over the world. I loved to ‘feel’ Italian when in Belgium and Belgian when in Italy. I felt very lucky to be able to identify with both sides of my family. Many years later, this became my secret weapon and superpower, allowing me to become independent, travel and assist my executive and huge delegations of entrepreneurs as well.
“Today, the next generation of Assistants are helped by the internet, and living in a global world is even easier with social media, TV and lots of language teachers on the web. Studying at high school is no longer enough. The more you practice foreign languages, the more you open your mind, and the better it is (in my opinion). I would also encourage today’s organizations to favor reverse mentoring and conversations among teams and to encourage diversity via conversation and knowledge-sharing.”
Thiphaine Serena Grego
I asked Thiphaine whether being bilingual and having studied other foreign languages was helpful in finding a job, and if it added value in her job search and career.
Thiphaine: “I spent my childhood between Europe and the East, and then as an adult, I chose a career which gave me a lot of contact with different cultures and nationalities. This has helped me to improve my emotional intelligence and to be versatile. For bilingual people, communication takes different forms. We use one language while suppressing the other or can use both at the same time
depending on the situation, the speaker, and the subject.
“There are some similarities between being bilingual and being an Executive Assistant. Bilingual people must not only learn a second language but also quickly acquire knowledge to integrate into the linguistic and cultural context of their ‘second country’. An Assistant must always be ready to act quickly and be as efficient as possible in their job. I am grateful for the added value of being bilingual which has supported me in my profession.
“Bilinguals are comfortable in both their cultures, which means they are also at ease interacting with others and in social relationships. This is very useful in the role of the Assistant. Furthermore, for bilinguals, the lack of understanding on the part of the speaker is usually due to the use of the wrong language; therefore, we can look for an alternative communication solution and adapt to the speaker’s communication. Personally, I will always encourage multilingualism and multiculturalism without being afraid of not belonging to a specific culture or identity, but rather using them as tools for enhancing personal connections, listening, and sharing.”
Conclusion I agree with both Vania and Thiphaine. The process of studying, learning and speaking different languages has been a great help in developing my emotional intelligence. Diversity has never been threatening for me; it was a natural state of mind. But I am not done yet: When I retire, I want to take up studying Russian. One of my oldest college English teachers once said to me, “Learning English is like playing tennis, but learning Russian is like playing chess”, and this sounds like a promising new challenge.
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FORTY FIVE
Organizational Change: Start Small for a Big Impact The Global Skills Matrix places Assistants firmly in the role of catalysts for successful organizational change, explains Aliina Rowe
As an Executive Assistant, I’ve always been fascinated by organizational change. What makes it so important and impactful, but so difficult? After all, to understand how we handle change is to understand how we – both as individuals and as organizations – operate, progress, succeed and, sometimes, fail.
How organizations approach and steer change is evolving, and the role of the Assistant has become increasingly relevant and integral in building the foundations needed for successful organizational change. More than ever, Assistants need to proactively engage in building these foundations.
Succeeding in the organizational change landscape of today means involving employees at all levels and connecting people to each other. In doing so, we create inclusive and nurturing environments where individuals feel ready to engage with change.
Over the past year, I embarked on a journey to discover just how Assistants are approaching change in their roles. Along with studying change from an academic perspective, I focused my energy and effort on getting to know a wider Assistant network, attending Assistant training, and reading relevant books and articles from experts and fellow Assistants – all with an eye to how our role fits into organizational change and which approach may be best to take on the path to success.
How Do We Engage in Organizational Change?
Exploring the Assistant community connected me to inspiring, thoughtful, and engaging individuals. Not only are they the type of individuals you want by your side in any organization, but their skills and tasks match what is required in organizational change. Where change requires
creativity and inclusiveness, Assistants are resourceful and welcoming. Where change requires listening and storytelling, Assistants are networked and engaged. And where change requires getting up and starting all over again, as it so often does, you’d better believe Assistants are resilient.
The training I attended highlighted just how valuable our role as Assistants can be in organizational change. Bonnie Low- Kramen’s BTUA workshop highlighted to me the importance of advocating for our role as a valued profession and supporting one another through change. Vicki Sokol Evans’ RedCape Academy demonstrated how Assistants can confidently be early adopters of technological changes and, critically, teach and pass that information on to others. Diana Brandl’s onboarding training session showed the importance of our role in welcoming new colleagues and being inclusive from day one. All these training sessions, along with several others available to us now, show how the Assistant role is key to building foundations for successful change.
The articles I discovered here in Executive Support Magazine explain several ways for Assistants to engage successfully in change. Julia Schmidt
makes the case for the importance of the agility of Executive Assistants and, with Evon Wood, outlines the Big Opportunity Assistants have in their organizations as change agents. Lauren Parson’s article shows us how to lead through uncertainty and change by remaining calm and demonstrating resilience. Doug Dickerson’s recent article makes transparent how change impacts our leadership and why we resist change, so that we can better embrace it in the future. These articles all highlight just how crucial it is for Assistants to get more comfortable seeing themselves engaging successfully in change and that there is no one single approach.
One of the most pivotal resources defining how Assistants engage in change is written in the Global Skills Matrix, recently published by the World Administrators Alliance. This matrix provides Assistants with an essential framework of skills and tasks at various levels in the administrative profession. You will not find the words “change agent” when searching the matrix, but you will find the skills and tasks fundamental for organizational change at all levels.
Lucy Brazier OBE highlights how our skills define our role. When searching through the skills in the matrix, it is apparent that, no matter where we fall in the career progression scale, there is a role for Assistants in building foundations for meaningful change within our teams and alongside the leaders we support.
With so many evolving approaches to change, it may seem overwhelming to know how best to proactively start building foundations for successful change. But you have already begun. The Global Skills Matrix places Assistants firmly in a role of catalysts for successful organizational change. You’ve either already got the skills that it takes or are on your way to developing them.
FORTY SIX
While the teams and executives we support are often busy focusing on high-level strategy and objectives, Assistants are in the background, in the details, sweating the small stuff and getting things done.
As part of the administrative profession, operationalizing strategy is key. All the juggling, calendar shuffling and prioritizing – as well as listening, storytelling and advocating the objectives of the leaders we support – has a role in organizational change. What may seem like “small” tasks can be powerful ways to start building foundations for change within your organization.
Small Matters
That “small” things matter is confirmed by research across the organizational change arena, and common wisdom tells us that small things don’t necessarily stay small; they have the potential for far-reaching impact. Indeed, the small stuff can be the big stuff. What does this mean for you? Begin to engage in organizational change from wherever you are right now. Start small – and see how big an impact you can make.
Key skills from the Global Skills Matrix:
• Self-motivation • Working autonomously • Attention to detail
Being self-motivated and working autonomously can help you start to build foundations for change. What does a strong foundation for change look like? Individuals and teams who are connected and engaged. As the doers of your organizations, when it comes to organizational change there’s no need to wait for the vision statement to be completed before asking yourself: What can I start now that is doable and may make a difference in connecting and engaging my colleagues?
Paying attention to detail also matters in change. Debra Meyerson writes in
Rocking the Boat: How Tempered Radicals Effect Change Without Making Trouble, “change often lies in the details of organizational life – in everyday practices, mundane interactions, and normal ways of understanding.”
As an example, it matters how the room is set up for a hybrid meeting to maximize inclusivity, and it matters who you remembered to include at the last minute. This could make the difference in someone feeling connected and engaged, which is essential for effective change.
Mindset Matters
Key skills from the Global Skills Matrix
• Adaptability and flexibility • Time management and prioritizing • Keeping the CEO accessible and open to
new ideas, proposals and practices
All research points to the mindset of leaders as being fundamental in setting the stage for successful organizational change. Assistants must approach change aware of the importance of making this shift. Being adaptable and flexible is key.
A mindset for change is best served by a nurturing environment. Cultivating a nurturing environment in organizations requires time, space and focus. Successful time management and prioritizing can help create this environment, allowing time and space to pause and reflect, as well as keeping your executive accessible and open to new ideas, proposals and practices.
Acquire and Assess Information
Key skills from the Global Skills Matrix
• Information collection and management • Understanding key business areas and
organizational objectives • Emotional intelligence and awareness of
staff morale
We need good information to engage in change. Assistants are uniquely positioned in their organizations to collect and manage information through their expansive contacts and exposure to information at all levels in an organization. Acquiring and assessing information allows Assistants to understand key business areas and organizational objectives when it comes to change.
One type of information to assess is staff morale. Using emotional intelligence is key in identifying any frustrations and understanding different perspectives. Paying attention to stories and narratives being told in our organizations is an important aspect of bridging any gaps of understanding to successfully connect and engage individuals in change.
Leverage Information
Key skills from the Global Skills Matrix
• Foresight, anticipation and initiative • Team building and relationship skills
coupled with event management • Proactively supporting and driving the
organization’s and executive’s objectives
We know change can be hard and resistance is likely. Often resistance comes from lack of information, causing anxiety and uncertainty. Assistants can use foresight, anticipation and initiative to proactively bridge information gaps by sharing facts or data on change initiatives that people may have missed. The less anxious or uncertain people are, the more likely they are to engage positively with change.
Did someone miss a presentation because they were unable to attend a meeting? Is a new colleague lacking context for a project that’s about to kick off? Has the team missed an offer of training on new tools within your organization? Passing on the document, getting the new colleague up to speed, or letting people know where to sign up for training on the new tool can all contribute to people engaging in change in a better way.
Assistants can also use their team building and relationship skills along with event management skills to connect and engage colleagues. Where might there be a need for individuals to come together? Is there an opportunity to connect individuals who could benefit from each other’s knowledge? Has there been progress made that’s worth
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Start with SMALL – A New Approach
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FORTY SEVEN
foundations conducive to change that matters – alongside the executives and teams they support – by creating nurturing, inspired and organized working environments. A lifelong learner, she is equally passionate about empowering Assistants to further their own personal development and to connect with each other for support.
Aliina Rowe is a proud, experienced Executive Assistant who champions the unique and integral role of the Assistant in good, meaningful and impactful organizational change. She is a certified Change Management Practitioner and recently earned an Executive Diploma in Organizational Change from Warwick Business School. Aliina focuses on how Assistants are engaged in building
celebrating? Building up teams, connecting people for shared knowledge and coming together for celebration can have significant impact in building foundations for change.
Proactively supporting and driving the organization’s and executive’s objectives can steer individuals on a path to successful change. As Assistants, we are sensitive to people’s emotions and staff morale. We listen to stories and narratives and interpret how change may be progressing (or not) within our organizations. Listening for disconnects and then bridging any gaps in understanding of objectives can be a powerful way to steer change. Bear in mind that simply repeating objectives may only create silence and disengagement. Interacting and engaging with individuals when advocating objectives can better bridge gaps and help in collectively engaging people in change.
Learn
Key skills from the Global Skills Matrix
• Process improvement and problem solving
• Strategic thinking, understanding and knowledge
• Resilience and stress tolerance
Simply put, we can and must learn about organizational change. Being reflective and asking questions is an ideal place to start. Answering those questions can lead us to reconsider and re-engage in new and more informed small ways.
Improving processes and solving problems is what change is all about. What isn’t working? Is there an opportunity to improve? Asking where there is room for change allows us to begin.
Strategic thinking, understanding and knowledge allow us to connect the dots.
Asking the following questions can put us on a path for successful change: Who might have a different perspective? How is this change being interpreted? What could we learn more about?
Being resilient and tolerating stress allows us to continuously learn and engage with change. Collectively being open to learning together in our organizations will allow us to maintain momentum while learning how to do those small things even better.
EAs Approaching Change Through Small Steps
Imagine the impact we can have as a profession when proactively using our skillset and viewing our role as essential in organizational change. By turning attention and focus on what can be done now, in small ways, we can engage and connect people to each other, building strong foundations for organizational change.
Questions to ask
• Where can you start now to connect and engage individuals in change?
• Are you contributing to creating a nurturing environment for a mindset for change?
• Are you paying attention to relevant information available to you needed for change – including both practical knowledge and staff morale?
• Can you proactively provide people with information they may be lacking? How can you bridge information gaps and advocate for your organization’s objectives?
• Where could you create momentum? • Are there opportunities for you or your
team to do better? How could you start again?
Use the skills you’ve got with an eye towards engaging in change. Try starting with SMALL and see just how big an impact you can make!
Entry Level Transactional Transactional + Strategic
Strategic Chief of Staff
Examples of skills & tasks for a role in engaging in organizational change
Attention to detail & accuracy
Self-motivated
Adaptability & flexibility
Emotional intelligence
Information collection and management
Time management, prioritizing
Awareness of staff morale
Foresight, anticipation & initiative
Event management
Understanding organization’s and executive’s objectives
Process improvement
Resilience & stress tolerance
Able to work autonomously
Proactively supporting & driving the organization’s objectives
Leadership & management expertise with organizational & strategic dexterity
Keeping the CEO accessible & open to new ideas, proposals & practices
An Adaption of the Global Skills Matrix for Organizational Change
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