As risks are perceived to be events that can mar or enhance the opportunity of achieving the established business goals and objectives, recognizing that serious errors, negligence, mistakes and abuse of office positions can bring unpleasant impacts and reputational damage on the bosses and organisations is very important for the personal assistants, executive assistants, secretaries and administrative office assistants. For example, missed appointments and disrespectful behaviors of an assistant may mean:
- missed revenue growth opportunities or investments and capitals,
- defaults or noncompliance on mandatory regulations,
- loss of revenue and increased cost,
- loss of great business relationships and customers,
- attraction of severe penalties and sanctions from the regulator,
- backlash from the public and social media channels, and public boycott,
- poor credit rating scores and perceptions.
Similarly, being proficient, professional, attention to details, integrity, insightful, responsive, pragmatic, dynamic, flexible, discreet, empathic, self-discipline, respectful and commercial awareness can position the individuals to boost clarity of thoughts, good reputation, revenue grow, great customers and investors attractions, win bosses confidence to trust the insights, advice and reports coming from the individuals, and ultimately improve the mental wellbeing and practical performance of the individuals and bosses in terms of productivity outputs, quality and timeliness of decisions and actions.
Imagine the shame and impact on the organization’s reputation and revenue for the failure of the CEO to miss important appointment with a key customer or investor or regulator because of serious errors in diary schedules done by the personal assistant which were not found on time and corrected or negligence to make the right travel arrangements. Sending poorly constructed correspondence with serious grammatical errors to key stakeholder within and outside the office by the assistant or making inflammatory discriminatory comments on the social media channels or leaking sensitive information about the organisation could be highly embarrassing to the bosses and organisation at large.
From the foregoing, for a personal assistant, secretary, executive and administrative assistant to support their bosses and the entire organisation preform and effectively manage the business risks, having quality education, technical and soft skills and being able to balance them to work smarter and responsible are essential. Below are sone of the essential soft skills expected of exceptional personal assistants, secretaries, executive and administrative office assistants.
- Proactive and responsive to be able anticipate the needs, expectations and key concerns of the bosses and taking appropriate actions to deal with the matters timely.
- High emotional intelligence to be able to interact across all business, professional and social levels without compromising integrity – ethics and professional conducts.
- Discreet/unjudgmental – analytical, research oriented, strategic and critical in thinking, behavior and actions, being reliable, dependable and insightful.
- Confident communicator, able to engage in meaningful discussions and providing objective value ad opinions during deliberations with bosses and others.
- Empathetic -putting oneself in others shoes, avoid entitlement spirit/mentality and refusal to see from others perspectives,
- Stress tolerance and team spirit – ability to work with diverse teams, and under pressure with grace, positivity, objective and quick in handling conflicts and crisis successfully,
- Energetic, commercial awareness and commitment for collaboration and cost savings by adopting new effective and efficient approaches in process execution. Good negotiation skill for pricing contracts.
- Dynamic/Flexible – able to take personal responsibility for continuous development and improvement of oneself and others to build the right knowledge, skills and experience required to remain current, competitive and relevant at work place.
- Risk aware – be well informed of the roles and responsibilities and implications of actions on others, bosses performance and the business and being intentional at all times acting for the best interest of the business. This also include understanding the social media tools, vulnerabilities, threats and opportunities and actions required to protect them self, their bosses and he organisation they work for.
- Resourceful – have Organizational and multi-tasking skills, understands essence of time and the management principles – able to separate important from not important, urgent from the not urgent, productive from unproductive /time wasters, crisis and distractions and the applications in every day-to-day operation. Delegation and supervision skills and resource allocation
- Quality and growth driven – appreciate self-development and improvement, willing to invest time, effort and money to acquire new knowledge, skills and experience to add value to the job and the organisation.