Executive Assistant Development Program

Program Overview

High-performing executives in the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous environment recognize the reality that a critical component to the success of any company is anchored on management’s ability to get more done in the day-to-day operations and strategy implementation. Administrative nightmares are some of the things that keep many executives awake at night. These issues include not having a strong business process flow that can be communicated and aligned across the company and having a workforce that is disconnected from the company due to that lack of alignment, making them indifferent about the company’s priorities or, worse, highly demotivated.

With the increasing demands of day-to-day involvement, the engagement of the executives with the rest of the team is crucial to producing the expected business outcome for the organization. Hence, their productivity and effectiveness are
hinged highly on how their work meetings, strategic priorities, and functional
deliverables are structured efficiently.

This organizational challenge is where the Executive Assistant (EA) or Department Secretary can add value to the Executives they are supporting. The role involves performing not only primary office duties such as managing schedules and calendars, coordinating travel plans and itineraries, and attending meetings and taking minutes, but also project management of critical priorities for the
executives, excellence in execution, overseeing the office or department budgets, managing correspondences and writing reports, and developing programs to improve the productivity of the office and interactions between departments and demonstrating leadership in areas where they can add value to the company.

A topnotch EA works with the organization’s leaders to proactively look for ways to improve the organization’s processes, systems, procedures, and colleague interactions. This is because they see the day-to-day details and complexities of the organizational priorities, which makes them uniquely equipped to know where the pain points are and, more importantly where there are opportunities for improvement. These topnotch EAs add value by freeing up large blocks of unproductive time for the team they are supporting. They can traffic work across the office and different departments to eliminate most of the immediate distractions that pull the executives away from more strategic work.

Experienced EAs may even have the opportunity to be the source of institutional memory about stakeholders, business partners, and organization challenges that will be helpful for new leaders to step into their roles. Not only do these management practices and best practices save vast amounts of time, but they also inherently make the life of busy executives easy and productive.