Essential Skills for Executive Secretaries, Personal Assistants, Office Managers and Administrative

Introduction

Executive assistants nowadays hold a very important position of influence and need to build a powerful partnership with the senior management team. This course will enable you to have the right competencies in order to work in partnership with your manager. After all, your success will have a direct effect on your manager's success. This course seeks to supplement your current set of capabilities by adding other highly needed competencies that will lead to excellence in your position.

During this course, you will discover ways to enhance your confidence and forward-thinking ability, allowing you to become a true business partner with the executive team. You will learn and practice powerful emotional intelligence strategies that you can immediately apply at the workplace. Moreover, you will participate in detailed discussions on the importance of building systems and having systems thinking approach, leading you to create several systems at the workplace. The next segment of this course discusses how to professionally deal with visitors, internal customers, and external customers and how to make your department and company more customer-friendly. Finally, you will learn how to develop action plans that will enhance your professional image and the image of your department and company.

Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Provide full support to stakeholders in order to enhance the success of the business
• Apply emotional intelligence to foster excellent business relationships both laterally and vertically
• Harness modern communication concepts and strategies to facilitate workflow
• Use the main functions of management to build and maintain different organizing systems that will lead to increased productivity
• Demonstrate professional skills in using creativity, serving internal customers, and managing stress

Training Methodology

This is an interactive course. There will be open question and answer sessions, regular group exercises and activities, videos, case studies, and presentations on best practices. Participants will have the opportunity to share with the facilitator and other participants what works well and not so well for them, as well as work on issues from their own organizations. The online course is conducted online using MS-Teams/ClickMeeting.

Who Should Attend?

Senior administrators, office managers, executive assistants, and supervisors of junior staff who already possess the essential administration skills and are seeking to further advance their careers.

Target Competencies

• Forward-thinking
• Emotional control
• Building and maintaining systems
• Image building
• Interpersonal communication
• Handling stress
• Service orientation

Course Outline

Day 1: Progressive Role of the Executive or Personal Assistant

• Understanding the strategic role of today’s executive assistant
• Working 'with' versus working 'for' your leader
• The challenges impacting the 21st-century administrators
• The competencies of the modern personal assistant
• Self-empowerment: creating your own mission statement
• Developing forward-thinking: being a proactive thinker
• Using technology to get things done​

Day 2: Emotional Intelligence (EI) Tact and Skills for Handling People

• Definition of EI
• The conceptual model
• Understanding the four dimensions of EI:
• Awareness of own role
• Management of own responsibilities
• Awareness of office politics and the environment
• Management of stakeholders
• Recognizing how stress and feelings affect performance
• Applying EI in building relations and dealing with difficult situations​

Day 3: Effective Interpersonal and Written Communication

• Building excellent relationships with colleagues
• Dealing with difficult personalities
• Developing self-confidence and assertiveness
• Presenting your ideas and influencing others
• Effective Business writing:
• Writing powerful emails
• Writing minutes of the meeting​

Day 4: Mastering Management Practices 

• Planning
• Setting SMART objectives
• Writing your personal goal setting plan
• Organizing
• Delegating effectively  
• Setting task priorities
• Directing/leading
• Understanding the team dynamics
• The coaching clinic
• Controlling
• Setting useful metrics
• Building and maintaining systems  ​

Day 5: The Executive/PA Guidelines for Success 

• Forging a customer service culture in your office 
• The importance of internal customer service
• Making your department customer friendly
• Dealing with visitors 
• Creativity tools for decision making
• Definition of creativity
• Creativity tools for generating improvements 
• The personal creativity profile
• Stress management
• Identifying causes of stress
• The personal stress worksheet
• Time management preventive measures