So you’ve hired an assistant – great! An assistant helps you get more done with less time – if you use them wisely.
Here are five strategies for maximizing your partnership with your assistant:
1. Strengthen Your Communication Habits
Increase your efficiency with your assistant by increasing the efficiency of your communication.
Connect Daily. This update on daily progress provides:
- Up-to-date information on any unexpected events or updates
- A specific time to communicate with each other so nothing goes unaddressed
- An accelerated understanding of each other.
Use simple language. Avoid beating around the bush. Your assistant is your partner. Close relationships thrive on honest and clear communication.
Encourage and use summary. When you are dialoguing with your assistant, actively take moments to summarize what you understood from them. Prompt them to do the same.
This allows the communicator to understand when the concept is understood and it is safe to move on.
Embrace organic communication. Sometimes in our effort to eliminate a problem, we make it worse or create new ones.
Identify where your communications systems and techniques are allowing you to get more done and where they are actually slowing you down.
Use communication shortcuts. We put together a full list of communication tricks that are easy to implement and highly effective.
2. Allow Them to Lead the Relationship
We have a saying at Superpowers: “You are the boss, but your assistant is the leader in the relationship.”
Give your assistant full permission to keep you and your life on track. They can help you get more done when they have complete freedom to confront you about inefficiencies, make scheduling decisions for you, manage your correspondences, and remove delegable tasks from your to-do list.
Your assistant is your efficiency specialist. When they are free to point out weak points in your approaches and introduce solutions, they can help you maximize your time.
Here are a few specific permissions to give your assistant:
Your Task Filter: Give them permission to audit your to-do list and remove low-value tasks.
Your Liason: Allow them to represent you in correspondences, meetings, and task delegation.
Your Personal Coordinator: Allow them to schedule your appointments, identify unproductive behaviors, and provide all-around feedback and coordination for your work life.
Let them do what they do best so you can do what you do best.
3. Let Them Coordinate Your Team
You are trying to delegate more, but are you delegating poorly? Selecting, training, and monitoring your delegates is often more time-consuming than doing the task yourself. Yet, delegation is the key to scaling your business.
Fortunately, you don’t have to handle the delegation process. Allow your assistant to take the reigns of this high-value responsibility.
They can serve as your coordinator. They can identify delegable tasks on your to-do list and ensure the tasks are handed off to the ideal delegate.
Next time you are completing a delegable task, record yourself and send it to your assistant; you may need to throw in a few explanations as you go.
Your assistant can clean up the video, document the process, and use it to explain the process to others.
4. Have Them Manage Your Relationships
Relationships are everything in business. Looking for high returns on your time? Invest that time in building high-value relationships! People buy your products, people make referrals, and people become customers.
Your assistant can produce a significant value for your company by being your liaison on social media, email, and other client-connection points.
You are busy running your company, so it may be hard to find time to maintain healthy relationships and remain updated on your clients’ lives.
Good news! Your assistant can handle a lot of that high-value relationship-building. Our Superpowers Assistants are trained to represent their entrepreneurs on social media.
They post content for you, engage with high-value connections, respond to messages, and keep you in the loop about important events and dates.
Assistants can also handle your email correspondences, representing you and maintaining those high-value relationships.
For activities where your assistant will need to act on your behalf (email responses, client interactions, project approvals), ask them first how you think they should respond, give them feedback on their response, and then complete the process together.
Once you feel confident in the accuracy of their responses, you can fully hand off these responsibilities.
5. Equip Them for Success
Even the most skilled assistants face limitations. By equipping your assistant with exceptional training resources, a supportive network of experienced assistants, and one-on-one coaching, you can equip your assistant to perform at the top of their field.
At Superpowers, we provide the easy button! With a Superpowers Membership, your assistant can build their skills through our unrivaled Curriculum, Coaching, and Community.
Curriculum: Our training intensives, masterclasses, continuing education resources, playbooks, and learning events equip your assistant to exceed your expectations.
Coaching: Reach your goals sooner! Our one-on-one coaching accelerates your assistant’s growth by providing personalized accountability, correction, and mentorship.
Community: Your assistant doesn’t have to do it alone. We provide a community for sharing ideas, best practices, and problem-solving techniques among top-performing Executive Assistants.
Conclusion
Interested in learning about Superpowers Membership or finding your ideal assistant? Schedule a Discovery Call today! We’ll talk through the process in a quick, thirty-minute conversation.
