In order to be a good Executive Assistant (A Good EA), you must know your objective, which is simple; take action and get results. Understand your role is to assist your Team Leader perform one or more tasks, and it’s crucial to get clarity on exactly what is expected of you. As an EA, if you don’t understand, you’d better be asking some questions because your Team Leader isn’t always going to give the best instructions. If you don’t get an understanding prior to taking action, you can to make yourself look bad along with your Team Leader and the Company.
This doesn’t mean that A Good EA will need to understand everything 100% every single time before taking action, sometimes it's necessary to make an Executive Decision. It’s sort of like starting a business after college. Higher education can give you the knowledge that you need to get started in a business, but actually getting started and learning from experience can provide the wisdom you need to keep you in business.
Knowing when to make an executive decision and when to stop and ask questions requires good critical thinking skills. If you’re not clear of what Critical thinking is, check out the article below; here is a little excerpt: .
Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following:
understand the logical connections between ideas
identify, construct and evaluate arguments
detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
solve problems systematically
identify the relevance and importance of ideas
reflect on the justification of one's own beliefs and values
Critical thinking is not a matter of accumulating information. A person with a good memory and who knows a lot of facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. A critical thinker is able to deduce consequences from what he knows, and he knows how to make use of information to solve problems, and to seek relevant sources of information to inform himself.
Critical thinking is key to getting results. A Good EA doesn’t work like a robot on an assembly line, they work more like a sniper, using critical thinking skills, patience, and common sense to take out the target. To a sniper it’s not about taking out a lot of people, it’s about taking out the right person. The most important thing to know about a sniper (in this comparison), the sniper usually only gets one chance to get it right and so does the EA. Admittedly that’s a lot of pressure, so it’s crucial that you have a passion for the position.
Forgive the morbid sniper example, but it’s suiting because the role of both The Good EA and Sniper are similar. They both have a very important job with little to no room for error. Both must have natural ability and be coachable in order to perform well. There are several snipers in the military protecting our country daily, so the comparison is worth pondering if you need to understand how A Good EA should perform.
It is 2am as I finish this post. Some may say that’s too early to be up writing, to those I say that it’s never to early to do the things that you love to do! Always do what you love and love what you do team. I love to write and I love to train, so I write in order to train. I do it early because I think we should all start the day reading, researching, or interacting with the things that we love to do. If we’re not doing that, what the heck are we doing?
Make it a great day and keep your eyes on the target, ya dig?
~Matthew
Food For Thought
What is Critical Thinking? - Click Here