Manage other admins

– As you grow as an administrative professional, you will inevitably end up hiring, mentoring, and training other assistants for your company. Once you become a senior assistant you have a responsibility to make sure that anyone coming in has the proper training that’s required to do their job effectively. When hiring an assistant, you need to make sure that their personality will work well with the person they’ll be supporting. Spend some time with the executive to see how they work, what they like, and what they don’t like. If you’re replacing an assistant that’s leaving, talk to them, get an idea of how they operate, this will help during the interview process. If you have an executive that’s very high-strung and more extroverted, you may need someone a bit more foreword who won’t take things so personally. Have your list of questions ready for the person you’re interviewing. Get to know them, see if they’ll open up to you on a more informal level, so you can get some insight into their personality. When mentoring an assistant, you’re taking a junior-level assistant, and working with them to become a more senior-level assistant. Have them shadow you so you can see the difference between how they currently work, and what it’s like to work for a more senior person in the company. Don’t be afraid to show them what’s involved. A good assistant is very valuable, so invest some time with them so they want to grow into a senior position and stay with the company. When assistants build that relationship with their executive they often move with that executive if they move up in the company. By mentoring a junior assistant early on, they’ll know what to expect when they move to a more senior role. When training new assistants, have a plan in place. Have a schedule of what they will do on their first day, and who they will meet with. If you have a full plan for them, they will feel much more welcomed, than just having them sit at a desk and figuring out for themselves. They need to know who the go-to people are, where the copier is, where the lunch room is, where to park, all those little things that don’t seem all that important, but they are. You may have anything from a half-day training, or two full days with them, so they can learn about each department they’ll be working with. They need to know the unwritten rules that are not in the employee handbook. Every company has those set of rules that are behind the scenes, and any new assistant coming into a company really needs to know those small things. When you hire, mentor, and train an assistant properly, you’ve a better chance of developing a lifelong employee. And that is a huge benefit for the company.