Bottom line in all busines decisions where you feel emotions getting in the way: what is the business result you need to achieve? What is the best way to achieve it?
If you stop and realize that you can be productive on other activities because this assistant is taking over time-consuming tasks, you stay focused on the common objective and it becomes much easier to articulate what needs to be done.
It’s not about you - it’s about the results that all of you are trying to achieve.
It takes practice to learn how to delegate and lead in a business environment. Staying focused on results over emotions is a good place to shart.
Also remember that junior senior staff (if that term makes sense) often tend to follow the lead of their seniors. As you become someone who has people reporting to them who in turn have people reporting to them, and THOSE people under you are (like you are now) in a superordinate position for the first time, how you treat them and communicate with them will become a template for how they deal with their subordinates. So set a good example!
I have a personal story/confession on exactly this line. My first job out of school was as a computer programmer, where I worked on a project where we had a “client facing” manager who seemingly got all the credit for the work we did behind the scenes. At some point, I was tasked with putting together some kind of spreadsheet in Excel in short order (which I had never used before), and asked one of the AAs to show me how to do something. Knowing I was supposed to do it by the end of the day and also had other things to take care of, and being on good terms with me, she volunteered to do it for me, and did so in about 30 minutes. She color coded some of the information and explained the coding to me.
Later on in the day I dropped it on my manager’s desk and also took the time to explain the color coding. However I unconsciously expressed it in the first person, saying “I color coded the spreadsheet <like so>”, and the AA (who was situated right outside the office) overheard. On my way out she said, “I heard what you said in there. You didn’t do any of that, you took credit for what I did. That ain’t right.”
I froze in my tracks and replayed what I’d just said. Then I looked her in the eye and said, “You know, you’re right, and that was very wrong. I can’t believe I did that.” I went right back inside and clarified to our manager, “By the way, it was <X> who did the work on that spreadsheet, she really helped me out on that one.”
Who knows what kind of asshole I might have become, at least for some time, if she hadn’t confronted me with what I hadn’t even realized I’d done?
As someone who worked as an admin/secretary for 20+ years, don’t feel guilty.
DO treat her with respect and remember please and thank you.
Seriously, other people’s grunt work is an admin’s job, that’s what we’re there for. LACK of other people’s grunt work was a major reason I was laid off from work in 2007, taking me from respectably middle class to my current poverty. I would LOVE to do your grunt work 40 hours a week for pay, seriously. I don’t care how mundane the work is, as long as I’m treated with respect.
I’ve been in admin jobs and worked for people at both ends of the delegation spectrum. One absolutley lovely guy I spent many happy years working for was dreadful at delegation. I’d hear him on the phone to his clients promising them all manner of things and these jobs would just pile up on his desk. Countless times I’ve walked into his office and just taken a heap of files off his desk because I knew what needed to be done with them, I’d do the work and hand them back so that he could go back to the clients and close his deal.
At the other end of the scale, I worked for a woman who delegated every last little thing she could think of and then bitched when she had to wait for something to be done. She was the kind of person who would walk up two flights of stairs from her office to where I was, past the copy room and the two copiers in the corridor, just so she could give me one piece of paper to photocopy for her, and she only wanted one copy of it.
If you delegate and you know it’s only grunt work, be gracious about it and remember to say please and thank you. Nothing riles an admin more than that “I’m too important to do this kind of job” attitude. A bit of thanks, credit and recognition for a job well done is never misplaced and if you can keep an admin on your side, you will never regret it.
There are two sides of this problem. IT people tend to think that IT skills are the most important thing in the world, they have huge egos and expect everyone to acknowledge those skills. They often can’t conceive why their manager gets praised for his client facing and project management abilities. The reality is that those skills are often more important to the business than being able to write code.
OTOH, you have plenty of managers who are driven by their own ego and think the entire world exists to serve the advancement of their career.
As you rise up the ladder, you will eventually become some kind of asshole to someone.
I actually kind of disagree. This kind of sounds insincere to me. Be honest that it’s your job to do X and your assistant’s job to do Y. [Unless it’s something that normally would make sense for you to do, of course]
My only advice is to figure out how much non-grunt work your assistant wants to do eventually, and then try and give them bigger and more interesting projects. They’ll have to keep doing grunt work of course (hey, that’s why they’re getting paid), but having at least some more interesting projects keeps them happier, and helps train a more valuable employee.
As an aside, just remember that the razor can cut both ways. You never want to be in the position where you get called in, after delegating work to an assistant, to be told,
“We’re cutting your hours, you don’t have 40 full hours work now. Needs of the business…”
I’ve been a receptionist. By the second time The Boss grunted “coffee!” I already knew he liked it black, one spoonful of sugar.
I’ve done data entry. It’s the kind of work where your brain isn’t involved at all, kind’a restful actually so long as you remember to stand up occasionally.
I’ve been a consultant who was ahead of the calendar and had to do some convoluted social engineering in order to extract some of her coworker’s grunt work and do it (my previous data entry jobs came in handy).
I’ve been a lab tech who got put in charge of ISO9000/14000 procedures because it was the part of his job the boss didn’t want.
I’ve been a weekend-shift lab tech who got sent to an international project because her boss hated travelling and who discovered that two other factories had done the same thing.
Nothing wrong with handing your “gruntwork” to those who are paid to do it, plus sometimes someone’s grunt work is another person’s dream job.
True, true and I suppose true. That’s why I carefully wrote “seemingly” – to me as a a fresh out of school kid it certainly seemed like credit-hogging. There is still a difference though between being a leader who invests in his team’s career growth, and one who simply “leverages his resources” which are considered interchangeable and expendable pieces. Especially when this company’s business was producing and selling and supporting its own software/hardware systems.
In the event of a crisis, like if something Had To Be Fixed By 9AM Or The Manager Will Get Fired, it’s good to have your team feel like they’re invested in the team’s success by having shared in its glory. I am in such a “client-facing” position now as the team lead for a group of developers, so I can tell you from both sides of the fence that it is worth a lot just to have the team be on a face-and-name basis with at least some of the client base, to use the first person plural in talking about both triumphs and disasters, and to publicly say “Kudos to X and Y, who put in a heck of a lot of work to get this project done on time” for major efforts.
I suppose I am an asshole to some people now, but mainly because I’ve learned to tell them that solving their problems is not one of my priorities unless they can convince me that it’s worth doing ahead of stuff I’ve already decided are important.
What it comes down to is making your team feel like they are part of a team, not peasents supporting some lord. My job may be more “client facing” but that works two ways. I bear the brunt of the client’s or the firm partner’s displeasure when something gets screwed up.
Also, in the consulting firms where I work, your boss’s success typically translates into success for you as well. My managing director would dump client projects on me. Sometimes projects that were royally fucked up by some other manager who has since been fired. I grab some people who aren’t working on anything to help out and I look like the big hero. They get some credit too, but the MD recognizes me as someone who can lead people to get difficult jobs done. I get promoted to management, but that allows me to give more responsibility and thus more opportunity for promotion to the people who have helped me.
It took me a while to get over the guilt of delegating things to an assistant. It doesn’t make any sense to leave them idle and then rack up overtime, though.
I do try to keep things balanced, though. I would never dump off some tedious task on her if I had time to do it during regular hours, or if I thought it meant she wouldn’t be able to complete her regular stuff.
If I have a good assistant I want to make sure that they aren’t resentful, and this means plenty of credit when it’s due. I praised my first assistant right out from under me and into a better position. (Maybe I ought to rephrase that, but you know what I mean.) I let my superiors know that it was common for me to ask her to do some out-of-the-ordinary thing that needed doing, only to find that she’d seen the need for it to be done already. “Oh, I already did that.” She’s really too valuable an employee to spend most of her time filing and copying, so I’m glad of her promotion.
