How to Work with an Executive Assistant for Maximum Productivity?

An executive assistant is a potential addition to stimulate your career and ensure business growth. Considering other generative virtual assistants, an executive assistant has highly valued qualities, skills, and certifications. Besides, an executive assistant’s position is equivalent to an executive position in a business.

Furthermore, the executive assistant has the power to set strategic insights, ensure business growth, and effectively go through market challenges. If you’re a CEO, Director, or Owner of the company, be collaborative, build mutual relations with EAs, ensure your business growth, and career expansion.

This guide will showcase how to build a strong working relationship with your executive assistant, focusing on communication, goal setting, delegation, and feedback.

4 Key Strategies for Building Relationships and Working with an Executive Assistant

While working with an executive assistant, you should set strategies to build a robust relationship with your remote assistant. These strategies involve strong, effective communication aligned with your business goals and priorities.

1. Building Strong Communication Foundations

Developing a strong relationship with a successful initiative is key to building professionalism as an executive assistant. This method creates a communication foundation by fostering a clear, open, and ethical culture. Thereupon, it’s essential to build a long-term relationship with the EA who can contribute to your business growth.

Choosing the Right Communication Channels

Establishing a solid relationship with an executive assistant involves setting up clear and efficient communication channels. Also, strong communication is the foundation of any successful professional relationship and ensures your trustworthiness.

• Multiple Communication Channels: Different methods of communication serve different purposes. For example, an email might be most effective during formal communication, while you send it while maintaining regulations. This is like a headline, email setting, and avoiding jargon.
• Determine Quick Communication Style: It’s vital to establish boundaries and expectations during every communication channel. Furthermore, quick messaging apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams are great for urgent response at the time of immediate action. Video conferencing or a face-to-face meeting is effective for any complex or confidential conversations, and secure for no text capture options.
• Caution Steps: Furthermore, you need to be aware of each other’s working styles and frameworks. If your remote assistant is particularly intended to focus on a single channel, avoid embarrassing them for multiple channels. This helps you reduce confusion and ensure no messages are missed.

Effective Communication Practices

Choose the right channels for effective communication and conveying information clearly.  Significantly, an executive assistant contributes to plays an effective role in communicating with different venture capitalists. This will create an excellent opportunity to get fundraising opportunities from reputable investors.

• Be Specific and Direct: Whenever you’re giving instructions or providing feedback, be clear and direct, and it’s better to avoid confusion and unnecessary urgency. For example, ensuring better relations, don’t say “complete the tasks soon with no reason”, instead apply, “please complete the task end of the day tomorrow”.
• Provide Context: Context is essential for your assistant to understand your message clearly. When you assign a task, provide all the information regarding the complete background. Therefore, the executive assistant can make better decisions and anticipate potential challenges.
• Check in Regularly: Set a priority to schedule regular discussions with your executive assistant regarding business challenges and progress. This will ensure your EA is connected with you, giving you chances to address any issues early before expansion.
• Be Open and Approachable: An executive assistant has many capabilities in handling various tasks and faces challenges in difficult situations. Create a transparent policy by which EA can feel comfortable asking questions and offering suggestions.

Note: Effective communication isn’t just about the words you use; it’s about how you listen and respond. Listening actively and being receptive to feedback is key to creating an environment of mutual respect and trust.

2. Aligning on Goals and Priorities

Through strengthens your goals and priorities, which is most essential to working with an executive assistant. Additionally, an EA handles essential tasks as prioritized and aligns with your business goals. When you and your executive assistant are working with the same objectives, it enhances productivity and reduces the risk of misaligned tasks:

Creating Clear and Measurable Objectives

The most effective way to ensure your executive assistant is working with you towards the same goal, set clear and measurable objectives. The key to identifying what success looks like both you and your EA can both define progress that will be tracked.

• Set a Clear Framework: Through setting a clear framework, discuss both short-term and long-term goals, taking your current workload into consideration. This workload includes upcoming projects and setting a vision for your role or organization. Thereupon, you need to set goals within the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

For example, if your goal is to improve efficiency in scheduling meetings, you might aim to reduce 50% time spent on scheduling. Therefore, you’ve to establish scheduling through automation with certain steps, and keep the calendar up to date. Also, establish a timeline and assign responsibility for each task.

Mastering Prioritization Together

After setting goals with a defined framework, the steps to prioritization. An executive assistant’s schedule and workload are sometimes frustrating. Therefore, prioritize critical skills, which are crucial to your EA framework, and assess your task urgency and importance.

Through applying Eisenhower Matrix: which is convenient to prioritize tasks. It categorizes tasks into four quadrants:

• Urgent and Important (Need immediate action to complete the assignment as quickly as possible).
• Important, but Not Urgent (This task is significantly valuable for long-term goals, but currently needs no urgency for completion)
• Urgent, but Not Important (These tasks need immediate action for completion, but are not significantly connected to long-term success)
• Neither Urgent nor Important (Schedule the tasks for the least priority, when your assistant is free to work without any complexity)

Expert-Tips: By categorizing tasks in this way, both you and your assistant can align on which tasks need immediate attention and which can be scheduled for later. Regularly updating this matrix ensures that both of you stay focused on what truly matters.

3. Delegating Work the Right Way

When you delegate core tasks to your executive assistant, this will clear your schedule to focus on high-priority tasks. Hiring an executive EVA ensures handing off work, providing clear instructions, resources, and building trust with your business partners.

• Understanding the executive assistant’s strengths, skills, and abilities, you might assign tasks according to the evaluation. For example, if your EA is efficient in managing logistics, empower them to handle events or travel coordination.
• While delegating tasks, specify in detail how and which outcomes you want to achieve. Thereon, you should approach “Help me with this project” by providing a detailed scenario of what types of outcomes you’re looking for. Don’t forget to provide guidelines regarding your assignment.
• Make sure your hiring executive assistant is skilled in accessing all the tools, information, and resources for successful completion. Also, if you are empowering your assistant with a complicated project, provide all necessary information with relevant contacts, technology, and software.
• The best way to maximize your assistant’s value through empowering them to make decisions individually. For example, you can build their confidence to make specific scheduling decisions, book flights within a budget, or respond to low-level inquiries.
• It’s essential to follow up on the task and avoid micromanaging. Building your trust with EA to convey the assignment and hold them accountable for delivering results.

Expert-Tips: Empowering your EA is not only a way to lighten your workload but also an opportunity to build a more productive and dynamic partnership with your EA. The more you delegate effectively, the more you can both focus on the bigger picture.

4. Giving and Receiving Feedback

When a business surveys over resources, there will apparent a successful working relationship. The best feedback for strategic planning involves constructive feedback, being open to execution, and is aimed at improvement. According to the same strategy applied to your executive assistant, both you and your remote assistant will embrace the idea of continuous growth.

Giving Feedback

When giving feedback to your EA, keep the following principles in mind:

• Apply your approaches, saying “This strategy could have better results” by explaining how you would like to see improvement. For example, in the meeting notes, highlight your EA’s suggested lines with high-priority marking to make them stand out more.
• If your assistant is addressing an issue, you need to explain the problem by suggesting potential solutions. This certainly gives you EA the direction they need to improve.
• Never skip acknowledging any significant initiatives of your EA. It’s better to recognize their strength and success that accelerate your executive assistant to continue performing consistently at their best.

Receiving Feedback

When receiving feedback, be open to receiving and focus on it for improvement:

• Receiving feedback is always a good sign of improving relationships. However, it is most important to receive feedback as a growth opportunity rather than a reaction.
• Always be open to getting feedback, and you might be an active listener. Take time to respond to how you would like to implement the suggestions.

Conclusion

An effective working environment with your executive assistant is a clear framework for better communication. These include mutual respect and connecting to a winning strategy. Through establishing strong communication channels, setting clear objectives, empowering tasks, and nurturing a better working environment, you can maximize values.

A better relationship with your executive assistant builds trust and collaboration. When you invest in nurturing a relationship, this will improve your productivity and help to reach your professional goals.

A well-structured partnership between you and your executive assistant is significant for your career growth. You’ll see new levels of efficiency in your day-to-day operations.