Top-notch telephone screening and etiquette skills are paramount regardless of industry, company size, or geographic location. Their importance hasn’t diminished in our modern world of text messages, e-mails, and online chats. What exactly am I talking about? Necessary telephone skills for assistants include how to answer the phone, take accurate messages, carefully screen calls, protect corporate and personal information, seamlessly transfer callers, use a polite and proper tone of voice, and know-how to tactfully handle difficult callers.
Every time you answer the phone, you are accepting responsibility for the relevant interests of others. You are entrusted by them to use good judgment when responding to the caller’s requests for information. As a telephone gatekeeper, you are a keeper of information. It is a role of extremely high importance and one that absolutely cannot be taken lightly. As you grow and your role evolves over time, the telephone skills you develop will become increasingly vital. A gatekeeper has an incredibly high level of responsibility to ensure that they:
At Office Dynamics, we believe this is one area where you should never stop improving. Your telephone skills have the power to either create and build or diminish and destroy valuable relationships. They can show you represent your leader with intelligence, professionalism, and courtesy. You must protect the personal privacy, security, and safety of others. There is a fine line between building rapport with the caller and guarding employee and company information.
Every stellar assistant must learn to be an excellent gatekeeper for their executive and company. Accurate and efficient screening will benefit your managers, co-workers, and their families. Joan’s revolutionary new eBook, The Gatekeeper’s Guide: How to Effectively Screen Calls, will get you where you need to be. Click here to get your copy!
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I have grown to love speaking on and teaching assistants about emotional intelligence. This definitely is a skill every assistant needs to know. This is a skill you can use every single day!
In our World Class Assistant course, we cover this topic and participants work on real work world case studies. They are scenarios that assistants can relate to. I reference Daniel Goleman for my classes and want to share this with you. Please quickly evaluate your level of emotional intelligence in each of the four dimensions.
Daniel Goleman, author of Working with Emotional Intelligence says, “Emotional intelligence is the ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions as a source of human energy, information, connection, and influence.
Daniel also says:
False:
True:
The 4 Dimensions:
#1: Self-Awareness (I know me.)
#2: Self-Management (I manage me.)
#3: Social Awareness (I try to know you.0
#4: Relationship Management (I attempt to facilitate situations for a positive outcome.0
One of our top trainers, Julie Reed, has been teaching several of our World Class Assistant™ certification/designation courses. When I asked Julie, what were her favorite lessons from emotional intelligence, she shared the following:
Which dimensions of emotional intelligence do you need to work on? Why not start today?
Joan Burge
What it means to be a World Class Assistant™:
What are you waiting for?
The post Emotional Intelligence for Administrative Assistants appeared first on Office Dynamics - Executive And Administrative Assistant Training.
This is a special Ask an Admin because it is time sensitive and we are helping a new executive assistant in Europe! So, administrative professionals from around the world, let’s try to help!
Katrien, from Belgium says:
I will start a new challenge as a Executive Assistant and I am very much looking forward to that. In February all colleagues (also the new ones) are invited at a company event in New Orleans, Louisiana. This means a long haul flight of 11 hours with 200 colleagues in one airplane. And a whole business week full of work and leisure events. I am a bit nervous though about a few things:
Katrien will be taking that flight next week so let’s try to get all the information, tips, and tricks to her as soon as we can! Side note…congratulations on your promotion Katrien!
ATTENTION: If you’ve submitted your response on our Ask an Admin blog post, please be patient to see your response and other responses. We have to manually approve them to prevent spammers and profanity. If you do not see your response right away, please give it time and revisit. We apologize for this but this is the best way we can keep YOUR blog clean! Thank you, everyone!
About Ask an Admin:
Ask an Admin will be a weekly post on our blog that presents a question that you or a fellow administrative professional submitted to us. We will choose one question per week and post it on our blog.
If you have a question that you would like to submit, please send it to officedynamics.aaa@gmail.com and include the name you would like us to use.
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The post How Should an Executive Assistant Conduct Themselves? – Ask An Admin appeared first on Office Dynamics.
Welcome to April. Wow, where is the time going?
April is one of my favorite months because, here at Office Dynamics, we get to celebrate the wonderful accomplishments of those in the administrative profession! In case you are not aware, Administrative Professionals Week is April 24 – 28. But we celebrate the entire month of April. One of the major ways we do that is to host our annual blog-a-thon whereby we post a blog every work day in the month of April. Aside from my blogs, we have several guest bloggers providing amazing information!
To kick off the celebration, I hosted a webinar yesterday for 5,000+ assistants worldwide whereby I revealed my secrets to success in the profession. I had 29 secrets! I would like to share just a few of them with you. If you would like to hear all of them, you can watch the replay of the live event.
1. I didn’t always play by the rules. That doesn’t mean I did things that were unethical or illegal. I liked breaking the status quo (and I still love doing that today.) Look at work and situations in a different light. Keep your eyes open for processes that need to be changed or new processes that need to be implemented. Shake things up! One way to stand out is to shake things up in a good way.
2. Inserted myself into my executive’s world. I didn’t wait for my executives to invite me into their world. When I was an assistant, I would take home the trade journals and periodicals my executive read so I could understand his world and understand the language. While I didn’t read every page, I certainly gained perspective. This is a strategy anyone in any profession can use.
3. Set healthy boundaries. It is really important to set healthy boundaries in the workplace. If someone is doing something or saying something that is unacceptable to you, then you need to speak up in a professional and assertive manner.
4. Thirst for knowledge. For some reason, I have always embraced a growth mindset. Since I got out of high school and went right into the workforce, I was hungry to learn in any way possible. I did not go to college by choice and it did not stop me from being successful in my work because I am a sponge.
I have identified 3 levels of learning.
With my thirst for knowledge, I was willing to invest in myself. Thousands of employees tell me they can’t attend training because their company won’t pay for it. That is short-term thinking and it makes me sad because it tells me that an individual doesn’t think enough of themselves to invest in their own education. As Brian Tracy says, “Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make.” I agree 100%. When you invest in yourself, you will take what you learn with you the rest of your life. And no one can ever take it away from you!
5. Always took my administrative career seriously from early on and saw it as a profession. This is important for all assistants, managers and coworkers to remember the administrative profession is a true profession! These are the people who run the lives of top executives. These are the individuals who put up with all the stuff every day, put themselves second and third on the list, manage a multitude of responsibilities, make their executives look good, and are confidantes. They should be treated with courtesy and respect.
If you are an assistant reading this, I hope you have a fabulous month! Please sign up for the Blog-a-thon by subscribing to the blog in the upper right corner and you will automatically receive the daily post in your inbox. Comment on the blogs and share them so you can be entered to win prizes all month long.
If you are not an assistant and you’re reading this, please be sure to sincerely recognize the administrative support professionals in your organization. And remember to not ask your assistant to order her own flowers; which by the way, assistants don’t just want flowers and lunches. They want a long-lasting gift. If you are looking for ideas, go to the Office Dynamics Success Store.
Happy April everyone!
This blog is part of our 2017 Blog-A-Thon. Please leave a comment or share the blog for your chance to win one of our amazing giveaways! The more blogs you comment on and share, the more chances you have to win. If you’d like to learn more about our Blog-A-Thon you can do so here. Hint: Subscribe to our blog in the upper right-hand corner so you never miss a blog.
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