The Redgate Guide to

Working with a Personal AssistantLottie Mackintosh

“A sense of humour is an absolute prerequisite for a PA.”Sarah Hellowell, Personal Assistant

Author’s NoteThroughout my career I have worked as an Executive Assistant, a Personal Assistant and a Writing Assistant. In every role, and no matter how far I progress, I’m always amazed at just how much there is to learn about providing, and accepting, great support.

I’ve worked with teams, with individuals, with division leaders and with board members. I’ve worked in traditional roles, and in roles in which I’ve been given free rein to develop and innovate. I’ve worked with people who are incredibly switched on, who build great teams and deliver multi-million pound deals, but I’ve also worked with people who, for all that, have no idea how to get the best out of an assistant. If they had, those might have been billion pound deals.

The value of an assistant of any type is often underestimated. They’re seen as “yes” people, photocopiers and tea makers. They’re undervalued to the extent that Office Support seminars sometimes feel more like self-help groups, and attendees are told, “Hey, it’s OK to be a personal assistant.” Frankly, I’ve never worked for a company who would pay someone just to make tea. And if someone tells me my career choice is OK, I tell them, “Yes, it is. It’s fantastic!” My job gives me insight into how a business really runs, into board-level decisions and into the hard graft of investments.

A truly effective assistant knows their manager’s priorities, concerns and responsibilities as well as they do themselves. They know how to make their manager more effective, and how to help them add value. They work alongside their manager as part of a tight-knit, high-functioning team, sharing a single purpose and workload. Of all teams, of all working relationships, I believe this one has the capacity to be the most transformative for a business.

Unfortunately, you can’t just hire an assistant and become an effective team overnight. Even the most experienced assistants will need time to develop an understanding of how you work, and of how you can get the most from them. They can’t do this on their own – you need to help them. This is just what many managers don’t know how to do.

My intention is that this book will provide you with tangible and realistic steps towards forming a great and effective relationship with your personal assistant. Follow the advice of the Redgate team and over time you’ll build an understanding of one another’s strengths and weaknesses, and you’ll co-evolve into a fantastically effective pairing.

Best of luck!

Lottie Mackintosh

ForewordAt Redgate, we want our personal assistants and managers to have the best working relationships in the world.

The relationship between a personal assistant and a manager can be transformational, but it can also be difficult. It can be hard work, and it can end in failure. It can do all these things, but it doesn’t have to. Over the last ten years we’ve learnt some hard lessons at Redgate, but we’ve made (and will continue to make) good use of them as we build world-class relationships between our personal assistants and managers.

We want to share this knowledge with our existing managers, with those who aspire to be managers, and with those taking their first steps towards an effective personal assistant / manager relationship. We want to share it with those of you outside Redgate who are still stumbling through those early lessons but who want to run. This book will provide you with everything you need to know about building an effective relationship with your personal assistant.

This book is also for, by and about our personal assistants. If you think you could do what we do, and help our managers to be more effective, get in touch.

In ten years at Redgate I’ve seen the company increase in size ten-fold. I’ve worked alongside two joint CEOs – then a single one. I’ve line-managed and worked alongside a second assistant, and then another. I’ve been appointed Functional Head of the PA team and have aided the transformation from working group

into a truly effective team. In all this time, my one constant has been Simon Galbraith. I can honestly say that we have a great working partnership, and that we know how to get the best out of one another. It didn’t take quite ten years, but it did take a few! We went through a long, rocky, road of trialling different working practices to get to where we are now, of testing one another and learning our strengths and weaknesses. We both hope that this book will help speed up that process for others within the business and outside it, and will help you get to where we are with the minimum of difficulty.

One thing (among many) that I’ve always admired about Simon is that he strives for the best in every aspect of the business. Simon really cares about the PA function, and he, too, wants us to be the best in the world. He knows that when we’re working efficiently with our managers and with one another, those managers are more effective and that ultimately the business benefits. If we want Redgate to be a success, we all need to be successful within Redgate.

My favourite chapter of this book? The one on trust. It’s at the very heart and centre of the personal assistant / manager relationship. If Simon and I hadn’t been able to trust one another, I might as well have gone straight home ten years ago. That’s not to say trust will be there straight away. It takes some work, but stick at it and you won’t regret it.

My thanks to the fantastic PA team for putting together this book. Their insight and knowledge is a gift to any manager – grab hold of it, now!

Sara Stopford-PickeringExecutive Assistant & Functional Head of the PA Team

ContentsGETTING STARTEDMy Unreliability NightmareHow Do You Know You Need a Personal Assistant?

I’m ready! How do I get a PA?What Personal Assistants Do and Why it’s important

Minimise context switchingReduce your cognitive loadReduce your actual workload

CREATING AN EFFECTIVE WORKING RELATIONSHIPBuilding Trust

How to look like a legendBe openPrioritise time with your personal assistantDepute all responsibility for your calendar and inbox - immediatelyGive good feedback and take the badDon’t skimp on delegation to save timeBe predictableAcknowledge your personal assistant’s workload as well as your own

ContextA productivity miracleLevels of PA support

How to Build ContextExplain how you work bestFind each other’s strengths and weaknessesMake daily and weekly contact

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Attend meetings togetherUse your personal assistant as a sounding board

NEXT STEPSHelp Your Personal Assistant to Develop

1:1s and PDP sessionsBalancing assistance with project work

How to Hire a Great Personal AssistantHere’s what we look for in a Redgate personal assistantHow do we test our personal assistant candidates?

Sharing a Personal AssistantCreate some distanceBe a grown-upManage your own expectationsHire someone ballsy and experienced

The PA TeamConclusionContactsFurther Reading

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Getting Started

My Unreliability Nightmare

In 2005 I was joint CEO of a fast-growing company that was beginning to show signs of success. I was always busy, but I was rarely productive.

My inbox contained 20,000 emails and was growing at a rate of 150 per day. Some of these emails were important, some were requests for my time, others were just vaguely interesting or not interesting at all.

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My inbox was my archive. It held everything. I would find myself scanning days’ worth of emails just to remind myself of what I was meant to be doing. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work very well. Plenty of those important emails didn’t get read, and I let a lot of people down who needed my time.

I was out of my depth; signing my first multi-million dollar deals, learning how to manage people and how to manage managers, and trying to strategise, all while doing hundreds of small tasks and reading thousands of emails a month. I was always late for meetings and, much as I wanted to be reliable, was becoming increasingly unreliable. If you can imagine all of that, you’ll have a rough idea of the state I was in.

When I described my situation to my sister-in-law, who runs a Government department in Singapore and so is no stranger to workload, her response was immediate: “You need a personal assistant.”

It wasn’t a popular diagnosis, either with me or with my co-founder, Neil Davidson. In my mind, personal assistants were a symptom of self-indulgence. Neil simply said he didn’t know what he would use one for (something I still tease him about today).

I procrastinated for a while longer until Neil relented and insisted that, even if he didn’t want a personal assistant, I probably needed one! We found an expert agency to help us navigate the uncharted waters of personal assistant recruitment and they, in turn, found us Sara.

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To say that the first week was uncomfortable would be an understatement. It felt like having someone else in your shower cubicle. Showing someone else my emails, explaining what I was doing, at work and at home; it all felt thoroughly awkward. But we pushed through. By the end of the first month, both Neil and I would have been horrified at the thought of Sara leaving us, and we would have hired again. Immediately.

Now I have not one but two personal assistants, and I never think of it as a self-indulgence. It’s an absolute necessity. Now I get to focus on the important stuff, and they do the tasks that used to bog me down. Even better, my personal assistants have talents and specialisms that I lack, meaning they do those tasks better than I could myself.

Back in the dark ages, I felt like I was letting myself down. I wasn’t doing the best for the business or for the people I worked with. Having a personal assistant made me like myself more in a work context.

I am now, perhaps unfairly, hard on other managers who are late to meetings, or who don’t reply to their emails on time. But it’s because I know it’s fixable. All you need is a personal assistant.

Simon GalbraithCEO, Redgate

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How Do You Know You Need a Personal Assistant?

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Many managers struggle to cope with their workload. This isn’t a symptom of failure; it’s simply what happens when you have a lot of demands on your time, and when they’re all coming from different directions. It’s what happens when your inbox is knee-deep in emails, and you spend all day working through them, performing numerous admin tasks and sitting in meetings for which you are unprepared because you just don’t have the time. This is a manager’s working life. It’s busy, sometimes even chaotic, and it can also be unproductive.

When you reach this point, it might be time to think about hiring a personal assistant. It’s something to think hard about. Hiring an assistant is a big expense. Your company is only likely to consider this as an option if you’re a high earner, if you’re managing managers, and if your effectiveness can make or break them.

Redgate, as a company of approximately 300 people, has just seven personal assistants who support our busiest, business-critical, leaders. We don’t believe that you’ll automatically need a personal assistant when you reach board level, nor that you shouldn’t have one because you’re not on the board. That’s why it can be helpful to think about whether or not you need a personal assistant and, in fact, whether there are any other steps you can take to help you manage your workload.

Throughout this book we’ll suggest some resources that we’ve found useful in tackling certain problems, and that might make a new hire unnecessary. Some of them are listed below alongside the key indications that, whatever the final solution, you need some help with your workload.

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1. You’re frequently late to meetings or arrive unprepared.a. Try setting aside prep time, or booking meetings within a pattern that works for you. We’ve got a great illustration coming up later.

2. You spend all your time either in meetings or working through your inbox.a. Try reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. You may feel you’re incredibly busy, but if you’re not getting the right things done, you’re ultimately being unproductive.

3. As a result of the two items above, you’re switching contexts multiple times a day, feeling exhausted, and being ineffective.

If all of these things are true of you, if you’ve tried alternative measures, and if you’re in a position to hire an assistant, read on.A personal assistant can do an enormous amount for your business. They can help you add value where it really counts, and ultimately make your business move forward. The next chapter focuses on some of the key benefits a functioning relationship between a personal assistant and a manager can bring. Unfortunately, this relationship takes work.

Hiring an assistant and then gratefully giving them all of your unwanted admin tasks may help a little in the short term, but it is not the recipe for a fruitful long-term partnership that will help you become more effective.

Having hired a personal assistant, the next, and harder, step is being ready to accept help. You need to understand exactly what a PA can do for you as an individual, to be prepared to expose the current chaos of your working days to close scrutiny, and

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to delegate real responsibility as well as rote admin tasks. You also need to be willing to adapt the way you work. You need to be ready to form part of an incredibly close team. Working with a personal assistant is like Pair Programming. It sounds like really hard work, but the overall outcome will be better than if you work alone. Or, for the less technologically minded, it’s like playing table tennis with a partner rather than against the wall. Yes, it’s more difficult, but at least you get a chance of winning.If you feel ready to do all this…read on.

I’m ready! How do I get a PA?At Redgate, the personal assistants have worked hard over a number of years to build a well-drilled and capable PA team. This means that if you work at Redgate, your first step when you need some support is to speak to the team. They can help you to understand your needs and to put some long-term processes in place that might solve your problems. If it turns out that you need more permanent support and it’s a solution that works for you and your role, they can also help you to hire a personal assistant.

If you don’t have a PA team, or if this will be your company’s first personal assistant, we have some helpful tips on hiring towards the back of this book that will help you to secure the right assistant for you.

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What Personal Assistants Do and Why it’s Important

“A personal assistant helps you to move faster.”Mark Cheverton, CTO

A personal assistant’s role is to optimise; to make you faster and more effective.

A good personal assistant can transform your chaotic working life into something streamlined, focused and eminently more enjoyable. They can help you to be calmer and happier. They can even help your colleagues to see you in a more positive way; as an approachable, confident and controlled manager.

A really great personal assistant, however, doesn’t just work for you, or even with you. With a really great personal assistant you’ll both function as a single unit of productive effort. Your working styles will evolve together over time until your combined effectiveness far exceeds that which you could achieve as individuals.

If you’re still reading, the chances are that this is what you’re looking for; that your working life is overloaded and overwhelming, and you’re not living up to your potential or your expectations. The chances are that you spend all of your time in your inbox or in meetings, and that between the two you generate so many tasks for yourself that you can’t address anything of actual importance.

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Have a think about the tasks that take up so much of your time, and then take a look at the list below. These are just some of the basic things a personal assistant can do for you:

• organising (and reorganising) meetings

• preparing meeting rooms, conferencing and video conferencing

• preparing pre-reading and presentations for meetings

• fielding calls, emails and desk visitors

• responding to emails on your behalf

• drafting longer emails, letters, blog posts on your behalf

• booking your travel and creating in-depth itineraries

• tracking your tasks and actions

• researching and making enquiries (internally and externally).

When you’ve learnt to work effectively with your PA, this list can expand to include any number of things specific to your role. But having a personal assistant is not just about the little tasks they do. It’s about what that stuff adds up to – a more effective you. The next few pages will describe some of the ways in which personal assistants use their time and these tasks to make you better at your job.

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Case StudyAmy Ingram is the world’s most prolific personal assistant. She seems to work for everyone, everywhere and in every time zone. Amy’s initials are also well chosen – she’s AI, Artificial Intelligence.

When the Redgate personal assistants first read a LinkedIn post about a start-up offering a worryingly good automated personal assistant service, they had a little communal heart-attack. Amy can schedule your meetings and remember your favourite restaurants. Soon, she’ll be able to book your restaurants, along with your air travel and hotels.

You may be thinking that this is a great solution to your problems. Maybe it is; if this is the extent of your needs, by all means give Amy Ingram a call.

For most of those in need of personal assistance, however, Amy will never be enough. She works without context, without the slightest idea why she is organising meetings nor who they’re with. She doesn’t know whether she is sending an invitation to your best mate or to your slightly intimidating client. She certainly can’t anticipate that you’ll need that meeting, or judge whether it’s more important than the other bookings in your diary.

In other words, she can’t stop you thinking about any of this stuff, she can just stop you doing it. She can’t, crucially, make you more effective.

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Minimise context switchingContext switching is what happens when you move from one task to another, unrelated one. It’s what happens when someone interrupts you while you’re writing an email, or when you go from a meeting about marketing to one about recruitment.

Context switching slows you down, wastes your time, and means you can’t do your best work. In other words, it’s a pain in the arse. At Redgate, our software engineers know this. Computers have to context switch too, after all. They have to shift from one task to another without losing the original task and without the tasks conflicting. This process, for computers and for the human brain, comes at the cost of time and performance.

Our engineers prefer to remain in a constant, uninterrupted flow of writing code or testing it. And why not? This is how they work best and how Redgate gets the most value from their time.For all of us, context switching tends to result in that vague nagging feeling that you’ve been really busy all day but haven’t got anything done. If you’re new to management or leadership, you probably feel that way often. There are suddenly more demands on your time, and they’re always coming from different directions.

A personal assistant will reduce the headache of context switching. They can fend off even the most persistent interruptions (by phone, email or in person), and are adept at figuring out how you work best and rearranging the rest of the world around you.

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This is otherwise known as effective diary management. A personal assistant will group similar meetings close together so that you’re in the right headspace to tackle them. They will keep larger blocks of time free so that you can think clearly, and at length, without waiting for the next meeting to crop up. They’ll make sure you know the purpose of every single meeting, who requested it and what the outcomes should be. They will even ferry you to and from your meetings, giving you information on the way in, and taking information on the way out.

It might sound simple but you’d be amazed at the number of people who can’t do it for themselves. It’s likely that you can’t either – after all, you’re reading this book.

Once you’ve built an effective working relationship with your personal assistant, and an understanding of how you each work best, your time can be made even more effective. The following diary graphic is an example of effective scheduling, based on a Redgate director who recognises that he is at his best from Monday to Wednesday. On these days he is energised, engaged, and able to give his attention to even the most challenging of meetings. On Thursdays and Fridays he prefers some quiet reflection time; a good opportunity to talk about development objectives or write up his meetings from the week.

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Mon27

Tue28

Wed29

Thu30

Fri01

8

9

10

11

12

1

2

3

4

AM

PM

Morningcatch-up

Morningcatch-up

Morningcatch-up

Morningcatch-up

Morningcatch-up

Quarterly1:1 - AB

Quarterly1:1 - CD

Quarterly1:1 - EF

Fortnightlycatch-up

Work onblog post

Lunch Lunch Lunch

Lunch LunchBreakManagement Planning prep

Managementteam meeting

H2 Planningmeeting

Exec Boardmeeting

Decisions Mtg- X Project

Exec Boardprep

Management

X Projectwrite-up andactions

H2 Planningwrite-up andactions

Break

Get out! Get out!

Fortnightlycatch-up

Wrap up

Exec Boardwrite-up andactions

Look at how his personal assistant has structured his diary. You don’t need to know the topics under discussion to see that this makes sense for this director.

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Reduce your cognitive load Have you read Getting Things Done by David Allen? If the answer is “yes”, then you’ll know that the first step towards productivity is capturing what you need to do. Not just what you need to do for a particular task, but everything you need to do. Because once you’ve captured it, clarified it and organised it, you can start to actually reflect on, and engage with, the important bits.Some people capture their tasks in a list. It’s a good start, but a list can’t clarify and organise those tasks for you. A personal assistant can.

The personal assistant’s task process

1. Split tasks into things that my manager needs to do, and things

that they need other people to do.

2. Define the smaller sub-tasks, agreements and meetings they’ll

need to get that task completed.

3. Decide which tasks are important, which are urgent, and prioritise

them.

4. Decide which tasks are neither, and argue for them to be dropped

or delegated.

5. Allocate time in the diary for each of the tasks my manager needs

to complete.

6. Make others aware of the tasks they need to complete, and give

them deadlines.

7. Follow up on each element until the entire task is complete.

8. Communicate the completion of the task if necessary.

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Do you ever take the time to do that yourself?

Unfortunately, with so much else on your mind, it can be hard to find the time and motivation. It does take time at first, and it takes sustained effort. It takes a detailed knowledge of your priorities, concerns and responsibilities.

But when your personal assistant achieves that insight, you can stop worrying about all the frustratingly disjointed little things you have to get done, and start getting excited about the big things you ought to get done. At this point in your career, that’s probably what they’re paying you for.

“Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”David Allen, Getting Things Done

Reduce your actual workloadIt’s one thing to have a personal assistant cataloguing your work, but it’s still your work, right?

Wrong.

We’d all like to think that the prime minister personally replies to every small child’s letter. Or that Bill Gates personally reviews

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and responds to every charitable concern that applies to him for help.

But of course they don’t. How could somebody with so much responsibility possibly take a personal, dedicated interest in everything they do? We often take such things for granted, but when you really think about how much these people achieve it’s clear that they’re not working alone.

Managers can’t reply to every courtesy email. Leaders can’t even read every email. It’s simply not an effective use of their time. Businesses pay their senior staff to think and to make strategic decisions that push that business forward. The emails might need reading, and they might need replying to, but they don’t need you to do it!

Once you’ve developed an effective working relationship with your personal assistant you can delegate (and even depute) tasks that slow you down and destroy your productivity. You can hand over all those small distracting tasks. You can hand over big tasks, recurring projects, that constant burden of documentation that needs updating. Better yet, you can hand them over permanently, so you don’t even have to worry about whether or not they’re being done. When there’s actually something to worry about, trust me, your personal assistant will absolutely let you know.

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“When Sarah understands everything as well as I do, it’s incredible.”Colin Oakman, Head of Finance, Invoicing & Payments and Facilities

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“The way we work isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about understanding each other, using our knowledge, strengths and staying focused.”Tony Payne, Chief Operating Officer

Case StudyColin Oakman is Redgate’s Head of Finance, Invoicing & Payments and Facilities. Unsurprisingly, he’s a very busy man. As well as the responsibilities his title suggests, Colin also manages the legal side of our business and all of our insurance policies and claims.

Or rather, he did.

Colin’s personal assistant, Sarah Hellowell, has a legal background. She has also, over several years working with Colin, developed an extremely good understanding of Redgate and the way our legal, compliance and finance business operates. They have reached such a good level of understanding and mutual context that Sarah can respond to even the most complex enquiries on Colin’s behalf. Most internal queries now go straight to Sarah, saving Colin time and reducing the risk of context switching.

But Sarah has not only removed some of Colin’s tasks, she has also accepted one of his responsibilities as her own: Redgate’s insurance policies. All our renewals and claims are now dealt with directly and permanently by Sarah. This is an example of deputation of tasks, one of the most beneficial results of forming an effective working relationship with your personal assistant.

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Creating An Effective Working Relationship

Building TrustHow to look like a legendTo me, one of the most important meetings in my day will be the one with my PA. It’s important, because it’s useful. It sets the tone for the whole day; it clears my inbox, straightens my diary and ensures I’m getting the right stuff done. It makes me look like a bit of a legend, without me really having to do anything.Over the last ten years we’ve probably let our routine slip more than twenty times. Its surprisingly easy to do when things are going well; I decide to grab a coffee before I sit down, and then chat with someone on the stairs and before you know it the time slot has gone and I’m meant to be somewhere else. But we always shrug it off – we’re in good shape, one missed meeting can’t hurt. Right?

This is the exact point at which the working relationship between a personal assistant and a manager starts to crumble.I realise I haven’t briefed my personal assistant on an email so I write it myself, in a meeting, missing half the discussion in the process. I start to take back a few more little tasks because only I have the context that makes them achievable. My brain is gradually becoming bogged down again. I’m becoming less of a legend, more of a myth.

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My personal assistant, on the other hand, is under-utilised and increasingly dissatisfied. Things are happening around her for which she has no context, and we’re both playing catch-up.If I lose my morning meeting with my personal assistant, in other words, I lose the whole benefit of having her there. I stop being a legend.

Keep your morning meeting sacrosanct! If you do nothing else to maintain an effective working relationship with your personal assistant, make it to that meeting. If ever it feels like the relationship is beginning to slip, ask yourself, “When did I last have my morning meeting?” If it wasn’t this morning – that’s your problem.

Trust is the backbone of any working relationship. If you’ve previously built a high-performing team, what we’re about to tell you might not be much of a surprise; every team needs trust.The team of personal assistant and manager, however, is the closest of all. It should, when run properly, be the highest-performing of all. It requires a level of insight into one another’s strengths, weaknesses, preferences and concerns that you don’t often find in other teams; some of the tips we’re about to give you will be specific to this relationship. You and your assistant should have a single focus; you should be a single unit of productive effort. You should, effectively, be two people doing one job. But to share your job with another individual, particularly a job for which you are ultimately responsible, requires a huge amount of trust.

Simon GalbraithCEO, Redgate

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“On my first day at Redgate my manager told me he didn’t trust me...yet. It felt confrontational - but also liberating to voice it so explicitly.”Lottie Mackintosh, Writing Assistant

Developing and maintaining trust with a new personal assistant can’t be done in a sprint. It’s more like a marathon. It can take up to a year for a personal assistant to really understand you and your working life. Just like a marathon, that process requires preparation and training (from both of you). However, if you’ve ever read Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, or undertaken training based on his model, you’ll know it’s entirely possible.

Trust requires vulnerability; it requires you to abandon your ego and your instinct to protect yourself. It also takes time and effort. Don’t worry – I’m not about to tell you to fall backwards onto a pile of your colleagues! The following suggestions are some practical, less embarrassing steps you can take to help you to build trust. These are used habitually by Redgate personal

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assistants and their managers to make sure they maintain a trusting relationship.

Be openThere are plenty of ways to build trust, but one you can start on your very first day is being open. Tell your personal assistant what energises you, and what demotivates you. Share your expectations of them and of yourself. Tell them what’s important to you right now, and what’s preying on your mind. Give some thought to how you like to work, and to how you build relationships. Then tell your personal assistant. Awkward? Perhaps, but not all conversations can be comfortable. This one will at least build a stronger relationship in the long run.

“Mark shares everything with me. He’s extremely open about his aims, his priorities and his workload. It helps me to anticipate tasks and clear roadblocks.”Doerte Letzmann, Personal Assistant

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Prioritise time with your personal assistantYou may be thinking, surely the point of a personal assistant is to save me time, not spend it? Yes, and no. In general the more effective and trusting personal assistant / manager teams are the ones that spend the most time together. That means regular catch-ups, one on one. It means prioritising the time you spend with your personal assistant. You’ll use this time to establish context, ensuring that you both understand one another’s priorities, concerns and even moods. This time allows a personal assistant to ensure you’re being productive, rather than just busy. We’ll cover this idea in more detail a little later, but suffice it to say that once you realise just how important this time is, and how much more effective it makes you, it won’t be such a big ask.

Depute all responsibility for your calendar and inbox – immediatelyIt might be an unnerving thought; to give a new member of staff, on their very first day, complete control over the program that pretty much runs your life.

What if your personal assistant accidentally deletes something important? What if they email the wrong person or move a crucial meeting?

Well, frankly, they a) retrieve it, b) apologise and c) move it back.

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In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.” This is at least true of Outlook in that almost everything you could do wrong is fixable. Yes, there are likely to be mistakes in the first few weeks, but no, they won’t be the end of the world. For the confidence this will give your new personal assistant, and the trust it will create between you both, it’s worth a little worry.

Give good feedback and take the badAnd vice versa. Personal assistants want to help. They really, really, don’t want to hinder. But if they don’t know the difference between good and bad, and what that means to you, they might end up doing just that.

Learn to give regular, honest feedback to your personal assistant. If you can, tell them when they do something fantastic. 

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“The best people do their work invisibly, make it look effortless and never seek credit.”Mark Cheverton, CTO about Sarah Hellowell, Personal Assistant

This quote comes from Mark Cheverton, our CTO. He could have just told Sarah she’d done a great job. Instead he thanked her publicly, via an email to their whole team. Sarah thinks it is the nicest compliment she has ever been given, as well as one of the key attributes of a great personal assistant.

As often as you tell your personal assistant that something is great, tell them when something isn’t quite right. Did you not like the format of your recent report? OK, tell your personal assistant why. Are you not happy with the response they sent to that nagging conference promoter? Again, tell them why.

As you learn to work with each other you’ll need to adjust habits and methods to suit. The more a personal assistant knows, the better they can perform.

The same goes for you. Your personal assistant might need to tell you when things go wrong, when you’re not helping them to be efficient. Be open to feedback, and react helpfully when you receive it.

 

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My busy manager came in every morning asking for ‘fifteen minutes’ with different people. I used to spend my entire morning reorganising meetings, every day. Eventually, I told him how unhelpful it was.Alex Haggett, Personal Assistant

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Don’t skimp on delegation to save timeA common fear when it comes to delegation is that it’ll take twice as long to teach someone how to do something right as it would have taken you to do it yourself, and that it’s simply not a good use of time.

Fortunately, that’s a fallacy. The first time might be painful, but the next time is fantastic. More importantly, once you’ve taught someone else to do a task, you might never have to do it again yourself. Think of your time as an investment: the more of it you spend, the bigger your returns will be.

When you do skimp on delegation your personal assistant is likely to feel that they’ve underperformed, and that you’ve underinvested. Honestly, neither feels great.

Be predictableThis one might be complicated. You might just not be a predictable person.

Unpredictability is not the same as spontaneity. Be spontaneous if you like; personal assistants love a last-minute challenge. Like when Simon Galbraith said to his assistants, “I’m off on holiday tomorrow, why don’t you write a book while I’m gone?” Look how well that’s turning out!

Unpredictability is when you laugh at bad news one day and rage at it the next. You can do either one, but it helps if you stick to the same one consistently.

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Personal assistants like to know who they’re dealing with. They like to know how far they can push you, what pushes you, and what energises you. And they like to know that your reactions are reasonable and relatively consistent.

If you can’t promise predictability, at least promise an explanation each time you’re unpredictable. If you feel like shouting, tell your personal assistant why. If you’re in an outrageously good mood, tell them about it. If your personal assistant can’t trust your moods, they should at least be able to trust you.

Acknowledge your personal assistant’s workload as well as your own Personal assistants may work fast, but there are limits to what they can achieve within a specific time frame. If something is urgent, tell them. Better yet, ask them how long something will take – before it becomes urgent.

Personal assistants also have a dangerous tendency to accept work when they’re already overloaded. It’ll take much longer for them to learn to say “no” than to learn the ins and outs of database delivery. They’re also likely to take on their own projects and broader responsibilities within the organisation as they develop in their role. Don’t assume that you know everything they have on their plate, just because

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they work for you. Talk to your personal assistant about their workload as well as your own.

“I try to look like a swan on calm waters but people don’t see my legs flapping away underneath.”Sarah Hellowell, Personal Assistant

ContextA productivity miracleThree years ago I was working consistently hard. I had been working consistently hard for about a year. I went to loads of meetings, all well-arranged and prepped by my personal assistant. I read and responded to a mountain of correspondence, again, all well handled by my personal assistant. I felt like a productivity miracle.

Unfortunately, my efforts made no difference at all to the performance of the company. I was working my arse off, and we weren’t doing any better.

It wasn’t until one of our Council of Advisers, our old name for the Board, asked me how long I spend in meetings a week that I realised I was doing anything wrong.

My estimate was 20 hours. It turned out it was closer to 40! And that’s not counting the meetings I slipped in on the fly, or the dinners that were effectively meetings too.

It was no wonder I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was being really productive, but I wasn’t being useful.

My answer to the problem was, bizarrely, to add in another meeting.

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This has become a religiously observed stalwart of my weekly calendar – a half-hour catch-up with my personal assistant on a Friday morning. We use the time to talk about my big priorities and to check whether the meetings we have lined up for the coming week actually contribute towards them or not. We also review the last week and try to figure out what was useful, and what was just wasting time. The more we do it, the less we have to say.

This single meeting changed everything. By providing some context for the week my personal assistant was able to challenge me more. They now frequently ask me why I’m going to meetings, whether they really help me achieve my goals, and whether my time wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere. I’m finally able to make my miraculous productivity count.

Simon GalbraithCEO, Redgate

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Context is the word used to describe the detailed knowledge of your objectives and priorities that a personal assistant needs to be effective. Without context, it’s very hard for a PA to offer much beyond basic administrative support; you might as well use Amy Ingram.

Context is also a great indicator of trust. If a personal assistant knows everything you’re doing, everything you’ve done and everything you’re going to do that week, and if they know why, chances are you’re in a trusting team.

If having context for your workload helps your personal assistant, what might context for their workload do for you? Two-way conversations are always an important part of the relationship between a manager and a personal assistant. The better you understand one another, the better the relationship will work. Next time you give context, try asking for some back.

Case StudySara Stopford-Pickering, as personal assistant to the CEO and Functional Head of the PA Team, has a great deal of experience in the role. So when she recently offered to help a staff member who was covering a managerial role during a sabbatical, and who had no previous experience with a personal assistant, his eyes were gleaming. His needs were quite minimal, he needed Sara to keep an eye on his calendar and make sure he could get to all his meetings, but let’s just say he had great expectations.

Sadly, they were dashed.

A stream of conflicting meeting invites came through, filling his diary. Sara, experienced as she is, was lost. She couldn’t even begin to unravel the conflicts because she didn’t know which meetings were most important. She didn’t even know if the staff member needed to attend them all.

Sara found this pretty frustrating, but we know why it happened. She had no context!

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Levels of PA supportThere are various levels of personal assistant support. We’ve illustrated this with the following table, created by the Redgate PA team. If you want to learn more about the type of management behaviours we list here (directive, deputed), take a look at Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership model.

The basic level of personal assistant support is the only one that can be achieved without context. It can be a dull and unyielding space to work in for both parties. At this level, personal assistants work under direction from their managers; they’re given specific tasks without insight into how they add value. For example:

“Schedule a meeting with this person, on this day and at this time, and call it this.”

AdvancedDeputedProactive

IntermediateDelegated

Initiative

BasicDirective

Administrative

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In this example the assistant doesn’t know why they are arranging the meeting, what the expected outcome would be, nor how this contributes to their manager’s objectives. Without knowing how important it is, they’re unable to define a time frame for the meeting by themselves and need to be told when to organise it. They are certainly not able to anticipate the need for this meeting, something a personal assistant working at an intermediate or advanced level might attempt.

At this level, and without context, a personal assistant can’t anticipate work for themselves or for you. They will, in other words, be unable to reduce your cognitive load. Personal assistants working at this level most likely report to several managers in different areas of a business (in which case it can be very hard to develop a sustainable, deep, level of context with one manager).

The intermediate level of support requires personal assistants to work from initiative and to accept delegated tasks from their manager. It is at this point that you start to relax your cognitive load. If you’re lucky enough to have a personal assistant to yourself, push for this level. If you’re new to having a personal assistant, it might be tempting to stay at a basic level while you accustom yourself to the change. Don’t. All you’re accustoming yourself to is low expectations. In a similar scenario to the one we described above, a manager might ask an intermediate personal assistant to do the following:

“Schedule a meeting about the topic we’ve been discussing, and invite the relevant parties. Set an agenda.”

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In this case the assistant has enough context to understand what the meeting will be about (even to the extent of what should be on the agenda) and who should attend. The manager has not specified a time frame; their personal assistant should already know how urgent or important a meeting about this topic is likely to be, and will use their initiative to fill in the gaps.

Unfortunately, a personal assistant can only work from initiative if they understand what would be helpful to you, and to do that, they need to know your priorities. They can also only accept and handle delegated tasks if they know the background; what it is and who it’s for. They need to know what “good” looks like, and they need context. The advanced level of support is where most Redgate personal assistants operate. They have a high understanding of their manager’s workloads, priorities, obligations and objectives. They have the same information their managers do, and they know how it should be used. This is something one manager has termed “24/7 Context”. At this level personal assistants can proactively source and complete work before it has even occurred to you that it needs doing. They can also accept fully deputed tasks (tasks that you wash your hands of completely and permanently) because they understand, not just the expected outcome, but all of the moving parts involved. If we return to our example, we could easily imagine the assistant saying to their manager:

“I’ve scheduled you a meeting with the following people, on this date, to discuss this topic. The agenda is set and we expect the following outcomes.”

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At this level, you and your assistant are working as a productive team. You have a joint workload and are providing significantly more value to your company than at any other level.

If you want an intermediate-to-advanced level of support, and you want to give your personal assistant the chance of doing great work, you need to provide context. The next section provides some suggestions to help you do this.

How to Build ContextLet’s discuss some processes that the current Redgate PAs have used, and do use on a daily basis, to build context. If you’ve built or managed a high-performing team some of these ideas might seem familiar. The specific requirements of a personal assistant and manager team, however, might be different to those you’ve encountered before.

These might not be the right processes for you, or for your personal assistant. Everyone works differently, even within Redgate’s existing PA team. Consider these as starting points, and work out your own best practice from there.

Explain how you work best

• Are you a naturally directive person? If so, you’re probably at risk of limiting your personal assistant to “basic” support. Try delegating some small, non-critical tasks first, and work up to abdicating big projects and crisis management as your trust strengthens. But, most importantly, tell your personal assistant that this is what you’re doing. Tell them that you’re a directive person.

• Are you someone who needs a lot of time to think about things? Do you sometimes struggle to give an answer or to make a decision because you just haven’t got your head into it yet? Tell your personal assistant. If you don’t, you’ll be nagged. Tremendously. But if you do, your personal assistant will probably set aside blocks of thinking time for you. Instead of pushing you, they’ll push back on the people who are pressuring you for answers.

• You can do this now, even if it’s your first day together.

Find each other’s strengths and weaknesses• Take a look at the contrast between these two skills maps.

One is for managers, and one is for personal assistants. It’s not surprising, given the different skillsets involved, that you and your personal assistant think about things in different ways.

• Give some thought to the way your own brain works. Can you picture it or verbalise it? If so, talk your personal assistant through it. If you can’t, that’s OK – just use a resource like the Gallup StrengthsFinder. Ideally, ask your personal assistant to do the same thing.

• Not only will a greater understanding of your thinking processes help them to understand your highs and lows, and even to schedule your week around them; it will enable them to present work and proposals to you in the way that works best for you. You will never win a work argument again, but you will neither notice nor mind.

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“I don’t like asking open-ended questions. If I explain the problem and propose a solution I get a much better response.”Charlotte Ridley, Personal Assistant

Make daily and weekly contactWe’ve been through this before – a lot. Your personal assistant needs time with you; dedicated, prioritised and focused time.

It’s not just a “hello” in the mornings, or some rushed instructions as you head to a meeting. If that’s all the time you can spare, you’ll be doomed to working in basic, directive mode. Redgate’s CEO, Simon Galbraith, spends one hour each morning with his assistant, and an additional half-hour per week on a Friday.

You might be wondering what they do with all that time. They spend it reviewing emails and the diary, and addressing any other tasks or questions that need Simon’s attention. They follow up

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outstanding actions from the previous day, and make sure they share the outcomes of all the meetings Simon went to.

Simon’s emails are split into things he needs to think about, things he would like to respond to himself, and others that his personal assistant can respond to on his behalf. His inbox is structured into folders so that each email can be put in the correct category. Working in this way means that no email is ever forgotten, nobody ever forgets what is meant to be done with any given email, and everybody has a great level of context. It also means a very small number of emails sit in the inbox at any one time. It’s a lot more manageable than that 20,000-item folder he started with.

“PAs outside of Redgate are always amazed when I say we spend an hour a day with Simon. They don’t seem to understand how valuable that time is.”Sara Stopford-Pickering, Executive Assistant &Functional Head of PA Team

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In the extra half-hour slot per week, Simon and his assistants discuss his priorities and his concerns, and define what he really needs to get done the following week. This discussion empowers all of their decisions for the coming week, and ensures that they get the right things done.

It might seem like a lot of time, but that five-and-a-half hours a week pays for itself twice over.

Schedule some time in the diary, and make it a priority. This, if nothing else, will ensure your personal assistant gets the context they need to do a fantastic job.

If you want to take it a step further, try updating your personal assistant at the end of each meeting. Not just with your actions, but with the outcomes. If you found the discussion interesting, they probably will too.

Attend meetings togetherOne way to avoid having to update your personal assistant at the end of a meeting is to bring them with you. Not to every meeting – they have their own work to do – but to meetings that are important or that will shape the course of your work over the weeks to come.

Personal assistants are naturally inquisitive, and knowing what’s happening around the company helps them to prioritise for you. Imagine that there’s a confidential discussion that people have started loudly enquiring about. If your personal assistant knows

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“I love to know what’s going on. When I have full disclosure, I can work out how best to assist my manager.”Alex Haggett, Personal Assistant

about it, and they know who else knows, they can point the people asking in the right direction and keep unhelpful rumours to a minimum.

Use your personal assistant as a sounding boardHave something preying on your mind? Not quite sure how to respond to it? Luckily for you, there is a member of staff sitting right next to you who can handle highly confidential information and who understands both you and your company.

Test your thinking on your personal assistant. If there are faults or stumbling blocks, they’ll help you to define them. Personal assistants are generally logical, organised people who have a lot of business experience.

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“Mark asks my opinion on everything from team meetings to skills needed for a new role. It gives me the chance to feed back important stuff like a team member’s over-work.”Doerte Letzmann, Personal Assistant

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They can also be argumentative. Encourage them. Challenge one another. Get your personal assistant to pick holes in your arguments, just for the sake of it. Whatever remnants you’re left with will be stronger, more coherent and more thorough as a result.

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NextSteps

Help Your Personal Assistant to DevelopWhy would you want to help your PA to develop? After all, you’ve just spent a year creating a fantastic working relationship. What if your personal assistant’s development leads them to an entirely different job, leaving you to start over with someone else? It’s a risk, but that isn’t a good enough reason not to do it.

Like anyone else, personal assistants like to feel that they’re growing professionally. They like to learn new things, and they almost always have areas in which they’d like to improve. When Sara Stopford-Pickering applied for the role of Functional Head of the Redgate PA team, she had some great ideas for team development opportunities and included them in her proposal. One reviewer asked, “Why would I want to develop a personal assistant?”

This was a purposefully challenging question, and not a reflection of the reviewer’s actual feelings or of Redgate’s approach. But it encouraged Sara to think some more. Here are some reasons you might consider developing a personal assistant.

You might encourage your personal assistant to develop a skill they already have. If nothing else, they will learn to use this skill better and to your advantage. They’re also likely to enjoy learning more about it.

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Or you could encourage your personal assistant to develop a skill they don’t have. Do you do loads of work in Excel for example, but your personal assistant has never heard of a nested IF? Or does your personal assistant get flustered writing anything more than a paragraph and you’ve got to write a stack of lengthy reports? If you’re aware of a skills gap, they probably are too. As you might be aware by now, personal assistants like to fix things.

What about a skill neither of you have? Think about what will strengthen you as a team, not just as individuals. You’re sharing a workload after all – think of their development as your team’s development.

Personal assistants who are offered development opportunities within their roles tend to stay longer than those who aren’t. If you have a great personal assistant and you want to keep them, get them in training.

Like many managers, you might be thinking, “How should I know what development my personal assistant needs? I’ve never been a personal assistant!” It’s a fair point, but the onus isn’t entirely on you. The following tips will help you both to find ways to identify and build personal assistant talent.

1:1s and PDP sessionsStep 1: Ask your personal assistant if they have any areas in which they want to develop. At Redgate, we hold regular 1:1s instead of the standard annual and mid-year reviews.

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These sessions give staff an opportunity to make their career objectives and blockers clear. They give managers the opportunity to guide their staff, to put them on projects that help them move forward and to set out clear development objectives as they go.

The process of defining personal development objectives isn’t inherently easy. Unless you’ve been lucky enough to notice a skills gap, something not everyone is adept at, it could be a very short process indeed.

So, Step 2: Start a Personal Development Plan (PDP). Redgate has a great system in place for creating and implementing PDPs:

We use skills maps to guide a conversation about current strengths, aspirations and areas which need some improvement. You can have this conversation without a skills map, but a bit of preparation will definitely help.

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Pick a few existing strengths and some areas for improvement. Ideally these will benefit you, and will tie in to your personal assistant’s career aspirations. Next, consider ways in which you can support development in these areas. Are there any projects your personal assistant can get involved in? Can they shadow someone with the skills they’re hoping to build? Could they attend a conference, join a networking group or do a course?

If you still can’t think of ways to help your personal assistant develop, try gathering some feedback from others they’ve worked with. If you can’t think of anything, maybe somebody else can.

One thing to remember throughout the process is that the best personal development starts from within a trusting working relationship. Your personal assistant won’t open up to you about their plans for the future if they don’t trust you, and it can be hard to accept criticism, however constructive, if it doesn’t come from a supportive place.

“Sarah has a genuine interest in nurturing me and making me into a great PA.”Cara Creek, Personal Assistant

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Balancing assistance with project workAs your personal assistant starts to develop, it’s likely that they’ll get involved with some projects outside their normal daily routine. This is particularly true of personal assistants that we refer to as PA+ team members; personal assistants who have brought to Redgate, or developed within Redgate, specific skills that are of use in other areas of the company. In most cases, the projects a personal assistant takes on will be aligned with your work, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be disruptive. Your personal assistant might have slightly less time for you than usual, or they could have to balance your priorities with their own. You might find it useful to read our later section on sharing a PA if you find yourself in this position.

The thing that helps the most when your personal assistant has multiple priorities is trust. This is one situation that falls to the personal assistant to control. To do this, they need to feel comfortable saying “no” to you, pushing back on your demands and being clear about their own workload. This doesn’t mean they’ll stop being helpful, but it does mean they’ll be managing your expectations, making sure you know when tasks are going to be completed, and that some things might take an hour or two longer than usual.

In most cases, you’ll still come first. In other cases, the most common solution is to call on the PA team for assistance.

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The PA team is a fantastically important support network for the personal assistants at Redgate. Every week they discuss their workload, their priorities and your priorities. Most importantly they ask one another for help when they’re overloaded. If your personal assistant can’t meet your deadlines because they’ve got a conflicting project, their colleagues will step in. This is why we hire personal assistants for Redgate, not for individual managers – they can step in and help elsewhere as needed.

If your company doesn’t have a PA team yet, see the section at the back of this book to learn more about what a team could do for you.

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Case StudyRedgate has always thought of itself as an innovative, ingeniously simple company. But until recently, we had no tangible way of managing innovation. So we innovated! What resulted was Catalyst, a new idea-sharing platform that would help us identify new ideas and make them into reality. The innovation team knew what they wanted to do, but not how to make it happen. This is where Doerte, a personal assistant with a background in research, stepped in.

Doerte had already completed some detailed market research for part of the project, so she had a clear idea of what was needed. She also knew the team were keen to do something big. They wanted a week-long launch event and lots of different ways for the innovation-shy to get involved. Doerte collected the team’s ideas and narrowed down the scope into an impressive but feasible plan. She proposed a time frame for organising it, and some realistic actions to get the team there. Due to the team members’ other commitments out of the office, most of these actions fell to Doerte herself.

Doerte worked with the Facilities team and with Redgate’s internal creative agency to make the launch happen. She also commissioned a permanent graffiti-themed post box for future Catalyst ideas from an external artist. She even renegotiated the design with said artist when the initial proposal didn’t go down well with the team.

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Doerte remained on the ball throughout the launch, amending plans at the last minute when the team realised what would work best for them. This has not only been a great development opportunity for Doerte and something that complements her skillset, it has been a great success for the team and the company.

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How to Hire a Great Personal AssistantHiring a personal assistant isn’t easy. Luckily for you, the Redgate People Team have it down to a fine art. If you’re not sure how to go about it, try it our way.

Here’s what we look for in a Redgate personal assistant.1. Cultural and team fit

• The relationship between a manager and a personal assistant is important. It’s also a relationship that can grow, improve and strengthen. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have written this book.

• Cultural and team fit are much harder to achieve but they’re equally important. A team and a company both need members that support their goals and are willing to work flexibly to achieve them. If you have a publishing team, for example, that only uses British spelling, but invite a team member to join who will only ever use American spelling, you’ve got a problem. It doesn’t mean that either approach is wrong, but they don’t fit well together.

• Even “personal” assistants need to be team and company minded; sometimes they’ll have to work with managers who didn’t hire them, and in areas of the company they’re unfamiliar with. You might even inherit a personal assistant

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from a predecessor – and if you do, you’ll certainly hope they took the time to interview thoroughly and find the right person!

• Switching teams and managers isn’t always an easy transition. Personal assistants have preferences about how they work, too, and adapting to a new management or support style can be daunting. But the most effective personal assistants are flexible ones, and they should be prepared to match the needs of the company as well as those of the individual who hired them.

• PA teams also need members who contribute, and who support the team’s goals. Take a look at the Redgate PA mission statement at the end of this book. The team wrote this together, and they expect to uphold it together, even when the team members change.

2. Soft skills

• At Redgate we don’t necessarily want the most experienced, high-flying personal assistants. We’ve often found these applicants to be lacking the essential skills we need.

• We don’t need our personal assistant applicants to have managed a diary before, or to have booked travel. The generic tasks a personal assistant performs, and the practical skills they need, can all be taught.

• We do need applicants who are well organised, who enjoy offering support and who can think ahead.

• Many personal assistants outside of Redgate work in very directive environments, being handed specific tasks and fulfilling them. We prefer personal assistants who can think for themselves!

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How do we test our personal assistant candidates?1.The travel test

We’ve already said that a candidate doesn’t need to have booked travel before, and we mean it. We expect anyone with the right soft skills to be able to complete this task, with or without experience of booking travel. We explain the task to the candidate verbally. This is part of the test – we want to see how they deal with receiving verbal instructions. The best candidates take notes, review the instructions they’ve been given, and ask questions to ensure they have all the information they need for the task. Then the candidate is given a cruelly short time to work; to research travel, to identify calendar clashes and to offer up solutions. Well, it might seem cruel, but we use this short time frame to test whether people can handle the demands of the job – a personal assistant’s work is often complex, and tends to come with a tight deadline.

2. The grammar test

We all have our weaknesses. For many people, grammar is at the top of the list. Personal assistants are responsible for creating and editing emails, letters, contracts and presentations. A personal assistant needn’t be a budding bestseller, but it’s useful if they can write clearly and coherently, and spot any mistakes in written work.

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“A member of my team hates writing. I sometimes catch him staring at a blank Word document! It saves him so much time and pain to give his writing tasks to me.”Doerte Letzmann, Personal Assistant

These tests are the very first part of our personal assistant interview process. If the candidate doesn’t ace the tests, we don’t continue the interview. It may sound harsh, but it’s also more efficient, as we spend less time talking to candidates we know aren’t going to be a good fit for the role. After the tests, candidates are given the opportunity to review their work. Some pick what they’ve done apart, and talk about other things they’d have done if they’d had more time. Some don’t. You can probably guess which attitude we’re looking for when hiring personal assistants.

If the tests have gone well, candidates spend some time answering CV questions, followed by some questions on cultural fit with the People Team. If this isn’t already part of your hiring process, it’s worth thinking about your company culture, the

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kinds of people and personalities that have integrated well in the past, those that haven’t, and what questions you could ask in an interview to find out whether the person would likely thrive or struggle within your organisation.

Finally they meet:

Their potential manager

This meeting isn’t as important as it sounds. Unless either of you has a violent antipathy towards the other, it will be a formality. The relationship between a manager and a personal assistant develops over time. It can always improve and grow. It might mean that you have to work with someone who wasn’t your first choice, but who fits well within the company and PA team. As long as you can learn to trust them, you’ll soon see their value.

The PA team

This meeting is more important than it sounds. The PA team is a vital support network for all personal assistants, and it simply can’t function unless everyone’s enthusiastic about working with a new hire. We’ve rejected applicants who were a good fit with the manager, because they weren’t a good fit with the PA team – it’s just that important.

Sharing a Personal AssistantYou’ve identified that you need some help. You’ve spoken to the PA team, or to the relevant person within your organisation, they’ve monitored the situation and they agree with you. Almost.

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They tell you that you need half a personal assistant. The most common solution to this problem is to hire a full-time assistant, and to divide their time between yourself and another manager in need.

This is pretty common practice when you’re new to personal assistance. And for good reason – not everyone will know how to use a full-time personal assistant, and how to get the most from them.

Sharing a personal assistant tends to work best when both managers work in a similar area and are aligned in their objectives and priorities. When this isn’t possible, however, here are a few key tips for making it work:

Create some distanceIt’s all very well saying that a personal assistant will spend fifty per cent of their time with you, and fifty per cent of their time with someone else but if they always sit with that other person, you’re unlikely to get much support. Personal assistants work most successfully in this role with two desks, one next to each manager. It clearly signals which manager the personal assistant is working for at a particular time, and allows the personal assistant to build a relationship with each manager.

Be a grown-upIt won’t always be a fifty-fifty split. Occasionally, one manager will have a project that takes precedence, and it won’t always be you. Learn to ask your personal assistant regularly about

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their workload, and let them manage your expectations. Other support (such as a PA team) might be available to help you in an emergency.

Manage your own expectationsIt can be very difficult to maintain full context across two managers, especially if they work in different areas. This may mean that you receive a more basic level of support than you would with a dedicated personal assistant. Be wary of dumping everything onto your assistant.

Hire someone ballsy and experiencedPersonal assistants often find it hard to say “no”. In a shared PA role, they’ll have to. They’ll need to juggle workloads, judge precedence and be honest about what they can and can’t do for each manager. It can be a very rewarding and varied role for a personal assistant, but it can also be difficult if they’re not comfortable standing up for themselves. If you’re new to managing a personal assistant, you’re also going to need someone experienced. If you’re an old hand, by all means, hire someone green. But two people who are both new to a personal assistant / manager relationship will find it hard to get the most out of it.

This advice is also applicable to sharing your personal assistant with a project, whether that’s something they’re already involved in or something that’s part of their development.

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The PA TeamWe’ve said a lot about PA teams throughout this book. That’s because, at Redgate, we consider the team to be a vital part of the organisation. If your company has several personal assistants who aren’t working together, read on to learn how forming a team might benefit you all.

Well, as I’ve just explained, your personal assistant might work primarily for you, but having other personal assistants around who know the company and can work across it makes both their and your life easier in times of crisis or heavy workload. It can also provide massive benefits for the company as a whole.

Redgate hasn’t always had a PA team. In the past, their relationship could have been better defined as a working group. They could come together to do specific tasks when they needed to, but they weren’t a cohesive team. There was a distinct lack of trust between the members, and they struggled to share work. They weren’t using their individual strengths or harnessing their considerable combined power as a team.

After a company reorganisation, some team changes, a painfully honest retrospective and the appointment of a Functional Head, the personal assistants began to work towards building a team that would really add value at Redgate.

Since that point they’ve made two successful hires and implemented a new travel function. Several of the personal assistants have become managers and developed new skills. They’re all aware of one another’s skills, and have detailed skills

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maps to refer to, and they apply them around the company as needed. They collaborate, around their team whiteboard and in meetings, and as a result have done blog posts, lightning talks, and even written this book.

Redgate has a PA team because, together, the personal assistants can do so much more. The team doesn’t take away focus from “personal” assistant roles, it helps the team to perform those roles to the best of their ability.

They learn from one another. They get to do more of the things they do well, and share out the tasks that other people do well. Since becoming part of a functioning team, each and every one of the personal assistants feels that they work more effectively in their individual roles.

Unlike most other teams, the PA team don’t do a lot of actual work together. They don’t have many big projects, but when they do, they nail them.

If you want to find out more about how Redgate built such a valuable team take a look at Sara Stopford-Pickering’s blog post, “How we created a functioning PA team at Redgate”. If you work at Redgate you can also stop by our whiteboard to see what we’re working on at the moment.

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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLEPersonal assistants tackle more unusual and demanding situations than you can imagine. They’re sometimes asked to do things that the requester themselves would consider to be impossible, and that sit outside of their normal roles. But more often than not they find a way to make the impossible possible. These snippets are just a few examples of celebratory challenges Redgate personal assistants have been set over the years, and will give you an idea of the versatility and tenacity of our team.

1At Redgate we love to celebrate and one of the most satisfying opportunities is when a colleague reaches their ten-year work anniversary. It can be difficult, however, to find an appropriate gift. There are some big expectations, and no matter how long you’ve worked with someone it’s hard to know what that person would love best. When it came to Tom Harris’s tenth anniversary, Simon Galbraith (who is always involved with the choice of gift) insisted that Tom’s primary passion was for squash. Unfortunately, the cost of the average squash racket is rather below what we’d hoped to spend.

Simon characteristically suggested we think on a larger scale. How would it be, he suggested, if we managed to secure Tom a training session with the world’s #1 coach?

Most people would say it would be impossible. Sara, one of Simon’s assistant’s, however, put in some serious research time

tracking down the world’s top ranked players and coaches. The result was an extremely happy, and thoroughly beaten, Tom Harris.

2Another of our favourite Redgate memories is our trip to John Lewis, one of the UK’s best department stores. It was such a fantastic way to say “well done!” to our staff for hitting a sales target that we’ve now done it twice! Only a few members of the PA team were involved to keep the surprise as big as possible.

All of our staff were told that we’d have an offsite (obligatory) company meeting after work. Several buses arrived to take us to our “conference centre”. Instead, we were taken to John Lewis where we were greeted with champagne, canapés, the entire store to ourselves and £500 each in vouchers to spend. The work that went into organising such a trip, secretly, was as immense as the rewards. Sorting £150,000 worth of department store vouchers into envelopes for each staff member is no mean feat.

3Lastly, and most recently, the PA team have been involved in a celebration that brought together our teams on either side of the Atlantic. Each year we hold a “Redgate Day Out”, a big summer party with team building, games, dancing, even dog training! This is always a hugely anticipated event but somehow, in 2015, it just didn’t feel enough.

Our colleagues in the US office felt out of touch. We only get a couple of hours a day in which we can speak with them, and most of us have never met in person. So we decided to fly the entire US office over to Cambridge to join our superhero-themed Day Out and to spend some time in the office. The PA team coordinated travel, accommodation, meetings, British- and American-themed lunches, and even put together local guides for our visitors. They did it, moreover, £30,000 under budget. We hope this means we get to do it again!

No matter what the request, or how big the task, the PA team are always willing to help. It’s a trait common to most personal assistants, but one that can be really boosted by having a functioning team to support them.

“We are a dynamic Redgate PA team, consistently enabling growth and adding value across the business through flexibility and reslilience.”The Redgate PA team mission statement

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ConclusionWhen we first decided to write this book, it was with the hope of helping others to negotiate the pitfalls and hurdles of building an effective relationship with their personal assistants. To that end, we’ve tried to keep our advice tangible and applicable to everyone, whether you work at Redgate or not. We hope that you now have the tools to hire your own personal assistant, to build an effective, trusting relationship with them, or even to build a high-flying PA team.

It will take time, and there will always be challenges to overcome, but we truly believe that any manager and personal assistant have the ability to form an effective relationship. We’d love to hear from you as you take this path yourself and to learn more about what processes work for you.

If you’d like to find out more about Redgate or if you’re keen to join us as a personal assistant, a manager or in any other capacity, take a look on our website, www.red-gate.com, or contact one of us directly. Best of luck!

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The PA TeamSara Stopford-PickeringExecutive Assistant to CEO & Functional Head of the PA Teamsara.stopford-pickering@red-gate.com

Lottie MackintoshWriting Assistant to CEOlottie.brooks@red-gate.com

Doerte LetzmannPersonal Assistant to CTOdoerte.letzmann@red-gate.com

Alex HaggettPersonal Assistant to CCOalex.haggett@red-gate.com

Charlotte RidleyPersonal Assistant to COOcharlotte.ridley@red-gate.com

Sarah HellowellPersonal Assistant to Head of Finance, Invoices & Payments and Facilitiessarah.hellowell@red-gate.com

Cara CreekPersonal Assistant to CMOcara.creek@red-gate.com

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Further ReadingIf you want to learn more about any of the techniques or theories we’ve discussed in this book, please take a look at the following:

Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivityAllen, DavidPiatkus, revised 2015

The Five Dysfunctions of a TeamPatrick Lencioni John Wiley & Sons, 2002

StrengthsFinder 2.0Tom Rath Gallup Press, 2007 http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx

Situational LeadershipPaul Hersey & Ken Blanchard http://situational.com/

How we created a functioning PA team at RedgateSara Stopford-Pickering https://www.red-gate.com/blog/how-we-created-a-functioning-pa-team-at-redgate

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