Today is Administrative Professionals Day. Administrative Professionals are the heart of the organization. There is no group in any organization that I admire more. They keep us productive and organized, and from losing our minds.
This is a story about an Executive Assistant whose communication skills were better than the executives she supported.
It was an ugly acquisition. A well-known company in Silicon Valley, more than 20,000 employees, a good reputation, and best of all, a great leadership team at the top that employees were grateful to have. It wasn’t collapsing financially, it still generated strong cash flow. But the company was experiencing a period of stalled growth and mild decline, very dangerous in a fast-moving, high-tech sector.
It wasn’t a company anyone expected to be acquired since it had stood on its own for a long time. So when it happened, the news splashed across all business headlines.
New leadership came in, itching to replace the old, pouncing on every department, eagerly disrupting the “old way” of doing business.
The chaos that ensued was dramatic.
Sunny, an Executive Assistant to one of the execs in the C-suite, not the CEO, was doing the Beyond Persuasion coaching program. I asked for her goal, and she told me she wanted to be “a strategic partner for the C-suite”. She loved the company and desperately wanted the chaos to stop and to bring trust and harmony back. At the moment, she didn’t know where to begin.
I told her it begins with knowledge. Sunny was eager to learn. The knowledge of how to talk about her ideas so they would be accepted gave Sunny courage.
Sunny walked into executive offices she had no business walking into, except that she had decided the whole company was her business. No one stopped her. She asked if they had a minute, they did, and Sunny sat down with individual executives from both sides and started talking to them.
While everyone on the old team “hated” the new leadership team, Sunny knew that hating them would lead nowhere. She wanted to earn their trust and build a relationship.
Everyone got used to Sunny going where she wanted to go, no one challenged her. It was so totally different for an EA to do something like this, there were no rules about it.
Sunny started to get executives from both teams talking to each other. She arranged meetings that brought them together and gave them a common purpose for being there. It was all in the form of suggestions – she had no power. But hers were uncommon suggestions that appealed to them and they kept saying, “Yes”.
While these executives were top-notch business executives, because of what she was learning, Sunny’s communication skills were significantly better than any of theirs. And she used these skills to bring people together.
After these initial meetings were successful, more meetings started to happen spontaneously in the hall, without Sunny’s prodding. For the first time, you could hear laughter in the halls again.
Sunny found herself being invited to the Board of Directors meetings, something that had never happened before.
Execs were inviting her into their offices to ask her opinion.
Sunny didn’t have much opinion about the business or the strategy, her opinions were all about relationships and how to talk to each other. But relationships and communication are the keys for any success. Relationships are where decisions are made, and decisions are the pivot point for success or failure.
Sunny told them she was enrolled in an online coaching program (Beyond Persuasion) and started to casually teach them what she had learned. They thought she was brilliant.
Sunny became a trusted advisor to the entire C-suite. The distrust between the leadership teams and the disharmony vanished, the company felt united again
The new leadership brought the company to a new position of innovation. The business became highly profitable, strong, with steady recurring revenue. They’re doing well now. Solid.
Developing the power to transform extremely difficult situations into extraordinary outcomes is something that will open the doors to virtually any level of achievement you want to experience.
Sunny used that power to transcend the boundaries of the “Executive Assistant” to become a trusted advisor to the C-Suite and help direct an entire organization towards success.
Consider the biggest obstacle that’s between you and what you want to achieve. What would happen if you could make that obstacle disappear?
Be the cause!