Great assistants help everyone
Written on 21 Aug 2008
Johanna Rothman has a nice post about why people with responsibilities need assistants. As she points out, most organisations have been stripping out administrative support except for the most exalted positions, which makes sense until one looks at the bigger picture. Is it really better that people who are supposed to be busy with activities that generate income for the company spend their time filling in orders for stationery?
One of my (multiple) rants is about my brief experience at Digital Corp’s late Systems Research Center. Their technical recruiting was pretty tough but so, I guess, was their recruitment for all the other staff. They had the best administration staff I’ve ever seen. They would perpetrate unprovoked acts of forethought and helpfulness when you weren’t looking, same with the system administrators.
This works on all sorts of levels. First, if you’ve just spent a great deal of effort recruiting top-class researchers, it doesn’t make sense to have them spend time battling the corporate bureaucracy. Second, and deeper, the ethos in the building was that stuff would just work, so the technical staff would not be diverted from their real jobs—and, by implication, there would be no excuses for not doing good work. In contrast, at another international research lab, it took me months to get my expenses paid because the relevant administrator could not figure out which way exchange rates worked (more Dollars than Pounds at the time).
Like many such systems, it’s hard to understand or believe how much of a difference getting things right makes until you’ve experienced it; I expect this is how it feels at a first-rate Toyota plant. The rest of us have to learn to cope with the Gumption Traps waiting for us in the “real” world. In the distance, we hear the Siren call of the Pragmatic Fix.
Filed in: Organisations.
My problem with assistants is that people use them as a crutch and it is usually the poor systems in place that make people look for a crutch in the first place. And senior folks in the organizations never feel the issues because they have a crutch which others may not have. And hence the systems in place will never improve. The boss doesn’t get it most of the time. I think senior managers and executives indulge in unnecessary handoffs to assistants which creates unnecessary beurocracy.
That said, I would agree that a good assistant helps us beat the beurocracy, but let us not work at the beurocracy because of that.
Was it Adam Smith who spoke about the division of labour? For the first time ever (and I have argued for it numerous times), I have a personal assistant. My argument is simple, I design and write software really well. I motivate others quite well too. I am quite good at organising meetings. But, there are people who are better at organising meetings and doing other clerical stuff. There are not that many people who can do what I do - so, it’s best for the company to let me get on with my business and let other people get on with what they do best…
Usually a manager type with a technical right hand man is the way projects are structured. In my case I am the boss with a manager type as my right hand man. And it is working quite well.
@ Jayadeep You are, of course, right if the assistants end up doing the main job, and one of the ways to get things fixed is to make the people with authority feel the pain. One of the other efforts at SRC at the time, was to have the researchers figure out how to administer a Windows NT network (it was brand new at the time). It was very hard work.
Early in my career I worked for a consulting company that ran their administrative support group as a “profit center”. This group was treated at the same level as the technical and management consulting groups in the company.
Expectations were set high for these administrative assistants and they were rewarded in kind. As a result, they attracted top-notch people and this translated into a level of professionalism in that I have not witnessed in any other company.
My take-away is that great assistants needs to be valued through all levels in the organizations. We could all use a Miss Moneypenny!
[…] of willpower, then there’s less left for writing great systems; that’s why I think the regime at DEC SRC was so […]