Melba Duncan explains why executive secretaries boost company profits
MELBA Duncan phoned me from New York. She is coming to South Africa on February 17 to 18, to be the keynote speaker at Executive Secretary LIVE, the second year this conference has been held in the country.
Duncan is the founder and president of the Duncan Group, a retained search and consulting firm that recruits and coaches senior-level and C-suite assistants that end up working for the world’s top chief executives.
But all we can speak about in 20 minutes is the turmoil engulfing America.
As Duncan’s life is devoted to enabling solutions and bringing about positive outcomes, the present immigration travel bans and the chaos engulfing the US is hard for her to deal with. However, we soon got down to what it means to be an executive assistant.
What Duncan made me realise is that being an executive assistant is a career choice for people, both men and women, who have both emotional intelligence, common sense, and are very clever. “This is not a career choice for the faint-hearted,” she says.
Duncan has written two books, one of which was titled The New Executive Assistant: Advice for Succeeding in Your Career.
In it she wrote: “Today’s executive assistant requires a high degree of strategic skill. Effectiveness on the job is increasingly tied to correct choices. And what we choose to do, it turns out, is as important as the choices we make about what not to do.
“Constant discipline and clear communication of day-to-day decisions are necessary in order to sustain career momentum and an advantage of the job.”
In the book she asks: “How can a position with such varied and challenging responsibilities be so undervalued? It takes exceptional people to do this job well.”
Her third book, Indispensability, an overview of career survival strategies in the new economy, will be released by around July.
I asked Duncan whether the business world in the US acknowledges how important the role of an executive secretary is as in South Africa it seems very underplayed.
Duncan says the role does not get the respect it deserves generally.
“Some see executive assistants as a dying breed,” she says. “They think that because there is office software they don’t need an executive assistant. This is totally the wrong perception.”
As company executives need to travel more, they need someone to manage the office while they are away, and someone with the skills to keep them on track and provide support. They soon realise that their assistants are the most valuable resource. “This is a collaborative business partnership.”
While companies are cost-cutting increasingly, Duncan says they often think they can cut down on the level of the executive secretary they hire for executives. Duncan says this is a big mistake.
Not only does the assistant organise schedules and travel optimally, but they can help an executive produce company reports, for example. They network and have to keep up to date with technology.
They solve problems and are depended upon to make decisions on behalf of the executives they support. Through decisions that an assistant makes it saves the executive time, which equals productivity and contributes to a company’s bottom line. So this is short-sighted, Duncan wrote in the May 2011 Harvard Business Review The Case for Executive Assistants.
“At very senior levels, the return on investment from a skilled assistant can be substantial. Consider a senior executive whose total compensation package is $1 million (R13.3m) annually, who works with an assistant who earns $80 000. For the organisation to break even, the assistant must make the executive 8 percent more productive than he or she would be working solo – for instance, the assistant needs to save their bosses much more than that.”
It is also very important, Duncan says, for an assistant to be included in top-level meetings so they can collaborate on the best outcome. They need to know what is important to create a competitive strategy and forge a productive result.
In a world rattled by technology and globalisation, business is fast and furious and having an assistant that is talented is key.
I asked Duncan what message she would like to give to executives.
Duncan says: “Know who you are and who you become when things go wrong so that you know who you must hire.”
She explains that executives need to take responsibility in the hiring of an assistant. They must be clear in their goals and expectations of what they expect and not look at assumptions.
Equally, assistants need to speak confidently to executives. “Trust in the relationship is vital.”
As business models change in South Africa and the digital economy washes away old methods, what Duncan has described is exactly what this era needs, or what Accenture Tech Vision 2016 calls the “liquid workforce”.
The qualities that the liquid workforce have is the ability to learn quickly or the ability to shift gears and evolve in a dynamic environment. So too do executive assistants.
While Duncan argues executive secretaries are not a dying breed, I would perhaps argue that if you can’t see the value proposition perhaps it is you who are the dying breed.