The  Executive Secretary Excellence programme will provide participants with a ‘tool-kit’ of skills and techniques for managing the demands of their role. The programme focus is upon developing skills in the following occupational competency areas:

• Dependability & Reliability
• Taking Initiative
• Communications
• Managing  and Controlling Telephone Calls
• Planning & Organising
• Focusing on Responsibility
• Information Organisation & Retrieval
• Organising Business Meetings
• Maintaining Essential Equipment
• Maintaining a Secure Work Area
• Professional Business Writing
• Reception Duties
• Enhancing the Business Environment
• Terrific Team Working

Learning Objectives

This programme is for you if you wish to:

• Better understand your organisation and the business environment in which it operates
• Recognise your professional role as part of the team and develop strategies for enhancing your service provision
• Identify and develop the skills, knowledge and attitude of a highly competent secretary
• Create meaningful relationships with your colleagues at all levels
• Develop strategies for planning and organising work, including effective techniques for creating letters memo’s and emails that influence others
• Adopt a systematic approach to decision making and problem solving
• Assess interpersonal skills in order to communicate more effectively at all levels, both face to face and on the telephone
• Prepare an action plan to implement on return to work

Executive Secretary Excellence Course Content

Day One – The Role of the Secretary

• Your place in the structure of the organisation and the business environment in which you operate.
• Time to reflect on how and what you deliver to others and identify the Key Results Areas for you job.
• What are the essential outcomes or achievements that your internal/external customers expect?
• What are the skills required to deliver those services?
• Identifying the space that you occupy in your organisations structure and your key result areas – purpose and performance
• Mapping your formal and informal network to identify where demands for your service originate
• Linking people to information – analysing your work flow and trends in the flows.  Identifying inefficiencies in your current work flows.
• Ensuring that you enable people to access relevant, accurate and timely information tailored to their needs.
• The SAND Analysis (Strengths Achievements, Needs, Demands) How do these factors impact your service provision

The Role of the Manager

• The management function and the secretary’s role within it.
• Perfect partnerships and promoting your service provision
• Identifying your managers key result areas
• The knowledge, skills and personal attitudes needed to respond to your managers support needs?
• The Perfect Secretary – Lets advertise! Create a role profile for the perfect secretarial support through your manager’s eyes.
• Exploring management styles and how to respond to your managers preferred style
• Defining and managing your manager’s priorities
• Defining your goals and aspirations with your manager
• Manage and control information flow on your manager’s behalf
• Managing more than one boss and adapting to their preferences
• Overcoming difficult behaviours – identifying those behaviours that you find difficult to manage and adopting strategies to manage your response

Taking Greater Control and Responsibility

• Exploring the ingredients of ethos, pathos and logos and how they work to influence us all
• Understanding credibility and a credibility analysis to reveal where you need to assert more influence
• Who and what is in your circle of influence?
• Identifying those events and people over which you do have influence
• Increasing your influence and others’ confidence in you the six techniques of influence that are guaranteed to produce positive results

Day Two – Communicate!

The activities in this module help you to assess your communication skills, whether it’s because we make assumptions, fail to ask the right question or fail to listen to the response we can all improve our communication skills. You will engage in an activity designed to highlight the need for clear communication and will enable you to communicate using a number of mediums to deliver your message.

• Communicate interactive group activity
• Assessing your performance during the activity and identifying those fatally flawed communications to be avoided at work
• Questioning  techniques and key word  listening to get to meaning in messages quickly
• Positive projection. Is your language and your body communicating the same message?
• What is assertive behaviour – You can develop it!

Getting Results is Down to Details

The magic behind every outstanding performance is always found in the smallest of details. What are the ingredients for complete personal effectiveness? During this module you will assess yourself against criteria for work effectiveness. We will also consider the importance of details in a team based activity where you will be responsible for processing wages payments for a group of employees – and we really don’t want to get that wrong – do we?

•  Deadline 30 minutes team activity
•  Managing and minimising the impact of  mistakes
•  Work effectiveness indicator, assess yourself against 20 work effectiveness competencies

Day Three – Time and Personal Management

How do you use your time, we will consider your attitude towards time do you like a planned approach or perhaps you do things at the last minute and prefer a spontaneous approach to time. However well you organise your life or build your skills at dealing with time you will never have enough time to do everything you want – during this module you will consider the strengths and consequences of your approach to time and learn some quick fix techniques to encourage effective use of time.

• Identifying your time preference. We each have a time preference, and finding ourselves in a job or a relationship that doesn’t suit our style can be deeply frustrating. A simple way of looking at time styles is to predict or control what is going to happen to us
• Quick fix tips for frustrated planners and spontaneous types
• Understanding your own habits which result in lost time
• The Time Management personal assessment – identifying efficiencies in the management of your time
• Set your objective activity – a highly interactive activity where you will need to plan for multi tasks while maintaining the quality requirements of the tasks and of course delivering on time
• How to recognise “Time stealers” in your daily work

Day Four Fleeting Meetings

Despite predictions that the impact of technology in the workplace would reduce the need for meetings, it seems that meetings have started to consume an increasing proportion of the working day. Everyone has meetings! They are a necessary part of any functioning organisation but think of how easily they can become time consuming, frustrating and wasteful. A meeting is a group of people who come together to seek a common goal – facilitation and preparation are key skills and contribute to the effectiveness of meetings.

• The seven step process to make meeting work
• What are the goals or objectives for the meeting
• Is a meeting the best way to accomplish them?
• What specific issues need to be addressed (the agenda items)?
• What information needs to be gathered before the meeting?
• How should the information be prepared and compiled for the meeting?
• Who should attend the meeting?

Meeting Facilitation Tools

• A tool-kit of meeting facilitation techniques
• How should the agenda be ordered to ensure everyone’s time is used effectively?
• What briefing materials should be sent to the participants before the meeting?
• What room arrangements and other preparations are necessary?
• Audi-visual equipment
• Arrangements for messages