By Karen Porter

It’s that time of year when you think that you need to set goals for your administrative assistant or executive assistant, perhaps working the goals into a performance appraisal session. Then next year (or whenever the goal deadline you set), you’ll hold another review session regarding whether or not your assistant met his or her goals that you set.

There is a problem with that scenario though: It’s a pathetic way to set workplace goals for your administrative assistants and executive assistants.

Your first mistake there is that you are setting goals for your administrative assistant or executive assistant instead of with that person. That’s not setting goals for your employee; that’s giving him or her an assignment.

There is a solution: If you want your employees, including your administrative staff, to invest themselves in meeting these workplace goals, involve them from the start. Your employee needs to see the personal value of setting goals in the workplace and that it’s not just an attempt to fill some space on a written performance appraisal document.

But you say: “I’ve asked my administrative assistant to set her own goals before and what she wrote was pathetic. Worse, some of the administrative assistants couldn’t come up with any goals. So it’s just easier if I take the lead in goal setting for my employees. After all, I’m the manager or leader here so I should set the goals for my administrative assistants, right?”

Wrong!

If you want your employees, including your executive and administrative assistants, to feel “buy-in” for these workplace goals and understand them and truly be motivated to meet them, then these assistants need to be personally involved in setting their own goals in the workplace. They need to understand the goals they are supposed to meet right from the start …the what, how and why. What’s the goal? How will I meet it? Why is this goal important to you, me and/or the company?

Manager: “But my administrative staff don’t know how to set goals and can never think of any goals to set. They tell me they struggle with goal setting for their administrative assistant role. One administrative staff member even told me I was the first person to ask her to set a goal at work in all of her administrative professional career — which spanned two decades so far.”

Bingo! There’s your problem: Lack of training in goal setting for your administrative staff.

If you want your administrative staff to be able to set workplace related goals, then you need to train your administrative assistants and executive assistants in how to set goals. In some cases, you need to go back to the very beginning and explain what your concept is of a goal (to make sure you’re on the same page of thinking). And train your administrative assistants and executive assistants to set goals, even the still popular SMART goal formula for setting goals. Teach your administrative staff — or find someone else to teach them — at least these four things:

♦ What a goal is (and is not).

♦ How to come up with ideas for setting goals in the workplace and for their administrative role specifically.

♦ How to write an actual goal statement, perhaps using the SMART goal formula.

♦ How to create an action plan to meet a goal.

As the old adage goes, “teach a person to fish and they will feed themselves,” but catch the fish for them and well, they will expect you to keep doing it — year after year after year. Perhaps that’s not the exact old adage, but you get the concept. Invest in goal-setting training for your administrative assistants and executive assistants. The result is they will then be able to set their own goals in the workplace — drafting them and then working with you for finalizing and getting approval on the goals.

Your administrative professional staff will have more buy-in and motivation for completing the goals because they helped to create them. They understand the goals, know why they are valuable or important goals to them, you, and/or the company, and have an action plan for meeting the goals.

VAAP educational materials includes an entire section on workplace goal setting for administrative professionals, including ideas to brainstorm goals and write them as SMART goal statements. That’s a start. You can join VAAP as a company and share the entire packet of goal-setting information with all of your administrative staff (plus there is a lot more educational information and tips for their administrative roles on a variety of topics).

Click here to sign up for VAAP and get the information packet on goal-setting for administrative assistants and executive assistants in the next five minutes (it’s downloadable PDF file format documents).

Or don’t sign up for VAAP and don’t get these self-directed learning materials for your administrative staff, and instead keep “catching those fish” for your administrative assistants and executive assistants — year after year after year. You decide if you want to set goals for them or with them; there is a difference. Do you want to manage and lead or do you want to do it all yourself? I say, help your administrative assistants and executive assistants learn to set goals in the workplace on their own and then finalize those goals with you; don’t set the goals for them right from the start. Utilize the goal-setting packet of information in the VAAP materials (click the link above to get it now).