7 Lessons from Administrative Assistants to US Presidents

Smart leaders know how important executive assistants are to their success. Executive assistants provide essential services like managing calendars, playing gatekeeper, ensuring meetings run properly, tracking paperwork, and much more. Perhaps the most high profile executive assistant job in the world is the personal secretary to the President of the United States. Here are seven essential executive assistant skills learned from stories from the Oval Office.

1 - Be a Fast Learner - Rose Conway had been working for ten years in Kansas City, Missouri as the executive assistant to the head of the Federal Housing Administration regional office. By chance, her boss happened to have a famous brother - Senator Harry Truman. When Truman was elected as Vice President, he hired Rose to be on his staff in Washington DC. Less than a month after she started, Truman ascended to the presidency upon the death of President Roosevelt, and appointed Rose as his personal secretary. It is hard to imagine a more demanding start at a new job than Rose had after moving halfway across the country to Washington. Her success in learning the job so quickly earned her a lifetime job with Truman for the rest of his presidency and in his post-presidency.

2 - Speak Truth to Power - Ann Whitman was President Eisenhower's personal secretary. Among her many talents was being able to let President Eisenhower know when she thought he was making mistakes. In one light-hearted example, Mrs. Whitman told the President he was wrong when he ordered the National Park Service to remove the squirrels from the White House lawn because they were interfering with his small practice golf course he had installed there. In another more serious example, she often argued with Eisenhower that he should be more aggressive in enforcing civil rights laws, only to have him reply, "Ann, you would feel differently if you had been raised in the South like I was." Whitman's service was so highly thought of, she ended up working for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller years later in the Ford Administration.

3 - Knowing What is Urgent - Kathleen Osborne, President Reagan's personal secretary, learned to identify situations where she should interrupt meetings. Here is her explanation: "For instance, I’d get a call, and they’d say,?Chris Wallace is sitting here, and he said he just heard a rumor that the President had a heart attack.?This was a rumor that somebody started because they wanted to affect the stock market that day. We knew what was going on. So rather than saying?'No',?and just sort of leaving it out there, you can see from my pictures, the proximity. I mean, the door to the Oval is right here. So I’d lay my phone on the desk, prop open the door, if the President was in there alone, and I’d say,?'Mr. President, have you had a heart attack today?'?And he’d say 'no.' I’d say,?'Okay, thank you.' I’d go back to the phone, and of course they had him on speakerphone in the press office, so they heard the President’s voice, they knew. Every time I’d get that call—even if we were having something like a staff meeting—I could open the door and say,?'Anybody have a heart attack in here today?'?They all knew why I was asking."

4 - Maintain Confidentiality - Presidential secretaries see and hear a lot of sensitive information. They learn to guard that information tightly, even after they leave the job. Rose Conway, Truman's assistant, was known as "Zipper Lip" because she never shared details about her work. Reagan's assistant, Kathleen Osborne, learned to refer to Reagan as "the boss" instead of by title when she was out in public to avoid triggering eavesdroppers. President Carter reportedly fired his personal secretary shortly after he left office because she was sharing personal stories about him in public and he later refused to provide her with a letter of recommendation.

5 - Be A Pressure Valve - Executives, including the president, need to have someone they can relax around between their high pressure business interactions. Dorothy Downton, the personal secretary to President Ford shared a story about how President Ford kept his sense of humor, even in the politically tough times that surrounded his presidency. Ford framed some of the less-than-flattering editorial cartoons about himself and hung them in Downton's office. "When he would come in to give me something or to ask me something, he would look at one and he would chuckle at it, and he would say `Dorothy do you remember when that happened?' and we would chuckle," she said. "He really did enjoy that. He did not take himself that seriously that he could not laugh."

6 - Create a Procedure Manual - Kathleen Osborne, President Reagan's secretary, shared her learning about the need to create a procedure manual for the job: "I felt like things weren’t really established or coordinated on who has access, who is available to do what. It was very vague, and it made me nervous because I didn’t want to put the wrong call through. I wanted to make sure I checked with the correct person first, but what I did, eventually, was I made a procedure manual for my desk... Basically it’s an access list, and we updated it constantly. This list was for phone calls and for people walking in to see the President... This was all to protect the President from being railroaded by somebody telling him something... It was all just a protective measure, and he knew we were doing it... We just want to put something in front of him to show him why somebody is calling if it’s something we’re not expecting, just so he’s not caught off guard."

7 - Keep Meetings on Time - Kathleen Osborne also shared how she kept meetings ending on time with President Reagan - "We didn’t want him to watch his clock and be concerned about it, so we tried to handle ending the meetings. If he had a meeting going on in the Oval Office, almost without exception, a staff person accompanied somebody in the meeting, depending on what the issue or the area was. And that staff person was told,?You have twenty minutes, and then you have to end the meeting because he has a full schedule for the rest of the day. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan allowed us to put the peephole back in the door to the Oval Office from my office, so we could see what was going on. At the time when the meeting was supposed to be ending, if it hadn’t ended, we’d be looking through there. And if they were all still sitting down, the President would not be rude and interrupt anybody, but Jim or Dave or I would go in, and we would just take maybe an empty folder and walk over to the desk—it doesn’t bother the President, he’s used to us being around him all the time. So he didn’t even notice, of course, but hopefully that would disrupt the meeting just a little bit, like okay, something else is going on. Then, if that didn’t work, we would go and stand next to the President—just stand there and look at the staff person nicely like,?'It’s time'... If that didn’t work, we would wait until someone finished their sentence and we’d whisper, so everybody could hear,?'Mr. President, I’m sorry, but your next appointment is waiting.'?Then he would be able to say,?'It has been so nice that you’ve come to visit me, and I really appreciate'—?He would stand up, and everybody would stand up, and the meeting would be over."

Great executive assistants are worth their weight in gold. Smart executives make them feel valued that way every day, not just on Administrative Professionals Week, which is celebrated, usually in late April, in at least 10 countries around the world.

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About the Author:?Victor Prince is a?corporate trainer,?executive coach, and best-selling?author?who helps organizations build leadership, strategy, communications, and critical thinking skills. Earlier in his career,?Victor?was a consultant at Bain & Company, a marketing executive at Capital One, and the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has an MBA in Finance from Wharton. Follow Victor on?LinkedIN?to access his 100+ articles on?leadership,?strategy,?learning & development, and more.