C-Suite Professionals 101
As an Executive Assistant aka C-Suite Professional with over 20 years experience, it always surprises me when you are in support networking trainings or collaborations and some of the most basic, or reasonable solutions, are not solutions in practice with others in your same profession.
This being said, I decided to put a couple of basic, but very handy skills in a short article for others to either learn from, or at least consider.
The main 3 reasons for a C-Suite Professional is so that they can help the Executive member:
There are tools in place for the EA or C-Suite Professional to do this, such as:
Board or conference rooms, equipped with the latest and greatest IT equipment and meeting tools available.
Always make sure these valuable meeting places are clean, organized, fully stocked and ready for any type of meeting. There is no meeting that is not important. If there are people in the organization taking time to get together, it is important!
In order to do this, make sure fresh markers are available on all white boards. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone into a meeting space (at another location) to take notes for an important meeting and the white board markers are dry or unreadable. This is a waste of valuable and important time. Simple solution, always check them after meetings when you are cleaning up the conference area and replace any old ones with fresh new ones every single time.
White board notes (like the photo at the top of this article) These are notes that the presenter deemed important enough to take the time to jot down, or brainstormed with the other members of this meeting, and thus they are important. ALWAYS before you erase a white board, take a quick snapshot photo of those notes and send them out to the person in charge of the meeting that just took place, in case they did not have time to record those notes themselves.
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Don't assume they thought of that or someone else got them recorded. It literally takes 15 seconds and then you are sure they do not get erased without documentation.
Note: If you have a conference room/meeting room in your area but did not attend the meeting, and you go in after a meeting to clean up and notice notes on the board, a quick way to delegate who to send that snapshot of the notes to is whomever is listed on the calendar of that room for the prior meeting, and then that individual (as the meeting lead or organizer) can delegate where those notes should go and forward them on.
If there are any items left behind from a prior meeting, in the meeting room, same thing goes for reaching out to the person who organized the meeting. Put the item or items aside in a safe place (a basket in a cupboard in that meeting room is usually a safe place to put lost or left items) and then send a photo to the organizer and let them delegate the communication to their meeting group to find out who left the item and where they can go to retrieve it.
If you are setting up for a Board Meeting or have guest coming in to meet with your Executive Members don't assume those individuals will have materials to take notes. Put pens and small notebooks in the center of the table in case anyone needs (or wants) to take notes they had not previously planned for.
Same goes with beverages. If you put one bottle of water out, put a bottled water out at every participants spot at the table. They do not have to drink it, but it is better to have the option available than to have to interrupt the focus to pass drinks out during their meeting session.
One of the most simple and surprisingly forgotten meeting preparation items is your company guest Wi-Fi login and password. As a courtesy to all of your meeting guest, every single time, have your company Wi-Fi and password visible on the board or on a laminated pass around sheet on the table. No guest should have to ask for something so simple and it will keep from delaying a meeting start time.
Lastly, if you have validations needed for parking, do not make your guest ask for one. Have validations ready for the exact number of guest (plus 1) and be ready at the end of every meeting to hand them out. If your guest do not need it, they will politely decline, but they should never have to ask.
There are many other tips and collaborations that help us be our very best as support leads, and I will be posting short articles such as this one over the next couple of weeks, but please, if there is something that helped you, that you would like to share, please drop it in the comments so we can all learn and as always, remember never to fixate on hierarchy, we all learn from each other and become better together!