arthurb999's picture Submitted by arthurb999 on
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Management and Leadership

I am at the highest, non-manager grade in my company.

Our department has an admin who is terribly under-utilized.  (terribly is an understatement).   She is always looking for stuff to do.

Her boss, the executive of the department, says it's fine for us to give her stuff to do.

I am the only person who (besides the main exec) who gives her stuff to do.  She loves it and we have a great relationship.

I just listened to the podcasts about admins and am seeing an opportunity to really get some things off my plate during our busy times... "if she has time and can resonably do the task, she should do it."

She "manages" my calandar now (after listening to the casts, I realize there's a huge room for imporvement) and does printing, binding, filing, expense reports for me.

I'm also going to get her involved in projects other than admin related stuff that I think she can handle.

Question:  Do you think it's appropriate for me to take it to the next level... like managing email and such even though I'm not the "big exec".

Let me know what you guys think.

-Arthur

timrutter's picture
Submitted by timrutter on Saturday July 9th, 2011 8:45 pm

If your boss has made her available to you, then by all means. It's worthwhile keeping him informed of what you have delegated to her and there may be times when he needs her time and you may have to take some of the delegations back but otherwise, delegate and develop like crazy

Tim

arthurb999's picture
Submitted by arthurb999 on Monday July 11th, 2011 9:17 am

Thanks Tim.

So I "farmed" a pretty straight forward report to her (retrieve the spreadsheet, link it to powerpoint, print it, compare the historical stuff to last month for discrepancies).  I'll do the current month review to force me to look at all the pages

Would have taken me 4 hours and she banged it all out for me.   And she tells me... i'll stop by on Mon to bug you for more stuff.  Um... ok :D

timrutter's picture
Submitted by timrutter on Monday July 11th, 2011 10:31 pm

Fantastic result so far!

I was thinking about this last night. If you flipped it around a little and you hadn't done something for your boss or a client and your reason was that you hadn't had time, he would be pretty justified in wondering why you hadn't used the Admin he had made available to you.

Tim