Tips & Secrets!

The following confessions are taken from my worldwide questionnaire:

• “The only person who never makes a mistake is the person who never does anything…!” – Theodore Roosevelt

• “Success is going from one failure to the next without losing enthusiasm” – Winston Churchill

Remember: confession is good for the soul and for helping others not to make the same mistakes as you!

The following ‘confessions’ are taken from the questionnaire and interviews as explained and illustrated in the Preface.

• “Once I had been given a full dictation tape (as normal) of urgent and important work and I was asked to type it up as quickly as I could. I promptly went back to my desk and put the tape into the dictation machine. My boss never ever bothered to rewind the tape back to the beginning so I hurriedly pressed the rewind button and also accidentally pressed the eraser button at the same time which erased the whole tape! I was horrified and felt overwhelmingly sick and desperately wondered what I was going to do as I knew he was going to be very angry when he finds out what I had done with the tape. The client was waiting for the work and my boss had taken time, concentration and effort to dictate the information on to the tape. I brazenly went to see my boss and said “are you sure you gave me the right tape as there is nothing on the tape you gave me”. He looked worried and bewildered and looked on his desk for another tape and he said he was sure he had given me the right tape but gave me 3 more tapes that were on his desk and asked me to check them all and to check both sides of the tapes. I went back to my desk and pretended to check them all and again told my boss there was definitely nothing on any of the tapes. I tentatively suggested that perhaps he had not pressed the recording button or maybe there was something wrong with the dictation machine. My boss accepted that it could have been his fault and felt angry with himself and proceeded to dictate it all again onto another tape. “

Learning points:

1. Try and get your boss to rewind their own dictation tapes once they have finished dictating and before they give you their tape.
2. If you do have to rewind the tape yourself then make doubly sure your finger is away from the erase button!
3. Own up and be honest and eat humble pie – the poor guy thought he was going mad!

• “Many years ago, I worked in a purchasing dept. and I used to list the forecast for the main 3 suppliers, all with similar products. At that time, I was in an office with 4 other colleagues. The system then was to produce an Excel sheet with the products by supplier and a cover letter for each fax. One day, there was quite a discussion going on in the office, in which I participated whilst doing the above task. When faxing, I was still discussing the hot issue and did not pay attention. All of a sudden, when it was too late, I noticed that I had swapped papers. Therefore, one of the suppliers had seen the forecast of another major supplier. Of course, this happened on a Friday afternoon, when my boss was not to be reached (and mobiles not yet standard equipment). All weekend I was very worried. The next Monday, I told my boss that I made a professional mistake which he had to be aware of, and that I would accept the consequences. He was impressed by my honesty and thankful for that, said he would leave it and see what the outcome would be on the longer run. Some months later, my boss met the Key Account of this supplier who mentioned my mistake. My boss replied that he was aware of this but that he remained confident in me. In the end, this mistake turned out to be a major move forward in negotiations with this supplier. Although this did not have any impact on my job, I decided that I would NEVER again lose sight of important information, but even more important that honesty pays off. I am still very conscious that thanks to my boss’s confidence I was not made redundant.”

Learning point: Keep focussed on the job in hand, especially when the consequences can have a detrimental effect to the company. Be honest and own up to your mistakes and learn from them.

• “The Travel office advised one day, that the tomorrow’s flight for one of my colleagues would take off one hour earlier than scheduled. I noted it on a piece of paper, but forgot it was on my desk, and finally I forgot to tell my colleague. The next day, he was working in the office, although he would have had to be in another part of the country that day. He told me that he arrived early morning at the airport while the plane was already on the runway, and therefore he missed the flight. He was quite annoyed, as this was a trip to an important business meeting for the achievement of a big project! My boss had been reported about this as well, and he asked me whether I had been informed by the Travel Office about the time change in the flight schedule. Honestly, I still could not remember and answered “no”. So the blame was laid on the Travel Office, but there were no real consequences for them. After a short while, it came however to my mind that I was the one who forgot, and I felt sick in the stomach for not having told the truth at once. I had some uncomfortable days and nights with a bad conscious.”

Learning point: Since then, even if I am not really sure, I would never again refuse to take responsibility about anything going wrong.

• “I was overlooked for a job as office manager in the office. Although I had been here the longest, had a better understanding of all processes and was the better qualified for the position. I was extremely disappointed when one of my colleagues was named to the job. The fact is this colleague had seen her previous role disappear with the expatriation of her boss. The job had not been actually advertised but it had been said that there was a need for such a position and in some way it was opportunity meet needs. I should have made it clear that I was interested in the role and would like to be considered if the job was created. Instead I just assumed that I would be asked, but of course, I guess nobody thought that I was interested!”

Learning point: “If you don’t ask or speak up you don’t get”, never assume anything and sometimes ‘blowing your own trumpet is not a bad thing! People who passively wait to be noticed are often overlooked. We should all be proactive in managing our careers. Also if you think you may never be promoted within your company and it is promotion that you really want, then I suggest you start looking at other companies to work for who will value your talent, experience and skills.

• “Once I had a message on my voicemail, which made me blush. There was a woman saying something like “Oh, darling. Only 2 more days to go before the weekend. I can’t wait to see you again. Forever yours…” The problem was that her name was completely unknown to me and I had to ask a colleague to find out who the message was for. She knew the name – it was the lover of one of our bosses, who had a wife and 2 children. I decided to erase the message… “

I think the learning point here is for lovers of married people or indeed for the married people (not to cheat)!

• “My first job on leaving school was working for a large firm of chartered accountants. One day I was asked if I would take some shorthand for one of the partners who was due to retire the following day, as his own secretary was off sick. With mixed feelings of dread and not wanting to let anyone down, combined with a desire to do my best for the top people in the firm, I went into the partner’s office and took some shorthand. Three and a half hours later I returned to the office I shared with three other secretaries (most of whom were copy typists). One of the women, who I affectionately refer to as the matriarch, couldn’t believe how long I’d been gone. After another couple of hours of trying to plough my way through the hurriedly scrawled dots and squiggles that is shorthand, without a break, I was ready to burst into tears. Mrs Matriarch took me under her wing thank goodness. Feeling angry with the partner that I had been put in the situation to begin with at such an early stage in my career. `Why couldn’t he have just given me his notes and I could have copied them… it would have been much simpler…’ were among her words of comfort. Needless to say Mrs Matriarch went up to what seemed to me to be the floor of the Gods, and sorted him out. Luckily she was able to copy the huge pile of notes and I was forever in her debt. Needless to say I learned my lesson from this traumatic experience including knowing your limitations”.

Learning point: Know your limitations, even if you do want to please people and always ask for help if you need it.

• “I had been asked to help a colleague to prepare a conference for her team as she was new to conference organising. At the date the conference I had the builders in, the house was full of dust and I had no hot water for a week! I booked myself in a 4 star hotel for two nights along the other conference participants under my maiden name so I could just have a good bath and two night of respite! My colleague never noticed she had an extra participant!”

There is no learning point here (other than is it ethical to do this?) and it is always good to get things out into the open and feel relieved that at last you have told someone or as the English say ”get it off your chest”.

• “My boss was dictating some letters in his office (for information: he was single and dating a few different ladies at the same time). In the middle of dictating his telephone rang and it was his best mate and my boss proceeded to tell him about his antics with the different ladies he was dating but he forgot to stop the recording button! The next day when I was transcribing the tape I could hear the conversation between my boss and his mate and what he gets up to with all his lady friends and I shared this with the other secretary in the office and we both had a good laugh about it. At the Christmas party a few months later, and after I had had a few drinks, I told my boss about his dictating fiasco and he was quite embarrassed.”

Learning Point for bosses: Be careful with your dictating machines and turn them off when the phone rings!
Learning point for the assistant: Always be discreet as you never know when you want people to be discreet about your actions and you need to build trust for a great relationship.

• “One late evening, many years ago, a PA to the CEO cleaned the memory of the department fax machine, where many undelivered faxes are usually stored and forgotten. This was a way to advise the colleagues about it and make sure that their documents would be delivered properly, mostly because the fax number was not correct or the line was busy. She typed the memory number of each document and printed it to find out who was responsible for it. One of the documents however was usually printed on the private letterhead of the CEO and addressed to a foreign lady staying at a holiday resort. Mechanically, the PA read through the text and firstly could not believe it, once she read it again and realized it was a very personal message to the girlfriend of her (married) boss. Obviously, he had tried to send out the fax (by himself instead of asking her to do so, as usual) but was not aware that it would be stored in the machine if not delivered. Firstly very disappointed about his behaviour, as he always carried the image of a loving husband and an intact family, she decided to send the message again to the girlfriend, and once it came through, she deleted the memory and destroyed the printed version.”

Learning point: Since then, for any of her own personal messages sent out by fax, she always make sure that the document is no longer stored in the memory (and this applies nowadays as well for modern digital copying machines).

• “One day we had a meeting arranged for 10 am in our conference room. The 3 men arrived from Belfast and I went to greet them and took them to the conference room where the meeting was to be held. The door to the conference room was jammed open, this was unusual. I looked in and saw the scones and refreshments which I had ordered. I saw a face of another person who had been invited to this meeting. The meeting seemed to have started so I waltzed these 3 men in and said help yourself to tea and coffee. One of them asked if this was the right meeting and I said yes. I went to walk up the stairs to my office and then it struck me, on the stairs, that I had just waltzed these guys into the wrong meeting. Oh dear, I ran up the stairs to one of the managers who was also going to attend this meeting and explained to her that I had been so stupid and what I had done. She said the usual, ‘Oh sure it could happen to anyone.’ She promptly went to rescue the men, I couldn’t show my face. One of the guys who I had led into the wrong meeting came up to see me to say that everything had gone well, I hid and said I was really embarrassed. He said that once a lady had sat through one of their meetings and she should have been at a completely different meeting. I didn’t feel too bad then, but I have learnt a lesson from my mistake, big time.”

• “An important confidential document had to be sent out to a selected group of people of which some were on the board of a well-known International Company. One of the recipients had the same name as a member of staff however this member was working on a different department. The document went out to the wrong person. I could not even recall the email anymore as it was read. I went straight on the phone to this person and requested to ignore the email, informed my boss and contact the correct person and told him what happened. Of course all parties were not pleased but I was glad to have done it this way. I noticed over the years that being honest helps build up your credibility towards people.”

Learning point: Check and double check all the names and departments before sending out confidential documents and always be honest and own up to your mistakes.

• “As a PA you are often asked to contact your boss’s bank/building society/utility company on their behalf, I remember calling my boss’s credit card company once on her behalf, (saying that I was her) – when I was asked my date of birth I paused and had to check my file….somehow I don’t think the lady at the other end of the phone believed me when it took 2 minutes to find my date of birth……

Learning point: “the learning here is to be prepared if you are asked to be someone you’re not!!”

• “My boss and a couple of colleagues were asked to present some ideas to the top people at a major phone company a couple of years ago, London was in the middle of a rare heat wave and our office at the time had no air conditioning. I had set up the room for the meeting and went in search of an extra fan. I spotted a large fan in the server room which was ideal so I popped in and unplugged it. However instead of unplugging the fan I unplugged the server…Major panic set in and I was on the phone to our IT Company within seconds. Secondly I had to admit to my boss and colleagues what had happened and explain the presentation they were planning on discussing wouldn’t be accessible….not an easy thing to admit but I needed to give them time to get a ‘topline’ presentation together in time for the meeting. Thirdly I had to use all the negotiation skills I knew to get the IT consultant to deal with our case ahead of other important cases, not an easy task. All in all it worked out, staying as calm as I could throughout – the last thing that was going to solve the problem was if I was in a complete tizzy.”

Learning point: Next time I’ll check what plug lives where!”

• “The first situation is a bit of a warning to anyone who circulates e-mails to large audiences, in my case it was to about 125 people and included the offices of overseas government ministers. In short, I had a very tight deadline to circulate a document entitled “Public Disclosure and Access to Information”. So, in a terrible rush I got my distribution list organised, which included the lawyer who had written the document, an absolutely wonderful gentleman whom I hold in great esteem, typed the title of the paper in the subject field and pressed “send”, turning my attention to the next pressing matter. About half an hour later I received a hysterical call from the PA of one of the Vice Presidents of the institution asking me whether I’d made a deliberate mistake… She was laughing so much I couldn’t understand what she was saying – until I spotted it: I’d omitted the letter L from the word public. I’ve never felt so horrified about anything, particularly when some people obviously thought I’d done it out of mischief! My second memorable faux pas came when I was asked to cover for the PA of the owners of a large retail empire while she was on vacation. Unfortunately, everyone around me was being terribly helpful and basically interfering in everything I did to the point where I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. At the time I felt that I could not ask these people to give me some space and let me get on with the job (and my own job which was supporting the finance director). The end result was that the job well done was marred by the small detail of me failing to cancel a private plane which ended up doing an empty round trip across the UK at some cost to the company!!”

Learning point: The lessons to learn from these two mistakes are: never to trust a spell check, in addition to the old adage “less haste more speed” and not to be afraid of speaking up when people are being helpful to the point of confusing you and derailing your thought processes.

• “My boss left her underwear on my radiator to dry out. I am a male PA! Need I say more?

Learning point: People may gossip in the office and put 2 and 2 together to make 5 – just remember to rise above it and not fuel it”

• “One late afternoon a PA to the Managing Partner was photocopying highly confidential material to do with salaries and promotions when she was called away from the copier by her boss to do some other urgent work. She promptly picked up her photocopying and went back to her desk and locked the confidential material in her draw overnight so she could continue with the photocopying the next day. In the middle of the night she suddenly woke up with a startle and a gasp and whilst sleeping her subconscious mind had remembered that she had left the original highly confidential document on the glass of the photocopier. She had only picked up the copied documents and not the original and to her horror she felt sick and worried in case the document was found and read by people who could use this information wrongly. For the rest of the night she had a fit-full sleep and arrived in work at 6.00 am (normal start time 9.00 am) and she anxiously ran to the copier before anyone else got into work. She found the document had been removed from the glass and felt even more sick to the stomach with her heart pounding. She frantically looked into the wastepaper bin close to the copier and found the document screwed up into a ball in the bin. She did not mention this episode of her career to anyone until now and to this day, she does not know whether the document was read by anyone who shouldn’t have seen it and the information used to their advantage”.

Learning point: One thing is for sure – ever since that day she has made it a habit to always makes sure she checks the copier and takes all documents for photocopying with her whether it is confidential or not!

• “I once took a director’s car to the garage for its service (a flashy ‘bat-car look-a-like’ BMW M Coupe) and when I was getting out of the car, Andy Cole (whilst he was a Man Utd footballer) started asking me what it was like, would I recommend it, should he buy one etc, etc. Of course, I had to act like it was mine so I gave it the thumbs down!! Sorry BMW!!

Learning point: “Don’t lie – it doesn’t get you anywhere!”

• It was Melbourne Cup day in my first year in the position. My boss and his wife had been invited to a corporate tent, and weeks before I had received (what I later discovered) were wrist bands to allow them entry: these I put into a daily “bringups” folder which sits at the side of my desk. The problem is that in the office the “bringups” folder is often overlooked, especially by me. My boss and his wife headed off to the Cup, all dressed up. About half an hour later, as the event is about to start, I receive a phone call saying “was there anything we needed to get in? They are saying we need something to get in” … well my heart just dropped as the penny did, and I pulled out the paper wrist bands. I tried to think of every way I could to get them to them (courier, etc) but by then they were furious, there just was not enough time and so they came back to the office. They were actually quite kind about it and didn’t mention it again. However I now know to schedule a reminder to myself in my calendar when an important “bringup” is required.

Learning point: As well as having a reminder in the calendar to remind you to look at your forwarding file (“bringups”) it would be good to get everything out the day before (that would have been prepared days if not weeks before) as a last minute check that you have everything and that all the travel and accommodation (if required) has been booked, maps and directions/itinerary etc printed and no changes have been made to timings, venue etc. Then you should put yourself in their shoes and imagine the step by step event of what would be happening and what you would need and check everything is in order. These should be given to the boss in plenty of time for them to look through and put their own mind at rest that they have everything they need – you can talk them through their packs if you prefer. There may be something that the boss failed to tell you that they needed and getting them to check through and think for themselves may trigger a memory of something you were quite unaware of eg they may have promised the client something at their last meeting.

“It’s okay to make mistakes – we are only human!
Be honest, own up and apologise
And learn from the mistakes you make!
Remember to celebrate success!”

“If you have a confession to make and would like it on this page anonymously then send it to
sue@suefrance.com and be rest assured your secret is safe with me.”

Sue France, Author of The Definitive Personal Assistant & Secretarial Handbook.

Tips on improving communication for women when talking to men in the workplace:

• As men cannot take hints and they cannot read your minds or even ‘read between the lines’ so if you want or need something then you have to spell it out for them. Men will appreciate not having to play the guessing game.
• Be direct and do not undermine yourself by using qualifiers in speech such as “I think”,  “this may be wrong but…”
• Ask a man what he thinks not what he feels about something especially when discussing an emotional topic unless you know he is a kinaesthetic (a feelings based person – see more on visual, auditory, kinaesthetic in chapter 1).

Tips on improving communication for men when talking to women in the workplace:

• Build on your relationship by asking how the female’s weekend went, how are things in general – just 5 minutes of small talk will work wonders
• Show appreciation/recognition for a job well done.  Women appreciate recognition especially in front of others.
• When a woman is trying to tell you something or needs to get things off her chest, do not interrupt and try and give her a solution – she will automatically feel better just by talking about it. If she asks for your advice then give it and try and offer more than one solution for her to mull over – don’t forget she can multi-task too!
• To compound the differences of how men and women think differently biologically to each other and how they interpret what is said to them differently; we also have internal filters.  These filters affect the way we think because of the way we were brought up, geographic background, education, skill set, personality, temperament, values and belief systems affect our way of thinking.

Tips on improving communication between the sexes:

• Understand your own filters
• Try and understand other’s filters – spot them and accept them and learn how to deal with them.  (Knowing they have got filters is half the battle)
• Constantly communicate – don’t make assumptions and don’t expect others to read your mind and let them know you can’t read their mind either!
• Make sure you are reading their body language correctly and always take a cluster of body language signals and not in isolation.
• Make sure that your body language is congruent with your words.
• Try not to take things personally – give them the benefit of the doubt
• Say “Is this what you said…. and is this what you meant ……” to make sure you have understand correctly
• Men tend not to notice body language as much as women and therefore don’t pick up on as much when listening to someone and can often feel threatened by a woman’s ‘intuition’
• Women usually pay more attention to the body language and therefore pick up more and are able to read between the lines
• Email communication – which I sometimes find it appropriate to call email rage is because it’s purely words and there is no tone of voice, body language, attitude connected with the words so massive communication problems can happen with emails.  Dr Albert Mehrabian, a UCLA professor discovered that when we communicate with someone we only take notice and remember 7% of the words used, 55% is body language and 38% is the tone of voice and attitude.  This explains why many emails can be taken the ‘wrong way!”

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