Thank You for the Gift Card, But What I Really Want Is Structural Change.

Today is Administrative Professionals Day. All over the U.S. and in a handful of other countries, admins are being recognized for the invaluable role they play in the day-to-day and overall success of their executives and the companies in which they work. As someone who has been an Administrative Professional for 24 years, instead of flowers or a gift card, this year I would like the following:

(1) An end to abusive bosses and toxic work environments

(2) A tangible career track and pipeline built into Human Resources systems

(3) An examination of the sexist history of the “secretary” role that has evolved over the decades to become the Administrative and Executive Assistant roles of today; the sexism and unconscious bias that continues to pervade the role and our offices (at every level), and how we might begin to reimagine this role in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp

Regarding number one, Scott Rudin has been in the news a lot lately. I have never worked in the entertainment industry, but I know abusive bosses don’t only exist in that arena. It’s time we stopped looking the other way or worse — covering and compensating for abusive managers simply because they fit the model of what we have been told is a “success.” I don’t care how “brilliant” or “innovative” someone is, or how much of a fortune they have amassed: if you have to scream at people to get them to do what you want, you’re a bad manager. If you throw things at or around your employees, you are a bad manager. If you never provide clear direction and refuse to make a firm decision and then blame your employees for not executing your vision, you are a bad manager. Just because someone is the founder or CEO or Chairman or “highest revenue generator” or “most prolific content creator” or “most visionary engineer” does not make them a good manager if they also have an anger or gaslighting problem, and we need to stop excusing their abusive behavior as a mere “quirk of their brilliance” or some sad byproduct of their genius. Assistants, because of our proximity to these managers, often bear the brunt of their animosity while also being charged with representing them in the best light to their direct reports and external vendors and clients. It involves a tremendous amount of unpaid emotional labor that leads to burnout (or worse), but instead of holding the executive accountable, we create terms like “revolving chair” and make sure the next assistant has a “thick skin” and “doesn’t take things too personally”. Can we please put an end to this?

For number two, there are definitely entrepreneurial folks who have added to or moved on from their assistant careers by hosting podcasts or inventing a new software. There are also a ton of people who absolutely love being an assistant who have truly fulfilling and successful lives as career admins. Then there are a huge lot of us who stumble into assistant work and are not interested in inventing a new software or running our own company, but who have a lot of great skills and have absolutely no idea how to translate those skills into something else. And yes, the onus is ultimately on us to express this to our managers and to seek out mentors and to try to explore other avenues if that is what we want, but I also want to call out the fact that many companies — if they even hire assistants these days, truly have no idea what to do with us.

It shows in how flexible the definition of “assistant” is by company, industry, region — even within individual departments within the same company, and it differs based on the actual assistant and what skills they have and what they are willing or not willing to do. There are general skills recognizable as necessary to be a “good assistant”, but the role is often defined by what the individual executive needs most. While a “sales associate” position may differ slightly based on what one is selling and the region in which they are selling their goods, a “sales associate” is still generally a “sales associate.” An assistant can be anything from someone who answers an executive’s phone and manages their calendar to someone who does those things and is also the main relationship manager to the executive’s direct reports; or who also produces monthly sales reports. Based on job descriptions and my own past experience, an assistant appears to be the person who is willing to do whatever is needed while also maintaining the title (and salary) of “assistant”, and in small companies without Human Resources departments, this can easily lead to exploitation.

There is some hope in sight, as more and more successful and talented Executive Assistants are moving on to become Chiefs of Staff or Directors of Operations, and that is fantastic. High-level Executive Assistants, especially in the C-Suite, are exposed to every aspect of the business they are in. All I am saying is it would be great if H.R. recognized this, and when they see a talented Executive Assistant, instead of being afraid that the executive might not want you to take away their “right hand”, that you actually recognize a high performing employee for their skill set and provide them the opportunities for growth that you do other high-performing employees, while also creating a pipeline of future “right hands”, so your executives are always well-staffed and these new Executive Assistants can also get the great exposure the previous high-level assistant got, and so on.

Which leads me to number 3. What I just described in the paragraph above is essentially what an assistant was a very long time ago. But that is when the position was largely male dominated (as opposed to now), and instead of being called an assistant or a secretary, they were called a clerk, and they had the opportunity for advancement. According to Lynn Peril in her book Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office, “A nineteenth-century clerkship was a sort of business apprenticeship that allowed the clerk to see how a firm ran from top to bottom; if he got along with his boss and performed his duties well, a clerk could reasonably expect to move up the ladder into a solid management position, perhaps even into the boss’s chair after he retired.” Over time, due to war-induced male employee shortages[1] and the advent of the typewriter, the clerkship disappeared, and the secretary was born.

I know we’ve “come a long way, baby”, and by no means am I suggesting that today’s Admins and especially today’s Executive Assistants are the equivalent to the typing pool of the past. It just seems to me that not much thought has gone into these positions. They’ve evolved over the years due to necessity driven by the changing culture of the office and the times, but not really beyond that. These jobs center the needs of the executives without even considering the concept of a career trajectory for the assistant, and I wonder how much of that is influenced by a culture that is still largely based on the idea of women being “helpers”. I mean, two nicknames for assistants are “Work Mom” and “Work Wife”, and I think that explains a lot about how these jobs are viewed, not to mention ultimately valued. Women have made so many strides in education and in the workplace, but the assistant position seems to still be stuck in the 1970's. With so much reimagining and reexamining going on in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, I would just love if we looked at why the admin profession is female dominated (and how misogyny, both external and internalized leads to exploitation and career stagnation), why male assistants get paid higher than female assistants, and how antiquated ideas of gender and unconscious bias might be leading to a huge percentage of the workforce being overlooked as “just assistants.”

[1] Also according to Lynn Peril in Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It In the Office, “Women first entered the office [in the U.S.] in 1862, thanks to a staffing shortage caused by the Civil War. With most of the men he would otherwise hire facing each other on the battlefields surrounding Washington, D.C., Treasury Department Head Elias Spinner took the novel step of hiring women to trim paper money. ‘A woman can use scissors better than a man,’ he told his boss, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, ‘and she will do it cheaper.’”