LinkedIn and Managing Your Boss' Inbox

Speaker 1 · 0:00

podcast.leaderassistant.com You're listening to episode four. How much episodes is there?

Speaker 2 · 0:14

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become irreplaceable, game-changing leader assistants.

Speaker 1 · 0:24

And here's your host, my dad.

Jeremy · 0:27

Hey, everyone. I'm so excited to bring you episode four of The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's been a great opening week. A ton of you have commented on LinkedIn and reached out and said you've appreciated the podcast, and I really appreciate that. It's very motivating to hear from people that listen to it and are benefiting from it. Really keeps me motivated to record more episodes. Also, thanks to everyone who reviewed the podcast and rated it and have subscribed so far. It was awesome to be featured in the new and noteworthy section of the careers category in iTunes. If you have not reviewed it yet, I really appreciate your feedback. I really appreciate a rating and a review on iTunes. You can find that link to the iTunes podcast on the website at podcast.leaderassistant.com and just click on the subscribe and iTunes button. Okay, so today's episode is going to be a couple of rambling thoughts that I had as I was hanging out enjoying the 75 degree sunny weather here in St. Louis, Missouri this weekend. I was just chilling outside while my boys ran around like crazy, hanging out with the neighbor kids, and I just had a few random thoughts that I recorded on my iPhone, so you can hear the birds in the background. The audio quality is not amazing, but I wanted to mix it up a little bit and do something a little bit unscripted. I had some good feedback from a very helpful person on LinkedIn, and I just wanted to mix it up and do a little more conversational thoughts. And just a heads up, I am recording some interviews. It's probably going to be a few episodes before I have an interview to publish, because I've got them all getting scheduled right now, and none of them are recorded yet. But I have about nine or ten people, at least so far, that have said they would be interested in being on the show. So I'm really excited about that. So here we go. Here are a couple of outdoor birds chirping in the background, rambling thoughts on a couple of different topics. The first one is LinkedIn, and then the next one is managing your boss's inbox. I hope these few minutes help you consider these topics, and please reach out on LinkedIn or email me at podcast at leaderassistant.com If you have thoughts or questions related to these topics, I will definitely dive in deeper on both topics in future episodes. Hey everyone, I'm hanging out, enjoying the weather, and just had a couple of thoughts on LinkedIn. So I was in between jobs in 2016 and hopped on LinkedIn, didn't realize that people still hung out on LinkedIn, still networked, and were even used to the platform. And I was just blown away at how many people were using it and engaged in it. And so anyway, I jumped on full steam ahead and just started reaching out and connecting with people, other assistants, primarily because I just realized I'd lived under a rock for so long. So anyway, I just wanted to take a minute and encourage you all to update your LinkedIn. Spend some time on LinkedIn. It's a great way to build your professional network. It's a great way to put yourself out there as a leader assistant. Put a good profile picture up, put a good banner image in the background instead of the standard LinkedIn one. Put your job experience on there. Put some details on what projects you've worked on and what results you've gotten in each of your roles. And then share valuable content, whether that's other articles that other people are writing that are helpful to the overall assistant community or your company's industry. Or if it's your own, you can write an article in literally a few minutes on LinkedIn. You can write a post and share your thoughts. Just I really want to encourage you. It's been amazing to see how many people I've met just through LinkedIn over the last few years. And I think it's still an underutilized resource out there. And if you're not spending even just, you know, 20 minutes a week on LinkedIn, at minimum growing your reach and reaching out and offering help to others, then I think you're really missing out on your long-term career trajectory. So yeah, I just want to encourage you to update your LinkedIn and connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you. And you can find my LinkedIn link in the show notes. And then, yeah, just I think every assistant should have a solid LinkedIn page to really show that they are kind of to stand out, to stand out from the other people online when it comes to being professional and really initiating conversations and leading and showing that you're aware of kind of what's going on in the world. So anyway, just a couple of thoughts on that. So for my last rambling for this episode, I want to talk about managing your boss's inbox. So I've surprisingly come across a lot of assistants that have told me they don't manage their boss's inbox, and I'm just blown away. I cannot imagine taking care of business without having access to my boss's inbox. So if you're in the situation where your boss is like, no, I'll take care of it. I'll do my own email or whatever. I really want to challenge you to ask them to reconsider and push back on that because there are a lot of emails that your boss likely gets that are not worth their time. And there are a lot of things that they could spend their time on that are more valuable to the company and based on their giftings. So there's an old article in Harvard Business Review from Melba Duncan, I'm sure you're familiar with it, called The Case for Executive Assistance. And she talks about if a CEO of a large company is getting paid $250,000 a year or whatever, I can't remember the exact numbers, and they're scheduling their own meetings, then the company is basically saying, we're willing to pay. And again, I don't know the exact number on this. I'm sitting outside rambling on this one, but they're getting paid a couple hundred or 300 or $400 an hour to schedule meetings. And if a company is okay with that, then okay. But most of the time you ask a board or shareholders of a company, if they're okay with their CEO spending that much time scheduling meetings, they probably would say no. And so anyway, the, hey, the, is my neighbor walking by. So really, does the company, does the company want to spend that kind of money and their CEO to spend that kind of time on those types of tasks? No, probably not. And they should, they shouldn't. And so really the inbox is the same thing. I really think that you need to get in your boss's inbox, you know, draft emails for them, you know, archive emails for them. You need to prioritize emails for them. So anyway, just kind of a random note about managing inboxes. And if you don't manage your boss's inbox, really wanted to challenge and encourage you to bring that up and really get on that. And that's one way you can set yourself apart from other other team members and other assistants out there that are not willing to try that out. And it's also something that I think is going to be really hard for artificial intelligence and machine learning software to be able to handle the nuances of all that. It's going to be a long time before they're really able to do that. And so I think that's something another way you can add value to your situation. So again, thanks for listening to all my ramblings today and we'll talk to you soon. Today's leadership quote is from Ken Blanchard. In the past, a leader was a boss. Today's leaders must be partners with their people. They no longer can lead solely based on positional power.

Speaker 2 · 10:02

Check out this episode's show notes at leaderassistant.com forward slash for.