Executive PA Australasia Issue 2 2019 | Page 52

DEVELOPMENT Is email compromising your executive’s leadership skills? Why do senior executives get caught up spending high value time and effort doing such low value activity as sifting, sorting, prioritising and checking their own email? In the days before email, you would never have seen a senior executive sifting through the mail room. So, why do they do it now? Research over the past five years shows that senior executives spend 75 days per year ‘doing email’. The dollar value of that equates to $55k per year. Most importantly, this time is often spent after hours (early mornings, weeknights and weekends), so now what is it really costing them? How has this situation come about? Firstly, it’s because executives are more accessible than ever before. They receive email from people who would normally be screened or filtered out if they tried to reach the executive via phone or in person. Along with that, executives, as decision makers in an organisation, are prime targets for a large number of emails from colleagues, subordinates, suppliers, and sales people. As a result, they struggle to find the time, energy and mental capacity needed to cope with the triple impact of information, communication and task overload. Too much of their time and attention has shifted from using specialised leadership tasks that directly produce high value to a ‘busyness’ spent managing inboxes and non- essential administrative tasks that do not. How do Executives manage their email now? The way that executives manage their email usually fits into one of the following categories: Owner driver: the executive manages their own email with a bit of assistance from an EA to manage meeting invites and calendar appointments w Nominated driver: the executive shares management of the email with their assistant in a partnership arrangement, especially when away w 52 Chief of Staff | Issue 2 2019 travelling or on holidays. Chauffeur: this is where the EA manages all incoming communication and filters it such that their executive only sees the small percentage of email that can only be handled by them. The EA is even able to write many of the replies. w Unfortunately, not nearly enough executives use the chauffeur model. One of the biggest complaints heard from EAs is lack of access to and control they have over their executives’ inbox. How has this happened? The reason we have this issue is because email seems to have escaped the systematisation and standardisation that has been applied to numerous other business processes in an organisation. For example, regardless of the number of staff in an organisation, there is usually just one or two processes for things such as applying for leave, raising a purchase order, or paying an invoice. Yet why not email? It’s simply a business process. As such, it too should be systematised across the organisation. A major problem that most executives (and their EAs) have is that they are using a skill set they learnt when they started using email 12, 15 or even 20 years ago. However, since that time, email volumes, complexity, demands, workload and urgency have increased exponentially. Additionally, email is now deeply integrated with almost everything else that is happening in the organisation. Almost everything goes through an inbox at some stage. It begs the question, how much time has been invested in developing the email skills of the executives and EAs in your organisation? If there is one area of professional development