A reader writes:
I’m a career executive assistant and pretty good at my job, but I struggle with keeping my boss’s calendar.
I support high-level people, so I am inundated by requests for boss’s time, from internal and external folks. I can’t tell you how many people ask for “Just 10 minutes, REALLY!” who I then have to pry out of the office after 45 or 60 minutes (or longer)
My current boss, as well as a former boss, mentioned this as something I need to work on, but I confess I’m having trouble keeping everyone happy — is there a way to do this without becoming the office hard-ass?
Complicating the matter is that current boss is charming, a great mentor/advocate and loves being involved in everything so she loves interaction, to a point.
Please, can you give me guidance on navigating this?
Do three things:
1. First, find out from your boss whether she just wants you to be more assertive about cutting off meetings that run too long, or whether she also wants you to decline some of these meeting requests in the first place. You might find out that she wants you to be firmer about saying no to people, or to some people, or to redirect them to later time slots. For example, if the request is coming from a direct report who she has regular check-ins scheduled with, she might prefer you to direct most of that person’s requests to those meetings rather than putting additional time on her calendar. So ask her directly if she wants the meetings to run shorter, or not happen at all.
2. When you’re setting up appointments for people, manage their expectations by telling them from the outset, “I want to warn you, she literally has only 10 minutes. I’m going to knock at 1:16 to grab her for another appointment.”
3. When someone is running over their allotted time, knock on your boss’s door and say, “Jane is here for your 2:00 meeting” or “I want to let you know you’re scheduled for X right now.” This is easy when X is another meeting or a phone call, but if it’s something like “you have this hour set aside to review documents that must be approved today,” you can just say, “You’re scheduled up for the rest of this hour.”
However, before you do #2, talk to your boss and make sure she’s on board with this plan. She may prefer that you give people a longer grace period before you interrupt, or that you do this with some people but not others, or any number of other modifications.
If you do this for a while and you find that your boss is generally ignoring your time reminders, then go back to her and say this: “You asked me to help keep your schedule more on track when meeting times are running way over. My strategy has been to alert you in the moment but I know it’s still happening. Would you like me to do something different to handle it?”
how do I keep people from using way too much of my boss’s time in meetings? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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