How to Elevate Your Skills

For training that will get you to the next level, heed the advice of expert Lynn Walder on everything from the importance of self-awareness and systems thinking to networking to upskilling outside of your comfort zone.

Recorded at EA Ignite Spring 2024 and produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals - ASAP. Learn more and submit a listener question at asaporg.com/podcast.

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Leah Warwick: Hi, everyone. I am Leah Warwick, and you're listening to "The Admin Edge." Welcome to the final episode of Season 3, recorded at EA Ignite Spring 2024 in Nashville with Peyton Ticknor interviewing guest Lynn Walder. Lynn is the Founder and Principal of Executive Management Partners and presented on executive operations at this event. She'll also present at another ASAP event this year, the Administrative Professionals Conference, or APC. Now, let's get into this episode on leveling up your skillset. Peyton speaks first.

Peyton Ticknor: Welcome to the podcast, Lynn.

Lynn Walder: Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here. It's really electric today. I love being with my kindred spirits, and the programming so far is absolutely incredible – and not only that, but the lunch was really amazing as well. So, whoever picked out the lunch, it was really delicious downstairs.

00:00:57                     

Peyton Ticknor: Nice. Well, I'll be going after this, so I will get to see what that's like.

Lynn Walder: Awesome.

Peyton Ticknor: Well, let's get into some of the questions on this topic. What are some essential advanced skills you believe every administrative professional should learn to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace?

00:01:17                     

Lynn Walder: When I think about this, I actually offer some advice that's parallel to what I give to actual CEOs that I coach as well. There's two parts to it. The first one is I think that there's a lot of downplaying around the importance of humancentric advanced skills. And what I see in that kind of realm is the idea of three buckets, the first one being self-awareness, the second one being emotional regulation, and the third one being contextual communications.

00:01:50

Like I said, this is what I actually coach CEOs on, and since we're working so closely, especially if you're working as a strategic partner, we need to start mirroring and understanding what our executives are needing to learn and grow in, and mirror that back. 

AI and tech and all these other kinds of things seems to be the topic of the day. I'm not saying that that's not important, but I think that that's actually going to elevate the necessary focus in on the more humancentric skillsets that sometimes has been put to the side previously. 

Peyton Ticknor: I agree with that.

Lynn Walder: Self-awareness is absolutely one of those things that I think that we're self-aware of what we're doing, but, when we're so busy and in the weeds, we put blinders on, and it really holds us back from connecting and influencing and communicating appropriately.

Linked into that, when I said the idea of emotional regulation and contextual communication, emotional regulation is extremely important not only for the leaders that we support. We have to come, and I say, "Energy out is energy in." The job of a leader is really to come in and elevate or temper the type of energy that's in the room in order to bring everybody together and move the either team or company forward. 

00:03:09

Contextual communications is right behind that, where you have to understand very clearly how people receive and process information, and that is quite different for each individual. But that's really how people feel heard, especially around active listening, a sense of impact, and also a sense of feeling like belong to something bigger than themselves. 

Peyton Ticknor: I want to go back to the self-awareness for a moment. How can someone become more self-aware?

Lynn Walder: So I have a couple of quick ideas that people can do, because I actually, like I said, come in and work with leaders all the time. One of the other subset of passions that I work on in my "portfolio life," as I call it, because I do work in administration, but I also consult and partner on setting up executive operations, and then also hyper focusing in on culture and core values, which I call foundational values, in startup and scaleup organizations.

00:04:09

It's very interesting when I come into these organizations and I work one-on-one with the CEO and their leadership team. They know all the buzzwords of what's important for building a thriving company or thriving team – you know all the ones: integrity, collaboration, teamwork, accountability. All the nebulous terms that they love to use or they say, "I'm a great communicator." That's my favorite. I love that. Well, let's dig underneath that a little bit. 

What I do not is I actually come in and I cross section three different types of assessments. I'm going to be talking about this in one of my trainings tomorrow. A way that you can become self-aware – a little more self-aware – [is] not only by going out and actually having some hard conversations and saying, "Hey," asking people, "how do I come across, both energetically and when we're just interacting in regular or formal situations?" 

00:05:00

But there's three different – I don't want to call them personality assessments, but there are assessments that you can take out there. The first one that I love is Strengths Finder 2.0 or Gallup's Clifton. I call that the "awesomeness assessment" because it really just tells you what you are innately amazing at. So that's number one for understanding where your flow is.

The second assessment I usually bring in is the Values in Action Assessment. That's free and you can do it online. It's the via.org you can go to. It'll pop up for you the top ten most important value sets that usually come to you through either culture or family or even some of your own experiences.

00:05:43

The third one is probably the most important, and this is the one that I actually bubble up to the top. I do a cross sectioning across all three. Many of us interact and are not self-aware of how we function within very high-stress or crisis moments, because that actually taps into our biological lizard brain. It's very quick, and you don't even think about it. This is actually what causes the most issues in organizations. 

There's an assessment that's also free. It's part of a broader assessment called Positive Intelligence, but it's called the Saboteur Assessment. You can go look this up. It's a five-minute quiz, and what it does is it actually gives you insight into how you default in your behaviors – that are actually beautiful behaviors, but you take them way too far, and they become destructive. And it'll give you a readout of the top ten of those. It actually gives you some insight of how you, again, function in crisis and stress, which is really where a lot of the problems crop up with an organization. 

00:06:46

So if you can do this with your boss and then do it yourself and then you cross section, it is such a plethora of information. I do a much more scientific cross analysis and roll it into other items, and I do it in a team format and all this other kind of stuff. But you can do it individually and it's quite eye-opening. 

Peyton Ticknor: Now I have something on my to-do list when I get back to the office. Thank you for that.

Lynn Walder: Could I add one more additional thing?

Peyton Ticknor: Absolutely.

Lynn Walder: So we were talking about advanced skills. I was talking about the humancentric side. There is one, I would say, business skill side, which is starting to come up – I think probably under the radar, but is going to be very prolific in the next five to ten years – and it's called systems thinking. It's already been out there, but it's been mainly, I think, in the origins of org design and public impact policy and things along those lines, but it's starting to make its way over into actually just regular, complex systems of piecing together and also understanding that sometimes you have to deoptimize certain parts of a system to actually upskill or create a more effective system as a whole.

00:07:55

That's very hard for administrators when we are constantly in the minutia and the detail and we are trying to make everything so efficient in its own right. We need to get better at starting to step back. If you're going to work in a strategic capacity, you need to have a 30,000-foot view of how things are plugging in, and that sometimes there's different parts that might have to fall by the wayside or, again, be deoptimized for the broader better of the organization. 

I know that MIT has just launched an online webinar that you can take as, I would say, a credit for furthering your education. It's an eight-week commitment. They focus on this with a number of educators that they have there. And so I would highly recommend the concept of systems thinking as being one of those very advanced strategic skills. If you can get it under your belt, I would really highly recommend going and doing that. I think it's going to be really, really important moving forward. 

00:08:53                     

Peyton Ticknor: Well, it sounds like something I need to look into as well. All right, well, let's go into the next question. Can you recommend any specific training or professional development courses that have significantly helped you or anyone that you know in their administrative career?

Lynn Walder: Professional development and training I split into two buckets. I look at one side being formal training and the other side being informal training. On the formal side, there's things like this, where you come and you be with your kindred spirts, and you share knowledge, and you learn from expert trainers, and you are inspired by our profession. You have communities that are more a-synch, so something like ASAP, American Society of Administrative Professionals. These are more formalized places where you can be with your people and share information, experiences, and learn from each other.

00:09:56

I usually suggest administrators to go outside of their comfort zone. Yes, you can take training on LinkedIn, Udemy, I think Lynda.com. I don't know if it's still there. I think that was actually bought by LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn training would probably be there. Even YouTube has a lot of free access to things.

But what I think we need to get better at is stepping outside our comfort zone of our own profession and again aligning and paralleling with the executives that we partner with, and starting to look at maybe some executive education courses that we can get covered through some of our development funding, or even try to get scholarships for those, or if you are able to attend conferences that even aren't necessarily exactly associated with administration. I'll give you a perfect example. I was helping out with communications at one of my previous roles, and I asked if I could go to a communications conference in New York City, because I said, "I'm working on internal communications here as a hybrid part of my role, and I really want to learn more about that." 

00:10:55

I did get it approved. I was the tiniest person in the room in the sense of I was at this tiny biotech, and I was in the room with like L'Oréal and Boeing. They were saying they had like two-million-dollar budgets. But it was enlightening for me to see how other places were working with communications in more complex systems that I could then take back. It was actually quite helpful. We've got to better at this with the range of the type of information where we can infer and cross section, and then bring it back to our teams and move our companies forward – not only our executives forward, but our companies. 

Peyton Ticknor: I never thought about going to a conference outside of your profession, stepping outside of that comfort zone. Did you walk away feeling like you understood more about communications, and you could go back to the workplace and write better communication to the team?

00:11:44                     

Lynn Walder: Not only that, but that there was a lot of research that was shared with me that turned a lot of my assumptions on [their] head with how leadership should come and work with internal communications when there's a crisis, and it was very, very helpful in that respect. Those are more the formalized side of things.

Then there's actually the informal side of training. And interestingly enough, there's some chart out there – I'm not exactly sure where it is, but we used to use it in HR when I worked at a company all the time. Less than 20% of our learning actually comes from formalized trailing. Almost the majority of our learnings come from experiential learning, and honestly, a little growth pain. So, this is where you have to start seeking out in the moment, just doing stuff: Looking for assignments that, again, are cross-functional within your organization. Seeking pain points that are even within your own department and saying, "Hey, I want to try to figure this out," and come and bring a proposal. 

00:12:45

Maybe you don't have all of the information, but going through that kind of brain-hurt process, which is building new neurons in your brain. It helps you learn and grow in ways that you just can't get when you are going to a formalized training. A lot of formal training has to do with theory and broadened kind of information dumps. To operationalize that is actually quite hard a lot of the times. You feel like you're eating an elephant. When you take different parts of the elephant and you work on, say, something that's very relevant to you and in the moment, you learn so much more because it's solving one of your problems. 

Peyton Ticknor: I agree with you on that.

Lynn Walder: Right, yeah.

Peyton Ticknor: For me, I learn by doing. I love absorbing the information when I'm at a conference, but I also want to learn by doing so. In the Microsoft session, I pulled out my laptop and I was like: I have to follow along with him to learn. So, I agree with that about in the moment, figure out your problem. That's great advice.

00:13:41                     

Lynn Walder: One other thing, too, is I love reading books, and so I highly encourage a wide range of reading, both from a business administrative – a lot of the stuff I've learned, actually, that I've pulled in has been from philosophy books – yeah – or history books. So, if you can get a range, it actually is quite helpful with making and connecting in a very creative way for you to come up with solutions that have nothing to do with your actual, day-to-day job. So, reading a ton is really helpful.

Peyton Ticknor: And that puts you out of your comfort zone. For me, reading a philosophy book would put me outside of my comfort zone 1000%, so I would probably take something insightful from that, and I could apply it to every day. Yeah, I like that advice.

Well, I'm going to go to the last question here: Could you share an example of a project or an initiative where you applied your skills to significantly impact your organization? 

Lynn Walder: Yeah, I was thinking about this question a little bit yesterday, and I ended up homing in on an example from one of my previous organizations. I was originally an administrative assistant in the HR department, and I was supporting an HR business partner. One of the parts of my role was working with kind of the off-boarding process and working with processing expenses for people who had already left the company – super painful tracking people down, missing receipts, like all the headaches you can bring with that.

00:15:10

But it wasn't just that. I was constantly getting complaints from the procurement department, which is who we had to partner with on these expense management reports and on the whole process in its own right, and everything was always delayed. There were always these gaps and all this kind of stuff. And I said, "Boy, people are really ticked off and they're ticked off at me, and that's not making me feel so great." 

And so I went to the head of procurement and I said, "Hey, I see that there's a gap here. You guys are really frustrated. I'm frustrated. Have we ever done a workflow assessment from literally beginning to the very end, to see what actually all touchpoints are through the workflow, and to find out maybe where there's places we can tighten it up or fill in some of the gaps that are really causing pain?" 

00:15:50

And he said, "No." And I was like, "This is a 600-person company, and you guys haven't done this yet?" But you know what? It was because everybody was working on their own little piece, and so I said, "Okay, I'm going to do an overarching…" Again, I'm going to step back. I'm going to look at the 30,000-foot view, and I just went in. This was something nobody else wanted to do. It was a pain in the butt to them, but I was like, "I know this will solve problems." 

So that's what I did. I went in and I went to every single ecosystem partner that was part of that workflow process. I let them know I was trying to fix it. Of course they're going to be like, "Let's talk." And I put a workflow together and then I said, "These are the gaps. This is where I think we could tighten it up. This timeline seems a little bit extensive, and I think if I create a form at this point it's going to literally shave off three or four days here." 

I presented it to all of the ecosystem partners and they just loved it. And then when I implemented that final kind of gap placing of the templates that we're missing, honestly, in the workflow, it was so much less stressful. That was something where I was an administrative assistant. I just happened to see a pain point that I was experiencing, but it turned out to be a bigger pain point across a lot of other people. 

00:17:01

Nobody told me to do that. I just went out and did it. It was very low risk, obviously, because I wasn't really going to be changing things so drastically, but it let me know people. People understood that I cared about their pain. And not only that, but I was bringing a solution to the table. This is the cross section of what we do. We are conductors of communication, of process, of accountability. And wherever we can find pain and try to proactively ease that pain, this is the power of administration. It's not fully recognized yet within businesses, and we've got to get better at advocating for ourselves and putting ourselves out there in a growth edge – sometimes which feels very uncomfortable – to take on these kinds of things and just do it. Just be experiential and help. 

Peyton Ticknor: Yeah, I love that example that you shared.

Lynn Walder: Thanks.

Peyton Ticknor: Okay, well, here's our listener question, so we'll finish the session with that. An anonymous listener submitted that they are an administrative coordinator from a global biopharmaceutical company, and they write: As an admin in the modern workplace, I am not sure what I should prioritize next. I've been working for many years, but feel there's a lot more I can learn. What advice would you offer, Lynn?"

00:18:14                     

Lynn Walder: So, first of all, shout out to all of my pharma and biotech administrators out there. It's a really unique industry to work in. I've actually been working in biotech for the past 15-plus years and have cross sectioned with a lot of the pharma administrators out there, so I totally feel you out there.

In reference to how do you continue learning and growing, and then how do you also prioritize, I think that's kind of the two parts of this question: First of all, really understanding and building community with an administration is something that is so untapped right now, and so I think the first step is, one, building community. Especially if you're in a large biopharma, there's so many sections. It's global. You have all the different departments. It can get unexpectedly siloed. 

00:19:01

So really committing to trying to bring together a collaborative where you have your hive, your people, and you're learning from each other – and you're also trying to, again, lift up administration to be a more strategic function of the business by working together and advocating together. So, working internal from building community, but then also getting out to places like this and experiencing and understanding, you will learn so much. 

I also belong to a bunch of online communities. There's a couple of Facebook groups that I connect with. It's amazing what you pick up just from being a lurker and reading through all the comments, right? That's one: Find your community. Be engaged. Be active, both internally and externally. 

00:19:43

From a prioritization standpoint, again, I'm always really pushing individuals towards understanding what the priorities of their leaders are – and not only of their leaders but of the business. We need to start linking a lot of what we do back into the bottom line of the business, and so understanding: What's the most painful thing that either you are dealing with, your team is dealing with, your executive is dealing with, or the business is dealing with (however you are supporting within that scope)? Then you start working backwards from there. 

The other thing is that prioritization is also about where you can learn. What I mean by that is: Think about what is most painful for you at the moment. Many times, this is something we try to run away from or we shy away from because we don't just – it's a headache, and we're like, "We don't want to deal with that right now because we've just got to get our day-to-day done." This is actually a growth edge. Anything that's painful or scary, you want to lean into because this really where you're going to start rounding out – and tension is growth. 

00:20:45

This is like a seed just pushing through the soil. It's pushing so hard to get out, and it's going to open up, but you've got to work through that threshold first. And once you get over that – and those are the ones that you remember. Those are the ones that are etched in your soul, right? 

Peyton Ticknor: I always say to my colleagues: "You know you have to go through a lot of manure to grow and to be beautiful." [laughter]

Lynn Walder: Yes! Oh, I'm totally taking that one from you. I love analogies like that.

Peyton Ticknor: You've got to wade through the manure.

Lynn Walder: I love it. Again, finding your community and prioritizing is a link back to your executive, but also to yourself, because that's really where you're going to find the most benefit – not only for you and filling your bucket up, but how that translates back into your team, your executive, or even the business.

Peyton Ticknor: I love that advice. Well, Lynn, thank you so much for joining us on "The Admin Edge." Where can listeners find you online?

Lynn Walder: I hang out on LinkedIn a lot. I love just interacting, so find me on LinkedIn, and I also have a website that you can contact me [on] or be in touch. It's called Executive Management Partners, execmpc.com, and that's where you can find me.

00:21:52                     

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Leah Warwick: Thank you for listening to "The Admin Edge," produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals. Original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions, with audio and video production at EA Ignite by 5Tool Productions. If you liked this podcast, please leave us a nice review and five stars wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe. If you'd like to submit a listener question, you can do so on our website at asaporg.com/podcast.