Leah Warwick: Hi, everyone. I’m Leah Warwick, and you’re listening to “The Admin Edge.” Project management skills are critical for career advancement, and yet we found in the data from our latest “ASAP State of the Profession Report” that many admins have a skills gap in this area and want to up-skill. That’s why we offer project management training online and at our conferences, and why we’re sharing this conversation between Katie Hendrickson and returning podcast guest and trainer, Tareka Wheeler, at the ASAP event, EA Ignite.

00:00:42

Katie Hendrickson: Hi, I’m Katie Hendrickson, Executive Assistant to the President and Chief Operating Officer of AIT Worldwide Logistics and ASAP Advisory Board Member. My guest today is Tareka Wheeler, Founder and CEO of T. Wheeler Strategic Solutions and a trainer at this event, EA Ignite. Welcome to the podcast, Tareka.

Tareka Wheeler: Thank you for having me.

Katie Hendrickson: Well, it’s been a wonderful day here so far. I’ve heard so many good things about your project management sessions. In fact, I had the opportunity to sit in on one, so it’s been very exciting. But for our listeners at home, I’m wondering if you can maybe give us a quick definition of project management, just so we can ensure that we’re all on the same page as we dive into this really important topic.

00:01:26

Tareka Wheeler: Absolutely. So project management, I would say, is really a discipline. It’s how you approach work. While the Project Management Institute has framed kind of different areas of focus for project management, what I really define it as is it’s a discipline to not only help you do the work, but to help you do it in a strategic way, so that you get the success and the outcomes that you look to have. Why that’s so appropriate, I think, within this conversation and especially here at EA Ignite is that executive assistants are project managers. They may not know that they are project managers, but they are. They are involved in initiating projects. They are planning projects. They are executing those projects. They’re monitoring and closing those projects.

00:02:09

They’re going through all of the stages within the project management framework, so to me it is a discipline to really help you do your work better and be more strategic about it in a specific framework.

Katie Hendrickson: Well, and there are so many different ways that an executive assistant can really take on those skills, but I’m wondering: What are the key project management skills that really every single executive assistant should develop to excel in their role?

Tareka Wheeler: Absolutely, I’m going to give you three key ones, and one piece I’ll give as a precursor to that is a little bit from one of my sessions. I talked about the importance of understanding purpose, understanding language, and understanding your tools. I think that’s unique for executive assistants to understand that you have to have a good grasp of not only your own personal purpose and the work that you’re doing every single day, but what is the purpose of the project or the initiative that you’re being asked to take on within your company, by your executive?

00:03:13

I think the second piece of that is around language. How you speak and/or articulate your updates, your status updates, your briefings to your executive, the meetings that you may be supporting, that language is important. How you affirm yourself is important. And then tools — leveraging actual tools, which I spent a lot of time talking about, project management tools that you can utilize to really advance. That’s a little bit of a precursor.

I think there’s three main skills that EAs must have. Number one: You have to be an active listener. A lot of times folks will hear “active listening” and they’ll think about, “Oh, yeah, I’m listening to what everyone’s saying and I’m hearing what they’re saying.”

00:03:56

But, for me, active listening has two really key components. One, you are listening with the intent to understand, and you’re also listening for what is not being said.

Katie Hendrickson: Ooh, that’s a good one.

Tareka Wheeler: So it’s great to hear what people are saying, but if you’re truly going to be an active listener, you are taking note and observing what is not being said. What’s not being said is where your magic is as an EA, because you can insert yourself as that strategic business partner to say, “Ah-ha, so I got these requirements. I got these things that you need me to do. I understand what your focus and priorities are. I didn’t hear you say anything about budget. What’s my budget for this event? I didn’t hear you say anything about attendees. Is it just going to be our domestic partners, or do we have folks coming in from other countries?”

00:04:46

Katie Hendrickson: Yeah, because those things make a big difference in the scope of your work.

Tareka Wheeler: Huge.

Katie Hendrickson: And I think, as executive assistants, we really have a unique vantage point to see all of those things that are missing. We’re not only hearing and seeing things from our executive; we’re seeing it from all aspects of the organization and have that responsibility to connect the dots and put those puzzle pieces together.

Tareka Wheeler: Absolutely. So that’s my first one, is active listening. The next skillset is around people management. You’ve got to understand that project management, especially when you’re an EA, is about people, processes and technology. But I think people first because you have to know how to manage your stakeholders.

In both of my masterclasses, I talked about stakeholder management. I told the attendees, “You’ve got to understand who you’re working with and who you’re working for. You have to report up, across and down. And you’ve got to understand, what does success look like for them?” What success looks like to me or what success looks like to you is totally different from what success might look like to the next person. You have to understand that. That is stakeholder management. It’s understanding who has high power and authority, who has high interest, and who has high power and authority but little interest?

00:06:01

When you can map that out and there’s tools that you can use to do that, it gives you incredible power. It helps you have a little bit more influence and authority because you know who you’re working with. So people management is a skillset you have to have, and all people are not people-people, right? [laughter] Everyone doesn’t do a great job engaging and managing with people, but it’s a skillset that’s needed.

And then third, which some may not say is a skillset, but I’m going to disagree, is curiosity.

Katie Hendrickson: I would agree with you.

Tareka Wheeler: Skillset? That’s a skillset. Curiosity is a skillset. You have to know how to dig deeper. You have to understand how to probe. You have to go below the surface. You cannot assume just the basic information you were given is enough. You have to be curious enough. As you’re supporting executives, you may only have one shot. You’ve got one opportunity to come to me and hear the request that I have and then go off to the races and do what needs to be done.

00:07:08

I gave an example today about one of my favorite movies, and I said, “You know, the key character in the movie could’ve been considered a tyrant, but I don’t think she was a tyrant. I think she was a woman who knew what she wanted. One of the famous quotes in her movie is [when] her assistant starts to ask her some questions. She says, ‘Please bore someone else with your questions.’” If you’re listening to this, guys, and you know the movie, you got it, right?

One may say, “Oh, that’s so rude,” but, actually, I want you to be curious to even when you don’t get enough information, you’re not going to be frustrated. You’re not going to go talk to your colleagues, “Oh, my gosh. I’ve gotten one more task that I don’t have all the information I need.” I want you to tap into your curiosity to go figure it out. And sometimes that’s not necessarily asking the question of the person that you’re supporting, but it’s utilizing the resources and team members and things around you to get that information.

00:08:05

The skillset of curiosity is real. If you don’t have that curiosity, you’re going to find yourself feeling like you’re always in the dark because someone’s to giving you what you need. But you might not always get what you need from that source. You’ve got to be curious enough to go get it yourself.

Katie Hendrickson: Yeah, I completely agree. And you actually just put it into words, something that I didn’t know how to put into words. I just had my performance review. One of the things that my executive said was I was excelling in him giving me very little information and me figuring it out and giving him an almost finished project that he could then put the final tweaks on it and say it’s finished. I went into it saying like, “Oh, I wonder if this is actually good. Should I be asking more questions of him?” But no, for him, that was a huge strength.

00:08:58

Pivoting just a little bit, I’m assuming that we have quite a few administrative professionals that say, “Well, I don’t run projects because I don’t have an official start and end.” So I’m wondering if you can actually share some examples of the typical types of projects that EAs could see themselves tasked with and, really, how EAs can effectively manage these projects to have a strong impact on their organization.

Tareka Wheeler: I love this question because EAs are project managers. Regardless if you have your certification or not, you are a project manager. Why? Yes, typical definition. It is an endeavor that has a beginning and an end and it has specific outcomes and a tailored focus. Yes, that definition sounds great.

00:09:41

To your point, let’s put it into real practice and application. If you are doing event planning, a board meeting, a retreat, a sales meeting, an all-hands staff meeting, those are projects. Yes, they may happen once a month or once a quarter, but the May board meeting has a beginning and an end from the time you initiate the work on that project to the time that people walk out the door of the board meeting. That’s a project. And then the May board meeting is a project. The June board meeting is a project, right? Those are projects.

00:10:15

Other examples of projects are doing conferences. Or perhaps you are responsible for leading an initiative for bringing on a new technology or platform or software within your company. Those are all projects. How do you manage those successfully to get to the right outcomes?

One of the things I talked about in my sessions was that it’s important for you to have a project charter, even if it’s just for yourself. You need to understand: What are the goals? What are the success metrics? What are we hoping to achieve? Who all needs to be involved? What is my budget? When is the timeline? It sets the foundation.

00:10:55

You then need something, some type of a timeline or a Gandt chart to help you manage start to finish and all the milestones that you need to hit and all the tasks that you need to hit within those milestones, right, so that you can communicate effectively to everyone that’s involved the status. How do you give a status without a timeline? It’s kind of hard to do that, right?

A lot of EAs will say, “Oh, people are always asking me, ‘Do you have an update on that? What’s the status on this?’” Well, give them a visual so they can understand, here’s where we are on the timeline. Do you ever see those signs, or like on maps, “you are here”?

Katie Hendrickson: Yeah. I have this much further to go in the airport. I’m almost there.

Tareka Wheeler: I am at gate 14. My gate is 42. Okay. I know where I’m at. So a timeline is kind of like that, and then you can build a status whether if it is a status update or some type of a briefing so that week to week or month to month, whatever that cadence looks like for you, you’re able to communicate that status. That is how you really take the things that EAs are doing every single day and start to apply some of those project management practices.

00:12:08

And I think one more area where you could really start to see success with those projects is to learn how to articulate and effectively communicate risk. Risk is like a dirty word to some folks, right? It’s like, “I don’t want to talk about that. My company is very risk adverse. They don’t want to talk about risk.” But risks are real. If you change the narrative about the risk, change your relationship with risk, you’re looking at what might happen and what can I do it to prevent it from happening, so it does not actually become an issue. You’re thinking about the risk before it even gets there, and all the things you’re going to be able to do to prevent it. Or you can communicate a risk to your executive to say, “This is a risk because I’ve not received this information from that department. They’re consistently late. And I’m concerned if I don’t get that from this department on time, it’s not going to make it into the report on time. So I’m going to have this as a risk, but here’s what I’m doing to hopefully mitigate it so it doesn’t actually become an issue and it doesn’t delay our schedule.”

00:13:10

Change the narrative and how we’re talking about it. I told the attendees to my session, “You’ve got to think about language: purpose, language and tools.” It’s a great way for EAs to embrace project management.

Katie Hendrickson: It really is. And one of the things that I have been doing is, any time I get any kind of information on a new project or I’m handed a document, I make it a point to ask myself, “What can I do with this now to save Future Katie a headache?” That’s a way that I find that I can really look at those things. What are the risks?

00:13:47

And example is my executive gave me his passport on my first day, and I looked at it and said, “Okay, what are the things that can go wrong if I don’t utilize this information now?” How many horror stories have we heard about people whose passports have expired and they show up at the airport? So I was like, okay, his passport expires in nine years. What can I do now? Put it into my task management software for eight years to remember, hey, he has one year until his passport expires. I have now looked at that risk and found a way to mitigate it.

Tareka Wheeler: And then you can rest and kind of set it aside. It’s there, but you have a plan in place. You have a mitigation strategy in place, right? And that is the piece that, honestly, if executive assistants can embrace risk management, it would help so much with the chaos that sometimes you can experience because it forces you to be proactive instead of reactive, right? It forces you to put plans in place instead of waiting ’til you see the risk staring in your face and it’s about to become an issue. I love that. That’s a good example.

00:14:58

Katie Hendrickson: So talking about this — obviously, I just mentioned my task management software, but from your perspective, what are some of the tools or methodologies that you could recommend for EAs in particular to really streamline their project management tasks and ensure successful outcomes?

Tareka Wheeler: That’s a great question. I think the first thing that we have to think about (and you just said it) was methodologies. In project management, there are several methodologies. The three that are most known and most talked about are: waterfall, agile and hybrid. To someone who’s not actively in the project management field, they may say, “What in the world does that mean?” Waterfall is straightforward. It’s linear. Start and an end, basic deadlines, basic timeline. Boom, boom, you’re done.

00:15:48

Agile is really more for you know there’s going to be a change in priority. You know there’s going to be last-minute requests. You know that you’re going to have to be agile, right, and practice a little bit of agility and flexibility in order to really get this task done.

Hybrid brings them together. There is some structure, but there’s structure that has maybe hard deadlines, but there can still be a lot of changes up and down that require you to be more agile.

Those three kind of methodologies, I challenge EAs to think about those when they’re thinking about the task that they’re doing, the projects that they’re managing.

From methodologies, let’s now think about tools. I think there’s a lot of software and technology out there, and sometimes folks get scared about software and technology. So I like to tell people: “Well, start where you’re at. If software and technology scares you initially, start with an Excel sheet. Start with a Google sheet. Start to actually develop a timeline that’s basic. It doesn’t have to be all pretty and all the charts. Don’t create anxiety for yourself. And then take the time to say, okay, let me put myself on what I would say [is] like maturity model. This is what I’m doing right now. But you know what? In three months, I’m going to have a beautiful timeline with a Gandt chart that is showing this, this and this, and I’m going to learn how to do that. I’m going to go online. I’m going to take a quick course. I’m going to do something on LinkedIn Learning or something, or talk with one of my colleagues, because I want to mature this. But I still need to be organized and I still need to have a timeline.”

00:17:30

So I encourage you to start with what you know, so you don’t overwhelm yourself, but then put yourself on a maturity model for how you want to advance so you can see where you want to get to.

Great tools to use — I mean, there are so many different platforms and software that you can utilize. I really encourage folks to explore things like Asana. MS Planner is great. It’s right there. Most folks are using Microsoft and you can use an application that’s right there.

00:18:00

I think things like Gera, especially for folks who are working in software technology, even within healthcare Gera is used a lot. But you need a tool that helps you not try to keep things in your head and on paper. You need something that’s going to help you manage those tasks a little bit better, and those are some recommendations.

Katie Hendrickson: That’s great. I know one of the things that a lot of executive assistants are now thinking is, “Okay, well, now how do I do all of that while balancing my regular responsibilities?” What would your response to that be?

Tareka Wheeler: You’ve got to practice really good time, energy, and resource management. We talk a lot about time management, but I need you to do time, energy, and resource management, and give your energy and time to things that are high value and high output and outcomes that align with the strategic priorities within your organization or with the executive that you’re supporting.

00:19:02

You can put a lot of energy and a lot of time to things that don’t deliver a lot of value, and that’s going to be a time suck, right? And so then you can’t get to something like optimizing the way you work and starting to use a new platform or new tool, because you just don’t have the time or the energy, because you’re pouring it into things that are not delivering you value and outcomes and the outputs that you need.

One of the things that I urge anyone to do — EA or not, but anyone to do — is not to have so many calendars. You have like your personal calendar and then I’ll have my work calendar and then I have my calendar for the kids. I have all these calendars. I encourage you to have one master calendar. Here’s why. You need to see all the things that are happening in your dynamic life, and there’s 24 hours in the day.

00:19:52

Someone says you’re supposed to sleep eight of those, and then, technically, you’re supposed to maybe work eight of those. I don’t know if an eight-hour workday is even realistic anymore, but —

Katie Hendrickson: It would be nice.

Tareka Wheeler: It would be nice. Debatable. But that’s 16 hours gone out of 24. What do you have left? Eight. You’ve got to manage that quite preciously, right? I think you have to really have a good picture of that. You need to understand, what do you have to absolutely do that’s urgent? What are the things that you need to get done, [where] it’s important to get it done, but you can kind of control it? And where are the things that you can delegate? Where are the things you can automate? Where are the things you can bring in things like AI? And then what are the things that just need to go off the list because there’s no time or there’s no season for it right now; it’s no longer important?

00:20:41

I think when EAs start to think like that, it really helps you prioritize those new things. Still get the things you’ve got to get done every single day, but now you’ve got things in these buckets. Actually, there’s a matrix called the Eisenhower Matrix — I talked about it in one of my sessions — that helps you kind of prioritize with purpose. And you break those things up into those buckets and that helps you manage your time and your energy and your resources.

Katie Hendrickson: That’s really impactful. I know that those types of things have been helpful for me, especially with, as you said, the curiosity mindset and going into: How can I set all of these things up for success?

00:21:21

We have a listener question that was submitted by one of our community members. They wrote: “As an EA, we are often unofficially project managing. Is it worth getting a project management training or certification?”

Tareka Wheeler: I love that question. Getting your certification, becoming a certified project manager, is like career currency. It really is. It advances you in the current field that you’re in, but it also opens you up to a wider variety of things that you could pursue.

00:21:57

I started my career as an executive assistant. I am now a certified project manager, but I also serve as a VP within a company. I am managing project managers and managing programs. I was a project manager that was managing projects directly and serving as like a project director. I will say, from the time that I got my PMP, my certified project management professional certification, my career just kind of skyrocketed from there.

However, I think that for some folks, [it’s like], no, I’m an executive assistant. This is what I do. This is what I’m going to pursue and continue for my career. Fantastic. Love that. Getting your project management certification helps bring an added layer an a value to your organization that was not there before, and you can capitalize on that.

00:22:46

There are many individuals that I know who have gone from EA to an operations manager or director of operations, simply because they started to think differently about their role and they got their certification, and they started to apply what they learned from that certification to the organization. EAs have an incredible amount of influence. They are supporting and touching some of the most top-most executives in the company. If you can take a practice that brings productivity, efficiency, more effectiveness, which oftentimes equal better bottom line or meeting some of the strategic objectives for a company, you’re becoming a strategic business partner, and you’re putting yourself in a position not only for supporting and advancing the company, but career advancement for yourself. So it’s career currency.

Katie Hendrickson: That’s amazing. Well, it’s been such a delight to have you here on “The Admin Edge” podcast Tareka. Where can our listeners find you online and connect with you?

00:23:43

Tareka Wheeler: Yeah, I love to connect on LinkedIn. I’m Tareka Wheeler, super easy to find. Also, you can connect with me via my newsletter. I’ve got a cool newsletter on LinkedIn called “The Unlocked PM,” where I talk about project management practices, but with a different little twist and a different way of thinking. I’d love to connect with folks that way.

Katie Hendrickson: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Tareka Wheeler: Yeah, thanks so much. This was fun.

[music playing]

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 by 5Tool Productions. If you liked this podcast, please leave us a nice review, five stars, and subscribe. If you’d like to submit a listener question, you may do so on our website at ASAPorg.com/podcast.