For many leaders, the right executive assistant is a lifesaver.
Find the perfect fit for your needs, and everything becomes infinitely easier. Hire the wrong match, and everything becomes a slog for both of you.
So, how do you ensure you find that perfect assistant?
According to Jenna Spencer, it’s all about finding someone who complements you in all three parts of the mind.
Jenna is the Founder and Visionary of AssistPro®, a company that provides busy leaders with dedicated virtual executive assistants tailored to meet their needs.
To do that, she looks at aligning assistants with leaders based on their cognitive skills, their affective needs, and how they naturally take action — conation.
“Essentially,” Spencer told Eric Herrera on the Powered by Instinct podcast, “we help entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants really elevate with a great strategic support partner. We match these people with really great high level executive assistants and we utilize all three parts of the mind with Kolbe, DiSC, and cognitive pieces to match them with people that will help them in the way that they think and grow and lead naturally.”
Spencer finds that many leaders understand the importance of delegation, but don’t have the capacity to teach someone. So AssistPro plugs in the right person and provides the tools and infrastructure to make the process as easy as possible.
”It’s really about this long-term support,” she explained. “We’re really kind of exiting the traditional virtual assistant space because that’s more transactional. When you are an individual, a human, you are unique. You have your own Kolbe, and you have your own personality. It’s really about finding someone that’s a great fit for you.”
By taking this approach, Spencer has matched leaders with assistants who are still together after five years, ten years, or more.
“It’s really about the quality of the match, because it’s all built around trust,” she added. “It’s about trusting yourself and working with someone who’s similar to you, with a great complementary style that you’re going to be able to build that trust with.”
And how an assistant naturally gets things done is critical to that complementary style.
“If you can understand someone’s Kolbe result,” she explained, “it can also give you massive insights into where someone might be operating against their strengths. If you piece together the right MOs that are needed, it can help you unlock massive business growth because it gives you a roadmap for what you need and how your people work.”
