Staff Matters: People-Focused Solutions for the Ultimate New Workplace

Preface

For twenty-five years, I worked with Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis as her Personal and Executive Assistant. Olympia led the Whole Theatre in Montclair, New Jersey, and I had a front-row seat while she managed a team of more than thirty people. I worked at the theater from 1986 to 1990 and then continued my work as her assistant and publicist until 2011. Our longevity was due, in large part, to our respect and appreciation for each other and the job we each performed. My goal was to be as skilled an assistant as she was an actress. Most of what I know about managing people comes straight from this experience.

Olympia instinctively knew how to manage people and inspire excellence and loyalty. When she passed away in 2021 at age eighty-nine, her memorial service took place at the Delacorte Theater in New York City, an outdoor venue. It poured rain for the entire two-hour event, and 250 people, many of whom had traveled from far away during a pandemic, sat huddled under umbrellas. None of us could have imagined being anywhere else, and we would do it again in a heartbeat.

I am not only a former assistant myself, but I have employed an assistant since 2012. Managing people is not just a theoretical concept to me; I live it. Jennifer Wilner works with me as my virtual assistant ten hours each week. I also employ others in the areas of publicity, technology, finance, legal advice, and marketing. When I was fresh out of Rutgers University, I worked at the Pheasant Run Theatre box office in St. Charles, Illinois, and managed a staff of six.

Titles matter. You will notice throughout the book that the titles for job roles are capitalized. This is intended not only to draw the distinction among them, but to create an equalizing effect, out of respect for each role. Example: Executive Assistant.

I want to express gratitude to my father, Sol Low, who worked as the Chief Accountant at the main post office in Jersey City, New Jersey. He died in 1973, and at his funeral on a freezing January day, his assistant, Delores, was inconsolable by his grave. She told me that my father was the best manager she had ever known. She said he had treated her with respect and compassion, and she would miss him and never forget him. I will never forget her.

I have spoken in many countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In all of these places, I have seen that the global workplace is a fascinating buzzing beehive of fragmented activity generally suffering from a lack of effective cross-department communication. The pandemic that began in 2020 has only worsened the breakdowns in communication. However, the truth is there were plenty of serious communication issues prepandemic that were made even more glaringly apparent when staff had to work from home. The distance became far more than geographic.

Long before the pandemic, another event caused massive upheaval in the workplace: the financial meltdown on Wall Street in 2008. In a storm of layoffs, downsizing, and reorganization, workplace structures were thrown into the air like a deck of cards, and the cards have been slow to settle for the staff. Seven years earlier, in 2001, 9/11 happened. The upheaval in the way companies managed staff caused disruption of the highest order. Disaster preparedness took on new meaning, as did cybersecurity. Leaders were forced to invest millions of dollars to design new and better ways to protect their staff and data. Since then, we have seen capable former support staffers promoted to middle management. Job descriptions, titles, and compensation have been slow to change, causing significant long-term angst among staff who are fighting hard to be resilient.

On top of all this, in 2017 we saw the beginning of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, which took sexual harassment out of the shadows and splashed it onto the front-page news. As a result, the harassers are being held accountable with more frequency. There have been major shake-ups in government leadership and at some of the world’s largest, most powerful companies.

In a world wrestling with how to recalibrate in a postpandemic environment, there has never been a more complicated time for the workplace. For everyone from leaders to staff to HR to recruiters, these complications are slowing us down, and sometimes stopping us dead in our tracks, as we figure out how to navigate them. Mental and physical health are now higher priorities at many companies.

My goal is to make sense of these complications and put the missing pieces together to find a better way to work. I envision a better workplace and a better world not only for ourselves, but also for our children, grandchildren, and those who will come after. I am optimistic about what I see, but we have lots of room for improvement, and much that is within our power to fix. I hope you share this optimism.

If so, you have come to the right book.

Right now, millions of human beings are trying to make sense of the new normal. It is filled with high technology and legitimate concerns about hybrid work-from-home situations, the safety of staff who are coming into the office, cybersecurity, hacking, and the mainstream infiltration of robots and artificial intelligence. Many of us are working virtually and remotely, and our connections with one another are happening through webcams and videoconferencing software. Robots are taking on tasks like scheduling, and sometimes it is hard to tell whether you are communicating with a human or a bot, which can be disconcerting, no matter how old you are.

The fact that many people possess two and sometimes three mobile phones and multiple email addresses makes communication even more fragmented and challenging. Our mental attention is divided. Just take a look at people in a restaurant and notice how many are on their devices rather than speaking to their tablemates. Disrespectful? Yes, to some⁠—but not to all. The capacity of the human brain is being tested every day.

Speaking of disrespect, chapter 15 exposes the darkest sides of our workplace, which include bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination, and racism. An ultimate workplace is not possible until we build strong bridges of understanding among our diverse staff. Support systems like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and employee resource groups (ERGs) are some of the ways to accomplish this.

The age range in our workplace has never been as broad as it is right now. This has resulted in a collision of the generations with some interesting results, both positive and negative. As baby boomers retire and others leave in the Great Resignation, the workplace must accommodate this mass exodus. What do we do in this unstable and dangerous situation? At best, it is another messy complication and a serious challenge to business continuity.

And we have the issue of sex, in all the meanings of that word. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, our workplace is 47 percent female. My work is training Executive and Personal Assistants, who are 93–97 percent female and as diverse ethnically as the world itself. These demographics are impacting how the humans in our workplace are interacting and working together⁠—or not working together. This subject is a particular obsession with me, which you will read about in chapter 16.

Spoiler alert: Gender differences and gender identities matter a great deal in the workplace, and the differences need to be acknowledged and respected. The genders experience the workplace very differently, which means executives cannot successfully manage them in the same way. These issues are explored in chapter 16.

We have the wage gap (which is bad enough for White women but even more problematic for women of color), workplace bullying, sexual harassment, and the mommy penalty. Workplace discussions about gender include issues regarding LGBTQIA+ staff and the proper use of pronouns. Transgender staff also face discrimination, microaggressions, and overt hostility. Clearly, these behaviors do not promote a healthy or productive work environment for anyone, regardless of gender.

The bottom line is that clarifying issues about gender and sex will benefit not only women but humans of all genders. Addressing these challenges will help everyone and improve our world. We can do better.

The complex issues affecting the people of our workplace are at the heart of the matter. Literally the heart. As in the human beings with beating hearts populating our companies. My quest is to pull the curtain back on what is really going on in this complicated and highly demanding new environment. I could not have written this book without the support of the hundreds of colleagues and friends who gave me their honest takes on their experiences. I thank them all from the bottom of my heart. Much of it is not pretty, but the truth is better than silence and ignorance. That’s why you’re here.

I intend to shine a bright light into previously dark corners in order to gain deeper understanding, and this understanding will help us fix what is broken and create an ultimate new workplace. Some of the places I will take you have not seen the light in a very long time.

That is all the more reason to go there. Ready?

Introduction

This book is based on over 1,500 one-on-one conversations I have had with Executive Assistants, Celebrity Assistants, Personal Assistants, Private Service Professionals, CEOs and leaders at all levels, HR professionals, recruiters, trainers, authors, leadership experts, business school professors, journalists, and psychologists from all over the world. They spoke to me and I listened. I asked questions, listened some more, and took notes. These conversations were not superficial small talk. Quite the contrary.

The conversations about what is really happening in the global workplace were often raw, honest, messy, and revelatory. What I have heard reveals universal truths and global trends. I have moved from confusion to clarity. What I’ve learned is that humans in our workplaces all yearn for the exact same things⁠—no matter where they are or the size of their organization or their level within it.

Much of my research was done with assistants who attended my Be the Ultimate Assistant workshop. I designed this two-day workshop to address the professional development training needs of assistants who were supporting leaders at the highest levels. Each workshop is limited to a maximum of thirty students, and, since 2011, I have spoken by phone or videoconference with every student several weeks in advance of the workshop. During those confidential conversations, I asked nuts-and-bolts questions such as:

What challenges are you bumping into with your executives, peers, and the company?

Is the job you were hired to do the job you are actually doing?

How many hours each week are you working?

Are you being compensated fairly for the work you are doing?

I will tell you what I learned from these conversations.

This book is about the humans who populate our global workplace, the architects who are the company CEOs, executives, managers, and supervisors at all levels and the builders who are the staff, the implementers, the executors, the employees, the team. The human resources professionals and recruiters are builders, too.

This book is intended to build strong bridges between these groups.

Every one of these constituents is a stakeholder in today’s workplace. Each serves a unique need and a specific purpose in their organization. Each one is a SME, a subject matter expert. Each person was chosen⁠—hired for clear and considered reasons⁠—and every one of them deserves to be respected, acknowledged, and rewarded for their individual contributions.

The bottom line is that there is no one you can name, from the richest person on Earth to the poorest, who got to where they are alone. It takes architects and it takes builders, in partnership and collaboration with one another, to build bridges.

Imagine if these architects and builders designed the bridges that led to an ultimate workplace. A workplace that addressed the many issues we face, such as workplace bullying, compensation confusion, hiring practices, and racial and gender discrimination. There is no denying that the current landscape is messy. What if a workplace encouraged staff to overcome the fear of being the messenger, and to talk with leaders and one another about solutions and ways to make things better?

If you find this notion interesting, you will find many paths leading to an ultimate workplace in these pages. Like me, you have probably read many books about leadership and the workplace. My office is filled with them.

What makes my book different? Perspective.

Two aha moments that changed everything

Imagine a fuzzy picture that suddenly comes into sharp focus and takes your breath away. Two aha moments in 2012 gave me surprising insights into workplace relationships and changed the direction of my work. Those moments have everything to do with my understanding of the workplace.

In October 2012, I was invited to speak at the Hays Conference for Executive and Personal Assistants in London. This was my first international speaking engagement. I was told that I was the first American to speak at a conference for professional assistants in the United Kingdom, and I would be speaking to about 250 of them. It was a big deal for me.

How many of you feel well managed? asked the larger-than-life Susie Barron-Stubley, a renowned pioneer in the professional assistant field. As I stood at the back of the ballroom taking it all in, I watched only about twenty-five hands raise and only a few with any real power or enthusiasm. Aha moment number one: an alarmingly low number of assistants felt well managed by their executives.

Wait, what was going on here? How big a problem was this? Was it global? Over the next months, as I struggled to understand this state of affairs, I began asking Susie’s question at my own workshops and conferences. The response was the same.

When I returned to the United States, I began researching why so few staff feel well managed. I asked very experienced assistants about this, and wow, did I get an earful. I heard about executives who had no idea what to do with assistants or how to leverage them and their skills. I heard traumatic stories about bullying and abusive behaviors, micromanaging, and passive-aggressive actions. I heard about job descriptions that were woefully generic and bore no resemblance to the role the assistants were hired to perform. I heard about low salaries and static salary bands/levels that had not been adjusted in years. I heard about unethical behaviors and rules that were unfairly applied.

Why aren’t managers taking better care of their staff? Why is it not happening? How do leaders not know how important it is? Or could it be that they know but do not care?

One business school professor explained to me that shareholder and stakeholder capitalism have competing and conflicting interests. To take care of your people can be expensive in the short term, even though it is a profitable and winning strategy in the long term.

I started thinking about how, where, and when managers learn how to manage people. The obvious places were MBA programs, business schools, and the military. To my surprise, business school curriculums have very few classes with titles such as How to Manage Your Staff.

As I traveled, I made it a point to ask executives if they had ever taken a class or had any training in managing people. The majority said no, and that they had learned on the job.

My research led directly to aha moment number two. I read leadership expert and author Jack Zenger’s December 2012 article in Harvard Business Review titled We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders.¹

Mr. Zenger and his team had polled 17,000 leaders around the world and calculated the average age when those leaders had received their very first people management training.

That age was forty-two.

Gasp. My heart was pounding. This was it. This explained so much about why assistants feel poorly managed: their managers have simply not learned those skills. Most managers have been out of college more than twenty years before they get trained to manage people. No wonder there are problems! Jack Zenger and his team repeated the same poll in 2021. The new average age increased to forty-six. The problem has only gotten worse.

Managing others is a learned skill, like becoming an expert financial planner, doctor, or lawyer. It is not logical that just because someone is a skilled financial planner, they are an equally skilled manager of humans. The following saying is absolutely true: You don’t know what you don’t know.

My aha moments led me to realize that we can do better. Much better. By failing to train our leaders to be good managers from the start⁠—or at least much sooner than what is currently the norm⁠—we have left the fate of the men and women in the workforce to chance. We are hoping that our managers have had good role models in their families or at their companies to emulate. We hope that they were raised by people who taught them respect and empathy.

But what if they were not? In the United States, we should be doing this so much better. We should be leading the way, demonstrating the best systems for managing people. Leaving it to luck is not good enough, is it? After all, hope is not a strategy. My research continued.

In 2013, I went to hear Jack Zenger speak in New York City. I asked him why the subject of managing people was not in the curriculum of most business schools. He said that the wheels of change in academia move slowly and that he did not see curriculum changing any time soon.

Bonnie, I agree with you that it should change, he said.

So why isn’t it changing? I asked.

Because it is hard to teach. What you are talking about are emotional intelligence and soft skills. Professors at business schools are not hired to teach that material.

What is the immediate solution?

Jack replied without hesitation. Tell the assistants of the world that they need to manage their managers.

I took Jack’s advice seriously, and since 2013, I have trained my students and audiences to manage up. It is easier said than done, but managing up means being a leader (regardless of your position) who speaks up about what you see and hear and takes proactive steps to solve problems. When students and audiences hear my stories and see the data, my assistants have aha moments of their own. Assistants are doing their best to manage up to leaders who have not been taught what assistants are supposed to do. This is not a small challenge; and in a rapidly changing world, it matters more than ever that leaders understand what makes their people tick.

I decided to write a book that I hope will be required reading at business schools. It will give students a detailed preview of what is really happening with the people of our modern workplace and how to handle it. A new approach is needed in the new workplace. Being a leader right now, in a postpandemic world, is harder than ever.

As this book began coming into focus in 2012, one of the colleagues who served as my truthteller and bellwether for up-to-the-minute information was New York City CEO and prominent recruiter Melba J. Duncan. I am honored and deeply grateful that Melba wrote the foreword.

Several years and thirteen countries later, the answers are essentially the same. Whether they work from home, go to the office, or work in a hybrid way, the majority of staff still do not feel well managed. That is what I want to change. I hope you do, too.

I am fascinated with the workplace that is still dealing with prepandemic fallout of the status quo. Despite living in an uber-advanced time with a plethora of ways to connect, there is still a shocking lack of communication, education, and training as it relates to the business partnerships between managers and staff.

It is clear that many workplace problems are due to a lack of education and professional development training, as well as breakdowns in communication between the key constituencies: the leaders, the staff, and the HR team. There are too many silos and not enough systems in place to break them down. The silos are only made more apparent with staff working from home isolated from the rest of the team. Staff members often suffer in silence out of fear of losing their jobs and fear of difficult confrontations. Without skilled intervention, these relationships can become abusive, deteriorating, and destructive to people and organizations. Most often, staffers quit their jobs because it is easier than confronting the offending party.

In general, the vast majority of workers (managers included) in our workplace have never been taught how to effectively address challenging issues with others. Without effective training, confrontation is a stress-provoking and impossible task. It is easier to quit.

The costly revolving door of staff turnover will keep spinning unless we break the cycle.

Full disclosure to my readers

There may be material in this book that you view as obvious. I err on the side of including such material because I am struck by how much of it is viewed as new news to Leaders, Assistants, HR professionals, and Recruiters. In a presentation we gave to thirty executives and their assistants, Monique Helstrom, former Chief of Simon Sinek, shared that one of the best ways she and Simon enhanced their communication was to commit to a ten-minute, one-to-one meeting each morning to check in. Simple, right? This was a light-bulb revelation to many executives and assistants in the room. Obvious to some and a completely new idea to others.

The structure of this book is designed to pull the curtain back on the burning issues in our workplace, told from the staff’s point of view. Each of the twenty-one chapters shares information meant to illuminate subject matter and topics that are not easily discussed and yet can make all the difference if addressed. My goal is to pave that road to make these conversations easier.

I will sometimes generalize. When I do, I am well aware that some of what I am writing may not apply to you or your company. I am writing what I see to be true. For example, I write that the onboarding and offboarding systems at most companies are seriously flawed and need an overhaul. I am delighted if that does not apply to your company and hope you will benefit from knowing what is happening elsewhere.

Writing about gender can be tricky, messy, and complex, but I am doing it anyway because it is important. For example, I know there are people who believe there is no wage gap between men and women. There is. I also see a serious double standard between some of the norms for women and men. I know we have LGBTQIA+ staff in our workplace who deserve to be acknowledged and respected for who they are and what they bring to the workplace. Will there be exceptions to what I write on these subjects? Of course, but I can tolerate the complexity if you can.

Pronouns⁠—I want to acknowledge, respect, and honor the people of our workplace who identify as LGBTQIA+. However, for the purposes of clarity, I will be using she/her and he/him to refer to women and men. I am a cisgender female and my pronouns are she and her. Chapter 16 on sex will include more information about the use of pronouns in the workplace.

Vocabulary choices: I intentionally do not use the word boss. The word comes from the Dutch word baas, which means master, as in master and slave. I hope you will consider not using boss, too, and find other words to use instead, such as leader, executive, manager, business partner, or supervisor, to name a few.

No one has paid me to mention their name, their company, or their resources. I am writing about them so my readers will learn and benefit.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin.

Bonnie Low-Kramen

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. —⁠Atticus Finch

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Chapter One

Empathy⁠—In Their Shoes

What is empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. That understanding helps us to better decide how to respond to a situation.

At its core, this book is about empathy for all the humans in our workplace. My hope is that by the end of the book, all the stakeholders of our workplace will have a better appreciation for the worries, fears, goals, and dreams of the people around them. In the end, the shareholders will benefit, too.

Let’s take a walk in the shoes of others and, in so doing, gain a relatable understanding about what life is like for them every single day.

One truth I know from over forty years in the workplace and talking with hundreds of people is that a real getting-to-know-you conversation that finds a simple area of commonality can be one of the fastest ways to break down walls between two very different people. (Hint: It might be your shared passion for pizza or coffee or country music.)

Seek to understand rather than to be understood. That is empathy.

The givens: Respect and professionalism

I typically have tremendous diversity in my workshops. Diversity of age, gender, ethnicity, industry, education, economic status, and country of origin. The common denominator is that my students are all driven to be the best and want to learn how to work at the top of their game. Our workshop room becomes a microcosm of the broader workplace.

What I set up as a given is that everyone belongs there and that our diversity is to be embraced and celebrated. Every person in the workshop room and in our workplaces is there for a reason. The expectation is that every person is to be treated with respect and professionalism and that integrity to this principle should be a common denominator in every workplace.

Starting at the top: Company owners, CEOs and all executives, supervisors, and managers

Leaders of a company, and of people, bear tremendous responsibility. This responsibility causes stress and sleepless nights. Leaders have deep and profound concerns about accountability to board members, customers, shareholders, and employees, not to mention the pressures of trying to have a personal life with family and friends. The pressures increase as they work to be profitable and yet must spend money to be innovative and stay ahead of the competition. They have the ever-present given that the buck stops with them. If something goes wrong, it’s ultimately their fault.

Being the person at the top is both exhilarating and exhausting, which explains why so many people do not want to be the person in charge. It is hard. Really, really hard.

Every person on a leader’s team needs to understand the stresses the leader is under and the very real ways that staff supports the vision and mission. The most successful leaders use their voice and their platform to share transparently about what keeps them up at night and how the team can help make the ship sail more smoothly. Vulnerability and the truth work.

Empathy is the key to the hit TV show Undercover Boss, in which CEOs go undercover in their own companies to discover what it is really like working there. The show confirms what I have learned from my own work around the world⁠—staffers truly want their leaders to see the work they do.

In August 2019, an important meeting of the Business Roundtable convened in Washington, D.C. The members of the group are the CEOs of America’s leading companies. At that meeting, 181 American CEOs signed their names to a Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.² It said:

We commit to:

Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.

Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.

Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.

Generating long-term value