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Feb 17

Important Questions to Include in Your Interview Process

By Angelica Rains Hiring Strategies, Interviews, Training

Having the right skills in itself isn’t enough to make someone right for a job. As an employer, you will interview a lot of people who have the right skills and experiences. The best talent also has high emotional intelligence. Unfortunately, many of the generic interview questions that managers ask do not provide enough insight. The best advice about interviewing you can get is to customize the question list in a way that gauges the candidate’s emotional intelligence. Below are some questions to ask candidates.

What Failures Did You Learn from the Most?

One way to assess someone’s emotional intelligence is to see how they react to adversity. Listen closely when a candidate talks about their weaknesses and failures. Failure is the heart of success. No one is successful right away. They learn from mistakes and become better. Someone who breaks down at the first sign of failure is not going to be a good employee. Look for candidates who view failures as opportunities.

Have You Ever Noticed Someone at Work Was Struggling? What Did You Do to Help?

Ask questions that will give you an insight on how the candidate will interact with co-workers. This is just one example. You can also ask about a time they had a conflict with a colleague, among others. These types of question will tell you a lot about the candidate’s attitude and interpersonal skills. You don’t want an employee who stirs up drama and can’t be a team player. Find someone who will build people up and be a positive influence on the team.

Have You Had a Boss You Found Difficult to Work with? How Did You Deal with the Situation?

See how the candidate handles authority. The employee-employer relationship can sometimes be tense. You don’t want to hire someone who is uncooperative and resistant to authority, but you also don’t want someone who is so servile that they never speak their mind. In some cases, employees will have to work with multiple managers and will need to juggle different personalities. There is a lot of opportunity for conflict there, so you need employees who have high emotional intelligence.

It’s easy to find a candidate who checks all the right boxes on paper. But you can’t tell someone’s emotional intelligence by looking at their resume and cover letter. Find someone who will respect managers and colleagues, learn from their mistakes, and navigate conflict and disagreements gracefully.

Feb 10

How to Increase Workplace Resilience

By Angelica Rains Career Guidance, Executive Assistant, Leadership

For many people in C-level support, work is a major source of stress. Like numerous other jobs in today’s world, jobs in executive support are fast-paced and exacting. Many employees experience burnout at some point in their career. While there is little you can do to make your work environment less demanding, there are ways you can improve your ability to endure stress and resist burnout. Below are some tips to increase workplace resilience.

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a form of meditation that involves training yourself to be more aware of your emotions and state of mind in the present moment. Mindfulness tools promote workplace resilience by facilitating stress management and improving mental health. Spending a lot of time planning for future tasks or obsessing over past mistakes is mentally exhausting. By focusing on the present, you become more engaged and more resistant to negative, toxic thoughts.

Work-Life Balance

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance will also help you become more resilient in the workplace. Technology has made it harder for most people to create boundaries between their work life and home life. In the past, once you left the office you were done. Now most people continue to do work-related tasks on their computer or smartphone, such as answering work emails, after they leave for the day. While it might not be possible to keep your personal and work lives separate, it is still important to allow yourself some regular time to relax and recharge. Doing so will help decrease stress and improve productivity.

Practice Reflection

Although it usually isn’t healthy to dwell on the past, reflection is an important way to develop strong emotional intelligence. The goal should be to think about emotional reactions you have had in the past to better understand what situations provoke stress, anxiety, or other strong emotional reactions. Fostering emotional intelligence will enable you become less reactive in general, and also help you avoid certain triggers that will likely cause you stress. In addition, if you know what triggers negative emotional reactions in you, you can develop coping mechanisms that will allow you to recover more quickly in instances when triggers are unable to be avoided.

Stress has become a natural part of work for most people. You might not be able to control your workload or the pace of the work environment, but you can control how you react to stress. Practicing mindfulness techniques, nurturing a healthy work-life balance, and taking steps to improve your emotional intelligence can allow you to become more resilient to stress in the workplace.

Feb 03

4 Ways to Improve Your Email Etiquette

By Angelica Rains Career Guidance, Executive Assistant, Leadership, Training

Email etiquette can have a major impact on workplace communication. When colleagues and clients read emails you send, they make assumptions about your professionalism, trustworthiness, competence, and more. These tips to improve your email etiquette will help you maintain a solid reputation within the C-suite while improving your communication skills.

1. Avoid Being Too Personal or Casual

Even if you are friendly with the people you work with, it is important to remember you are representing your organization when you send emails. Keep your communication professional and formal. For example, avoid discussing your personal life and overusing exclamation marks and emoticons. Also avoid using too much industry jargon, slang, and of course don’t use curse words.

2. Keep Emails Brief

Few people enjoy reading long emails. In general, emails should not be longer than 3 short paragraphs. Recipients will start to lose focus after that. If you have more to say than can be contained in a brief email, it is usually better to have the conversation in-person or over the phone. It also helps to read through the email before you send it. Are there sentences that aren’t necessary? Do you wait too long to reach the main point of the message?

3. Tell Recipients Who You Are

Unless you’re emailing someone that you work with daily, it is a good idea to introduce yourself at the start of an email message. It doesn’t need to be long. Just provide a short sentence giving your name and role. We often figure that if we met someone before, they know who we are. But in the professional world, it is easy to forget a name if you meet new people regularly.

4. Proofread Emails

Grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors are some of the fastest ways to lose credibility with your recipients. We have gotten used to relying on tools like spellcheck and autocorrect. While these tools are helpful, they are imperfect. Make sure you carefully review email messages before you click send to check that they are free of errors. It might take an extra minute or two, but it is better than having to explain confusing or embarrassing typos.

The etiquette you use when you write and send emails can say a lot about who you are as a professional. It’s important for your colleagues, managers, and clients to view you as organized, credible, and well-spoken. You can improve your email etiquette by practicing writing in a professional tone, keeping messages brief and to-the-point, introducing yourself to email recipients, and proofreading all of your messages before they go out.

Jan 27

Steps You Can Take to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

By Angelica Rains Career Guidance, Executive Assistant, Leadership, Training

Emotional intelligence is one of the most beneficial skills you can have as a professional in C-level support. Emotional intelligence improves self-awareness, allows you to communicate with clarity, and helps to control your emotions in challenging situations. In addition, emotional intelligence can improve your ability to collaborate and regulate stress. Here are some steps that you can take right now to strengthen your emotional intelligence.

Active Listening

Many people listen without fully processing what the other person is saying. You can foster emotional intelligence by listening carefully when others speak and making sure you clearly understand them before responding. Listening also involves observing nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions and gestures. Active listening can improve empathy and reduce misunderstandings in the workplace.

Self-Awareness

Emotional awareness is a critical component of emotional intelligence. One way you can improve emotional intelligence is to regularly ask yourself how you feel in a given moment. As you become more self-aware, you gain a better understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes. Over time, you will learn what activities trigger happiness and which ones fill you with dread. You’ll also become aware of what stressors you should try to avoid. Likewise, you will gain insight into what types of people relax you and what personality types bring you down.

Attitudes and Habits

As you become more self-aware, you can start to cultivate a positive attitude as a habit. There are steps you can take to improve your mood, such as eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, and maintaining a regular sleep pattern, which in turn will help improve emotional intelligence. When you practice keeping a positive perspective, you will work better with others, maintain focus easier, and improve your overall motivation. Other activities such as meditation can also improve your daily mood.

Responding Instead of Reacting

Reacting to triggers is a habit that can cause a lot of tension and stress. It is important to monitor how you react to things like requests and constructive feedback. Instead of reacting impulsively, practice receiving information, taking a deep breath, and responding without emotion. For example, if someone gives you negative feedback, instead of becoming angry, receive their criticism with an open mind and thank the person for taking the time to help you improve.

In C-level support, improving emotional intelligence can make you a healthier, more productive professional. You can begin to foster emotional intelligence by practicing active listening, learning to self-reflect, making positivity a habit, and responding thoughtfully.

Jan 20

Stronger Than Yesterday

By Angelica Rains Executive Assistant, Hiring Strategies, Leadership

Resilience. It’s one of the secrets to survival, both professionally and personally. It’s what’s gotten you to where you are, and it’s what will help define who you will become. Looking back at some of the toughest situations you’ve endured, you may have felt there was no other choice. It was a natural instinct. And while it’s true that resilience can come innately, it’s also a learned skill. Instead of leaving resilience up to chance, consider strengthening those muscles by choice. How can we lead a more resilient life, and lead a more resilient team, in the year to come?

A Core of Confidence

Everyone has an inner critic. Who do you compare yourself to, and why? Although comparison can create competition, which in turn can fuel achievement, it’s a balancing act. While constructive criticism can deter certain behaviors in the short-term, positive reinforcement is generally better for shaping new and lasting behavior. It’s also at the core of creating confidence.

As a leader, recognize that criticism doesn’t increase competency. You are simply sharing what not to do, instead of what to do. Imagine a child learning how to ride a bicycle. Which environment shapes a more confident future cyclist: pointing out each time they fell down, or pointing out what they did to stay up?

Confidence increases productivity and causes you to choose more challenging tasks, which makes you stand out amongst your peers. You naturally create a more cohesive workplace environment; confident people celebrate the accomplishments of others as opposed to insecure individuals who try to steal the spotlight and criticize others in order to prove their worth. Speaking first and often (a sign of high self-esteem) makes others perceive you as a leader. In fact, over-confident people are more likely to be promoted than those who have actually accomplished more.

A Fondness for Failure

Consider failures as beginnings, rather than endings. You’ve probably learned more from failures than any other source of wisdom. Teach yourself, and your team, to focus on the data and facts. Embrace failure’s value as a teacher, get curious about the information it provides, and be open to where it leads you next. You may even find you fail less when you don’t fear it.

Failure is either redirecting or reaffirming. If failure caused you to take a different path, it’s because you saw it heading towards a dead-end. If failure caused you to get back up and keep going, it reaffirms you are committed to a goal and it’s worth fighting for.

The Power of Purpose

We have the freedom to choose our actions, our profession, our financial needs, and the path of our life. Each day is not about what we have to do. It’s about what we get to do. Strength can come from the recognition that there is a bigger purpose, a desire to make a difference, and a need to have a higher meaning behind the choices we make.

Spend time focusing on this for yourself personally, and with those you lead. Some points to ponder:

Who in my life do I care to impact the most? How specifically am I going to mentor and impact those individuals?
What are five things I would put on my bucket list, and with whom would I want to experience them?
What experiences am I most appreciative of in my life? How can I help others have that same experience?
What moment in your life are you most proud of? How can you duplicate more of those moments?
What, and who, am I thankful for today?

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Steps for Success

Teach the importance of:

Taking a deep breath.
Taking another.
Focusing on the next thing that needs to be done in order to keep going.

If you wake up suffocated by the list of things that need to get accomplished today, start with getting up and brushing your teeth. When you feel anxiety over an important deadline, make a list of things that need to be done and do just one of them. If your email inbox is exhausting, unsubscribe to a few distribution lists that you never signed up for. Stop longingly looking at pictures of other people’s photos on social media, and spend that time scrolling through your own pictures and cherished memories instead. Don’t focus on the big things. Start with the littlest and decide where to go from there. Take an action, any action. Manufacture your own momentum.

Have an appreciation for your history. What are some of the toughest things you’ve experienced? How did you get through them? You probably already know quite a bit about being resilient but haven’t stopped to admire it.

Remember: you’ve got this. The person who has gotten you through the toughest parts of your life is you.