I hired P as an executive assistant.
She did the basic executive assistant stuff – mainly handling my email and managing the calendar.
Pretty straightforward, right?
Like most people in management, I get a few hundred emails a day. Nothing unusual in today’s hyper-connected world.
You probably get more emails a day than I do.
To manage my email effectively, P had to quickly discern how to respond as I would to various emails.
This means understanding not only the content but the context: who is writing, what they might be expecting in terms of a reply, and the priority of their requests relative to everything else on my plate.
This required P to not just familiarize herself with the dozens of different people who might email me in any given week but also to intuit the proper tone and content for responses depending on what they were asking about.
To be effective, she had to absorb who every one of these hundreds of potential contacts were, stay updated on the status of all ongoing projects, and respond knowledgeably when queried.
P is a fast learner. Over the span of 6 months, she not only mastered her job but reshaped it.
Out of the hundreds of emails that come in each day, she got to the point where I usually have to respond to less than 3. If that.
P didn’t just do her job; she transformed it. She became more than just an executive assistant.
She became my right hand, my frontline, in many ways—she became me.
In our organization, we take our weekly team performance reviews seriously. During these discussions with my COO, we not only assess who is excelling or needing support but also who might be undercompensated for their contributions.
It became glaringly obvious that P was not just performing well; she was performing at a level that far exceeded her initial job description.
So, we made the decision to not just give P a raise but to double her salary. And, of course, with her increased responsibility and influence, a fancier title was part of the package.
She didn’t just earn it. She owned it.
And she transformed our understanding of what a truly indispensable employee looks like.