Phoenix is coaching and supporting American billionaires, CEOs and executive teams in tech, retail and banking for over 25 years. He also founded and created MEGA Assistant University, a revolutionary skills and mindset “boot camp” for top Executive and Personal Assistants who want to level up quickly and begin forging a mutually successful business partnership with their executives and teams. Phoenix holds a Bachelors of Arts in European Studies/Civilisation from Trinity College Dublin.
So...the narrative about Executive Assistants has been diluted so much in the past 3 years or so that it's become more confusing than clarifying. Everybody's an "expert" these days posting fluffy, BS articles that generalize the grind, paint pictures that we're chaos wranglers and do-it-alls with a perma-smile plastered across our faces, and swimming joy laps in the underrepresentation, under compensation, underutilization and lack of empathy often suffered at the hands of the people we're low-key expected to take a bullet for. As someone with 26+ years in the seat, having given up the best years of my personal life to claw my way to the top of the EA game, I'm often pissed off seeing low ROI conferences duping EAs out of thousands of dollars, newbies claiming and weaponizing expertise they haven't actually earned, and articles/vlogs/blogs that serve no purpose other than pushing a personal agenda wrapped in yet another bullshit "Top 5 Ways To..." list or ad campaign.
I recently watched the brilliant documentary on Fred (Mr.) Rogers called "Won't You Be My Neighbor." If you were lucky enough to be in the generation who got to watch this TV show each week then you'll understand how big of an impact Mr. Rogers had on children of all ages, from every walk of life. He was a maverick, with balls down to here, even though his gentle demeanor was often mistaken and misperceived as weak or too passive with many calling his sexuality into question. In those precious, few minutes each week Fred Rogers addressed some pretty heavy topics like self-esteem, racism, divorce, bullying, death, fatal diseases -- with a ninja-like adeptness, to an audience of children as young as 3 years old. He taught children, each and every day, that they were special and imbued them with a much needed shot of caring and love in a world growing more and more precarious by the day. At that time.
2018: ummm, an interesting year. Can't say that I liked it very much personally, but I did learn a ton about myself and, especially, the communities I'm a part of and identify with. As I perform my annual review and retro of the year one of the most poignant lessons I've learned is that we don't treat ourselves with nearly the care that most of our executives treat their Ferraris. An expensive, inanimate object, that some would literally shoot another human in the face to preserve or keep from harm. And that's really sad commentary.
The title pretty much says it all. In my quest to help both applicants and CEOs fill top seats in a hot market I'm often aghast at the volume of crap resumes I see in the wild. Anything from inappropriate photos to long-ass "Objective" and "Skills" sections to conspicuous typos on the very resumes where people are claiming "highest attention to detail." Seriously. This is a mess.
Why are we still writing lengthy job descriptions in order to attract top talent? We all know that aside from a few essential responsibilities and must-haves, JDs are basically worthless as the job is really dependent on the needs in-the-moment and that person's individual approach to the role vs. the nice, tidy list of responsibilities that are mostly irrelevant and dated. So I propose we take convention out back, put it out of its misery, and do something a little revolutionary (read: relevant) when seeking top talent.
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