How to Get Your Assistant to Assist

What You Need to Know

You may assume an assistant knows what to do first.
Instead of making assumptions, explain what you want done when.
An assistant who buys into a deadline is more likely to meet it.

Most advisors face one or both of these challenges as their business grows:

1. Getting in front of enough qualified prospects, and

2. Building and working with a team that can support their growth

While many of the the advisors and agents who have reached out to me over the years have been looking for help with the first of these, more and more I find myself talking with advisors who have more business than they can handle and can’t get production out of their assistant or team.

They end up disappointed and doing the work that the assistant should be doing.

Applications are not prepared, money isn’t moved and tasks like filing a change of beneficiary form get pushed off until they’re five weeks behind.

If you have business opportunities that are on hold because you’re doing the paperwork, followup, appointment-setting with existing clients, marketing, or anything else that could be done by someone else, you’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow your business.

But how do you delegate these other tasks in a way that ensures they will be done right and on time?

Stop expecting and being disappointed.

Make clear agreements instead.

Management by expectation will almost always lead to disappointment.

If you’re expecting that a task will be given priority but your assistant doesn’t know that, your expectation that they would understand the urgency of this task and give it priority will usually result in disappointment.

Often, I’ll hear an advisor say, “It’s just common sense that this needed to be done first (or submitted somewhere, or whatever).” My usual reply is that there is no such thing as common sense.

Your sense may have been that this item should have been given priority.

Their sense was that they already had priority tasks and this just was meant to be added to the pile.

Make the agreement.

When you assign something to an assistant, take these steps: