Give PAs a chance. Demanding bosses can expect too much of their PAs, especially in the first few weeks of a relationship. The trick is to quickly find boundaries you can both agree on, as Grace McCann reports.
Three months ago Jane* was on cloud nine. She had landed a well paid job as personal assistant to a successful television producer, based in stunning W1 offices. "I can’t tell you how excited I was," says Jane, a film and television studies graduate with a secretarial diploma. "My previous job was a £30k role as second PA to a nice but dull insurance man." Mr Television was offering a paid role in her dream field and a tidy £40,000 plus salary. But Jane crashed back to earth on her very first day. Although the boss had been described in the job advertisement as “demanding”, at interview she’d found him charming – if a little eccentric (he asked whether she had ever taken part in a séance, perhaps something to do with a television format…)
Her first encounter with him at work, however, lasted all of two minutes. "He called me in and barked: ‘Look, my ideal PA would say two or three words a week. We’re not going to chat. I’ll just let you know if you mess up’." Coping with her boss’s personality proved to be by far the trickiest part of Jane’s job. "PA duties per se aren’t rocket science, but he expected me to pick up exactly where my predecessor left off. Of course this was impossible, and I got so many terse emails from him in my first few days I thought I was for the chop." It is a scenario that David Morel, managing director of St James’s-based Tiger Recruitment, might recognize.
Tiger places candidates in some of the most demanding PA roles in London. "There’s sometimes an unrealistic expectation that a PA will be up to speed from day one, but there’s always a bedding-in period. Bosses need to give new PAs a chance - it’s something we have to be quite firm about with clients." Jane’s new boss also operated at a radically different pace from the insurance man. "The volume of work he generates is phenomenal. I felt his previous PA must have been Superwoman. I was working 12 hour days to keep up.”
According to David Morel, these sorts of demands go with the territory when you’re working for a successful boss. "These people have got where they are by being brilliant delegators. And entrepreneurs have an uncanny ability to work with minimal sleep.” Another Mayfair-based secretarial recruitment consultant, Tessa Meadows-Smith, director of RMS Recruitment, agrees that pressure is to be expected in a role paying between forty and sixty thousand pounds. However, like David Morel, she says that bosses can alarm their PAs with seemingly impossible expectations. "A problem we’re getting now with the advent of Blackberries is PAs getting buzzed all night by their boss. A PA who was unsure of herself might be up all night booking flights and so on."
Tessa Meadows-Smith and David Morel both say that while practical secretarial skills are fairly straightforward, matching PAs to highly successful, often complex, characters can be tough. "I think secretarial recruitment is much harder than say, IT, which is all about technical skills. We have to find personalities that click,” says Meadows-Smith. In her experience creative bosses are the most demanding. "Interior design, for example, is renowned for it," she says. "I think because attention to detail goes with the job.” One of Meadows-Smith’s clients insists that his biscuits are laid out in a certain way with his cup of tea. She says that while some PAs would find this intolerably fussy, or even demeaning, others would relish the opportunity to please their boss. "One might think: ‘I didn’t go to law school for this’, whereas another might take the view: ‘I respect this person, they are a genius in what they do, and I want to keep them happy and productive’.”
David Morel thinks the key to a harmonious PA/boss relationship is for boundaries to be respected, but says these fall in different places depending on the individuals concerned. He recently placed a candidate who was asked to do house cleaning. She refused and the boss apologized for asking.Tessa Meadows-Smith has come across PAs being asked to take their boss’s dog for walks. "I remember saying: ‘Why are you paying £40,000 to someone to walk your dog?' But a good PA will be able to sort a situation like that out herself."
Are some bosses so difficult that no candidate should be expected to work for them? David Morel thinks not. "We deal with people who shout and scream but that's just their way of doing business, and we can find PAs for whom it's water off a duck's back. In eight years of doing this I can't think of a client of whom I've thought: 'that's actually a nasty person'." Tessa Meadows-Smith has a different perspective. "Sometimes we’ve walked away from a client – we've tried and it's not worked out. There’s a difference between being challenging and being impossible.” Jane decided that her boss was making her utterly miserable, and left to temp and look for a new job. "This time I’m avoiding ads that say ‘demanding’ or even ‘creative’,” she says. “In case it’s another boss who wants a workaholic mute for a PA."
* Not her real name.
