How to Advocate for Admins

Need to advocate for more as an administrative professional? Former Chief of Staff and current executive coach Jillian Hufnagel shares advice for getting what’s best for yourself, your team, and the business.

Recorded at EA Ignite Spring 2024 and produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals - ASAP. Learn more and submit a listener question at asaporg.com/podcast.

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Leah Warwick: Hi, everyone. I am Leah Warwick, and you're listening to "The Admin Edge." This episode was recorded at the American Society of Administrative Professionals, or ASAP, event called EA Ignite, with guest Jillian Hufnagel and interviewer Katie Hendrickson. Katie sat down with Jillian for an in-depth discussion on the ways in which administrative professionals can be assertive leaders in the workplace, advocating for themselves and for their teams.

Katie Hendrickson: Hi, I'm Katie Hendrickson, ASAP Advisory Board Member, and my guest today is Jillian Hufnagel who was speaking about executive partnership and taking the leap to Chief of Staff here at EA Ignite. Jillian is the former Head of Culture and Human Capital at Slim.ai, and former Chief of Staff at Duo Security, as well as a start-up advisor and an executive coach. Welcome to the podcast, Jillian.

00:00:57                     

Jillian Hufnagel: Thank you for having me.

Katie Hendrickson: It's our pleasure. Well, let me just hop right in here. First, in what ways does an administrative professional need to advocate for their team?

Jillian Hufnagel: I think it depends on what the structure and format of the team are because you advocate in different ways depending on where you sit within the structure. Sometimes administrative teams are localized around the concept of being a group or a cohort rather than being in a reporting structure within a department. So, I think if you're in a situation where you are a member of a more informal group, or a dotted-line reporting group, advocation tends to look a little bit more like localizing around sharing best practices and supporting your peers in the things that they are working through or experiencing in the workplace; and you tend to do that in more of an ad-hoc way than in a structured way.

00:01:57

When you're part of an administrative team that is within a department and is led by an individual, you typically have a lot more resources. You have proper career ladders. You have very clearly defined matrixes for how you work, and what are the different levels of competencies that would be required for you. So, what I would say is you can always advocate to have more clarity around your job description. You can advocate to have more clarity around: What does good versus great look like in a competency or a skillset from an expectation perspective? And then there's always parts that you can do to advocate when you're meeting with your leader. 

00:02:42

I think one of the things that we as administrators do – I've been doing this for a very long time. I started at reception. I moved into being an AA, an EA, a Chief of Staff. One of the things that we tend to do is put ourselves last. And if you are not actively using your one-on-one time to talk to your leader about your goals, your dreams, your desires, and then getting their buy-in to support you in those, I think that's one of the biggest areas where you can advocate for yourself as an administrative professional who is also then better able to contribute to the admin team. 

Katie Hendrickson: That's really powerful. I know one of the things that I've struggled with is not having clear key performance indicators, and so if being able to sit down and have that conversation of: For me, what does this look like? And then being able to understand for your team as well is super important. What would you say are some common challenges that administrative professionals face when trying to advocate for their team, and how do you feel that they can overcome these obstacles?

00:03:45                     

Jillian Hufnagel: I think one of the things about like lack of budgeting around being an administrator – even something as simple as not having an allocated budget for learning and development – is a common challenge. It is widely known that if you are an administrator in a company, you typically are not categorized in a department. You are typically rolling up to your leader of whatever department they're in. So, let's say you're the EA to the head of product. Everyone else in product has a learning and development budget. You have to fight for yours because it typically is not naturally allocated to you because you're a job code class of an administrator not a product individual. You're not a product manager. You're not a program manager.

And so, when you think about advocating for learning and development, this goes back to: How do I grow myself as an admin? How do I learn new skills? How do I stay relevant on things like the introduction of AI into my work? How do I be the champion for those things? 

00:04:54

So, I would certainly encourage you to advocate towards development that meets you where you're at. Sometimes that's a coach. Sometimes you need one-on-one coaching. Sometimes you're not in a position where you can attend an online class and ingest information from an online teacher. Maybe you do need a little bit more of a one-on-one guidance and mentorship. 

I think other areas that are really interesting are free trainings. Lucy Brazier, who is our emcee for the event, has hundreds of hours of YouTube content that any administrator can go receive at any given time. And then what I would say is, don't just go take the class. Don't just learn from the mentor or the advisor or the coach. In order to advocate for yourself, you have to take your learnings back into your business and you have to articulate: How does your learning benefit you and the business? How does the new skill that you've achieved move your leader's team forward? 

00:05:57                     

Katie Hendrickson: That's so good, Jillian. I know for myself, after I attended the EA Ignite in the spring of 2023, I took back some very hard skills in Microsoft PowerPoint and learning how to do data visualization. It turned out, three weeks later, they needed to create a slide deck for a board presentation, and I was able to pull it out because of what I learned at EA Ignite, so I completely agree with you.

Jillian Hufnagel: That's so wonderful. On my plane ride here, I just happened to be sitting to another EA that was on her way to the conference, and she was working on organizational charts. Not being nosy, but you're sitting next to someone on a plane, right? 

Katie Hendrickson: Just a little nosy.

Jillian Hufnagel: And I saw that she was using the spreadsheet function to then build the slide deck. And I thought to myself: This is what admins do. Admins make the complex simple. And so, as we were getting ready to get off the plane, I was like, "Hey, that was a really sexy org chart you were working on over there – not to be creepy."

00:07:02

And she was like, "I just taught myself how to do this. Could you even imagine? We have 800 people in our organization. Could you imagine how much time it would've taken me to build organizational charts on a PowerPoint slide presentation for 800 individuals? And so, now, I send this to my boss and my boss is like, 'This exceeded my expectations.'" But that took that admin's initiative. It took her desire to do something more effectively. She self-selected that. 

That's another thing that's really interesting. The people that attend these types of conferences are the types of people that are self-selecting growth and development, despite obstacles. I think it's important to be aware that we're not all on the same level of growth and development journey at any given time, and so you really want to give grace and space. When you learn something and you bring it back into your organization, there's going to be plenty of people who don't want to adopt it. I would just say, don't invest your energy and effort with those people. Spend time with the folks that are like-minded, who want to really be influenced by growth and development. 

00:08:14                     

Katie Hendrickson: That's so good, especially if you have those folks that are really interested, but really they don't quite have the confidence or the avenues that you do to get those types of things approved or to get encouragement in them. How would you say that administrative professionals can effectively communicate the value and the needs of their team to upper management?

Jillian Hufnagel: This is maybe going to rub some people the wrong way, but the organization that you work in does not exist to give you a job. It does not exist to create a career ladder for you. It does not exist to give you all of the things that you need to thrive within a business.

00:08:54

If you understand what you need to thrive, then you can communicate it. You have to understand how the business works. What are the structures? What are the methodologies? What are the strategies? What are the business drivers? If you can ladder your work to those things, you can very clearly articulate your needs and get them met. If you bifurcate the way you work from the business drivers, you're going to go blue in the face. 

I would say one way to best advocate is – let's say your company does OKRs (objectives and key results). Typically, the objectives are three to five topline business goals for the year. It's a 12-month span. And then underneath that there's typically key results that are run quarterly. If you can tie your work into how it positively impacts the key result or the objective, and you can show that both qualitatively and quantitatively with those KPIs, where you can say, like, "Alright, so we've got an initiative to grow our business in Asia in the next quarter," maybe I support a chief commercialization officer and my CCO is out on the road, in Asia, building a book of business with new customers. 

00:10:16

Well, as the administrator, I'm going to make sure that my leader is fully briefed on every single customer meeting before they leave the United States. I'm going to make sure all of those briefings are not only in a folder, but I've actually printed them because it happens so often that you don't have Wi-Fi on a plane. So, we look around the corner and we say, "Alright, I'm going to proactively load my leader with everything that they need." The other thing that I'm going to do is, as soon as they land, I'm going to make sure that I take all of the knowledge that I have about who they are and how they work, and I'm going to feed that into the on-the-ground schedule. 

00:10:52

The way Chynna [Clayton] talked about in our first keynote on day one, she talked about understanding the way that Mrs. Obama behaved and being able to get ahead of her. Under no circumstances should your leader get off the plane in Asia and not go directly to the hotel to rest, to take a shower, to call their family. You can literally tie every single thing that you do in your thoughtful workflow towards your leader actually nailing a new account. When you do that, you can advocate for more. If you can't actively tie your work to how you make your leader or your team better, you're very likely not going to be able to influence for more for yourself. 

Katie Hendrickson: Yeah, and I think that those principles can apply to the administrative professionals that have others that, again, don't have that confidence and courage. With these principles, we can sit down with them and say, "Hey, let's figure this out together. Let's get through this together." And you can help them create a document to go to their upper manager and say, "Here's where I'm excelling. Here's what I want to do," and advocate for themselves.

00:12:08

Or if you're in a position where you're the one that has access to upper management, you can work in that same way, but then present it to upper management yourself. 

Jillian Hufnagel: I think part of the presentation also needs to contain your self-awareness. I've been doing this for almost 25 years. I am still growing and developing. One of the key areas for me is I'm growing and developing in my HR compliance competencies because, more recently in my career, I've been taking on responsibilities within the HR realm. I intentionally hired someone who was smarter, better, faster, stronger than me in HR compliance. So, even though she reports to me, I'm learning from her. She is augmenting my gaps so that I can defer to her as the subject matter expert and learn from her while I go.

00:12:57

And so I think if you're going to put that framework together for anyone within your administrative team to bring it to their leader, it should also include a very clear list of the areas where you know you can grow. And then you tell your leader, "I need your commitment," not only that you know that I'm trying to improve my business acumen, or I'm trying to become more proactive with expense reports, or I'm trying to deepen my understanding of how our department operates, A) You need to know those things, B) You need to understand how you help me achieve those things. So, it's not just the list; it's the ongoing dialogue that you have. And that goes back to making sure you keep your one-on-one. 

Katie Hendrickson: Building off of that, in your opinion, what role does team morale play in advocacy, and how can an administrative professional foster a positive team environment that's worth advocating for?

00:14:01                     

Jillian Hufnagel: Culture is such an overused terms because culture has pieces to it that operate differently depending on where you are in the business. There's like the corporate culture of: What does our brand look and sound like to the world? There's the leadership culture of: What does leadership tell us that we should do that looks best in terms of values alignment or how we operate as a business? And then there's subcultures within each division and each department. I think the challenge that administrators face is they're being asked to positively contribute to the silo of whatever department they're supporting. They're also being asked to contribute to the positive culture of being an administrative professional within the organization, and they may not be localized into a department.

00:14:51

I think all of those things being considered, and the fact that we are aware of them – the only person that you can manage is yourself. So, if you go to work every day and you're feeding negativity into the organization, that's on you. There's always going to be challenges. There's always going to be dysfunction. The grass is never greener. If you want to grow where you're at, you need to understand that you have an impact on every single person around you. So if you walk in with an open mindset, if you walk in with a willingness to receive feedback, if you walk in with the practice of setting your ego aside and being really engaged in whatever it is that you're doing – do that thing to the best of your possible ability – then you're positively influencing those around you. 

00:15:46

I think it's really common in administrative teams that either have a department or don't that sometimes there's a queen bee. There's this behavior of someone who’s maybe been in the role for a really long time. They don't practice transparency. They don't practice shared information flow. They don't contribute to the growth and development. And so I think when people are in organizations where they're experiencing a queen bee, they feel really stymied in that ability to contribute to a positive culture because they look at that person and they say, "Well, that person's responsible for our negative culture, and so therefore we can't have a positive one." And what I would really like people to take away from what I'm about to say is that no one person, regardless of their station, their title, or their rank, can dictate the culture that you experience. You choose what you experience. And so you can either allow that person to negatively affect you, or you can just look at them as, they exist. They're there. I'm not changing them. I can change how I respond to them. I can change whether or not I allow their words to land on me and affect me. 

00:17:03

And I'm going to learn how to social engineer them. I'm going to learn how to go around them to get the outcome that I want. 

Katie Hendrickson: I love that. And that kind of feeds into our last question, which was submitted by an anonymous listener. They write: "I am a seasoned executive assistant to the C-suite with over 30 years of experience. My growing team of EAs want to be on a bonus plan, and it's up to me to advocate for them. Their role is instrumental in the executive being able to reach their full potential to get their own bonus. The EA sees this and gets nothing in return for their work to make the executive successful. I would like to develop a bonus program for the EAs and would like to know how to structure this for them. What are your thoughts?"

00:17:49                     

Jillian Hufnagel: Well, I think it's a lovely idea, because the organization already has a bonus structure in place, so I think there's a couple angles you can take. Angle one is: Are we creating inequity in our organization by offering a bonus program to some and not others? And so you can prove your point by identifying that you're actually creating disparity in the organization by limiting a subset of employees of achieving a bonus. So, that's one way to kind of bolster your case. I think another way to bolster the case is identify what is the percentage of the leader's bonus that the admins actually affect.

Let's say the leader has five goals this quarter and the leader achieves all five goals. Which of those five goals did the administrative professional impact directly or indirectly? So, then the administrative professional should be able to receive a certain percentage of whatever bonus pool was set aside for them based on the amount of impact that they had on their leader's goals. 

00:18:59

It's called like a weighted average. So, what you would do is, when you're putting the structure together, you can say, "Alright, of the leader's goals – they have five; now the admin has five. Well, the admin doesn't actually have the capacity to affect goal four. Okay, so that's one less goal. So now there are four goals that the EA has the ability to impact directly. If they were to achieve all of those four goals because their leader achieved 100% of all of their four goals, what's the pool of dollars that would be allocated to the achievement? 

Maybe the pool is, let's say, $5,000/quarter. Let's say the leader doesn't achieve goals one, two, three, or five and only achieves four. Well, goal four was the one that the admin didn't have the ability to influence. So now what happens is you create additional inequity for the admin because you've laddered the admin's goals directly to the leader's goals. 

00:19:56

And so it could be a little bit of a slippery slope if you do it that way because then you're limiting their ability to earn. So, what I would say is administrative professionals should be able to be eligible for bonuses not just because of their leader's execution, but because of their execution within their core competencies as an admin. So, what I would say is, I'm going to break the admin's goals into a third. One-third of it is that they're growing and developing in their admin core competencies. The administrative manager and/or the head of business execution defines that. So, what are those core competencies and are you growing in them, yes or no? 

The middle third would be whether or not they are a champion for the overall execution of the business. That could be values-based execution, so maybe they're modeling collaboration as an exceptional bar. 

00:20:49

And then that final third would be laddered directly to their leader. So, let's say their leader tanks all five goals. They can still earn in the first third and second third that ladder to their admin competencies and then their ability to affect the overall business. 

Katie Hendrickson: That's wonderful. Thanks so much again for joining us on "The Admin Edge," Jillian. Where can our listeners find you online? 

Jillian Hufnagel: I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and there are not a lot of Jillian Hufnagels, so it's pretty easy to find me there. I do have my own website, which is jillianhufnagel.com. Thanks to my brilliant husband who got me that years ago, I've been able to be the one and only jillianhufnagel.com.

Katie Hendrickson: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.

Jillian Hufnagel: Thank you.

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Leah Warwick: Thank you for listening to "The Admin Edge," produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals. Original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions, with audio and video production at EA Ignite by 5Tool Productions. If you liked this podcast, please leave us a nice review and five stars wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe. If you'd like to submit a listener question, you can do so on our website at asaporg.com/podcast.