If you've hired your first virtual assistant, or if you're on your third, there's a good chance that your new assistant might not be as confident just because they have yet to gain much experience or are just naturally introverted. How do you further develop that confidence within them so they can take responsibility for different things and move forward with you if they have any suggestions or anything else they want to improve or bring up with you?
Building your virtual assistant's confidence is essential for a lot of reasons because it's one of the ways that you can free yourself up to be able to do other things. After all, your assistant is confident enough to do things independently.
ASSESS THEIR SKILLS
The first thing you can do is assess their skills.
What are they good at? What are the different things that they're naturally good at? Just excel at, or things that you know get them into flow? What's something that, as you give it to them, they're excited about it? Do they want to work on it, or is it even a task they've always wanted to do?
It would be best if you looked at these tasks because this will be your foundation—it will be the fixed point of how they will build up their confidence. Because this is something they are already really good at—they're already passionate about and excited about. So it will be easy for you to develop further and grow their confidence.
HELP GROW THOSE SKILLS
After assessing your assistant's skills, the next step is helping them grow those skills.
Try to develop different ways or different tasks or projects they can work on in your business where they can hone and develop and grow those skills that they have, so your assistant is good at graphics. What are the different ways that they can turn a particular text document into a graphic? Can they create graphics for your social media? Can they develop infographics to be given to your clients? Can they create slides? You know, these are things that you can quickly provide them with feedback on. They'll take it—they'll eat it up because it's something that, again, they're passionate about, and that's what you want: someone who's not only interested in the work itself but also excited about learning how to do it.
CONNECT WITH OTHER PEOPLE IN THE COMPANY
The next thing you can do to empower your assistants is to connect them with many people in your company. Even if you have a more prominent company, this one step will help empower your assistant and clarify what they're doing and how it's helping in the bigger picture.
When we're just working on a singular task, we lose sight that it's part of a more critical mechanism towards the goal you guys are moving towards. So having them be able to ask questions to resources or people who aren't just you helps build confidence that they can handle it—that they can do what they need to do.
It also gives them a different perspective on what they're doing and gives you a different perspective about how an assistant could be doing based on their interactions with the rest of your team.
CATCH UP WITH YOUR VIRTUAL ASSISTANT REGULARLY
Next, make sure to have a catch-up with your assistant regularly so that you can make sure they're working on the right things.
This means ensuring you have scheduled a time in your day or week when you catch up with your assistant on what projects they're working on and what tasks they might need help with. This helps build their confidence because they know that even if you aren't always there, even if sometimes you may not be available, there's still an area for them. There's still a time slot just for them to air out all of these problems they're facing and reiterate that if there is anything urgent that needs attention from them, they can chat about it. Doing regular checkups also helps give them regular feedback so that there is a feedback loop between the two of you—and also making sure they are working on the right things!
One of the most critical questions I've learned from reading a book called Good to Great is: are you working on the right things?
There's a phrase in the book that says, “people in the wrong seat on the bus.” So what do they mean by that? Let's say you have a bus—and this bus represents your business.
Some people will be drivers of that bus, some will be navigators, and some will just passengers who help move the bus along. And if you have someone who should be a driver but they're just a passenger, well… something needs to change!
That's why regular checkups are so important. They allow you to ensure that everyone on your team is in the right seat for their role, which will help your business succeed more than anything else.
GET TO KNOW YOUR VA PERSONALLY
Next on the list of things you'll get from regular check-ins with your assistant is building a relationship with them.
You must know your assistant as a whole person, not just as the person who does the tasks you assign them.
There are many reasons for this: firstly, it helps you align their work with their goals and priorities. For example, if one of their priorities is building a side business, you can use their work to help them improve their skills and build confidence so they may eventually leave your company. But even if they don't start their own business, at least they've already learned the skills needed to do so when they're ready!
Another reason for getting to know your assistant personally is so that you can learn what motivates them and how best to help them succeed. If they're stuck on something or need guidance on how they learn best (or even how they consume information), then knowing these things will help guide your interactions with them to support them better.
GIVE THEM THE FREEDOM TO CREATE
Next, make sure that you give your assistant the freedom to create. This means a lot of things:
For one, it means you have so many business and project ideas that you can't do them all on your own—that's why you have an assistant! So giving your assistant the freedom to create or build out your projects will be another exercise in building their confidence because once they've made something great, they'll know they're capable of doing more. And then, when you give them feedback on what they did well (“Oh yeah, I love that you added all this!”), they'll be able to understand how much they've grown in their role with you.
ACKNOWLEDGE THEIR WINS
Next is ensuring you acknowledge their wins whenever they do a task well. And, of course, having that good back-and-forth feedback.
Now, I have a ton of blogs on how to get feedback from your assistant effectively. Remember that that's how you grow through feedback—if you keep fixing their problems and keep setting what they're doing, they're not going to grow. They will keep making the same mistakes because you weren't there to fix them anyway! So make sure you give them clear feedback on how to do certain things, praise them a lot for what they do right, and always focus on the item you want them to work on. This is something that I've taught many of our clients in 2xYou, where whenever they give feedback, they focus on what they did wrong and should be doing better than focusing on “Hey! I'm looking forward to the next time that you do this task.” You're pointing out what you want them to refocus on, which is what they should be doing rather than what they did wrong.
ASK THEM FOR IDEAS
The next step is asking your assistant for ideas on how to do certain things, new things they can work on, and even things you probably should stop doing.
When you do this, it helps them feel like their opinion matters—like, hey. This person will listen to me! This person will value my opinion! So then they start looking at your business from that point of view and be able to start suggesting different things to you.
This builds confidence in both of you so that you can grow together.
VALUE YOUR VA
When it comes to your team, you want to ensure they feel valued and appreciated.
That's why we'll give you tips on getting the most out of your employees and creating an environment where everyone works together toward a common goal.
First off, make sure that you're valuing them as a member of your team, whether this is by giving them bonuses, giving them, you know, taking them out on trips, so if that's something that you can do if you guys are like you know the same city from time to time or whether it's just really acknowledging all the work they've done and how much they've helped you in your business these are different ways that they can feel that what they're doing has an impact in the long run and that's what a lot of people want, it just knows that they are making an impact so make sure that they feel valued feel taken care of.
Take the 2xYou Scale You Scorecard now to see which part of your business needs a boost: 2xyou.com/scorecard.