Are you a manager, director or other senior-level personnel who wants to work more effectively with your administrative support professional? Did you know that partnering with your administrative assistants and executive assistants can actually help you to meet your professional goals at work? Would you like to know how to improve morale among your administrative support professionals and retain them as long-term employees? After all, isn't it a lot more profitable to retain existing staff than to constantly hire, train and get along with new staff? Here are five ways to work more effectively with your current administrative support professionals starting now:

1. Assume that your administrative support professional doesn't know what's on your mind until you tell him. That's one assumption it's okay to make in office environment. Always remember that your administrative support professional is not a mind reader--no matter how in tune with your thoughts she or he may seem to be sometimes. It's that one time that you "assume" when things will go awry in your work relationship.

Do you have a Business Plan? Congratulations, but you are in a small minority. And if you have a plan, is it integral to your business, and instrumental to its growth? If answer to this question is yes, then you need to read no further. However, most business owners who actually go to trouble to write a business plan have left it languishing on their bottom shelf, gathering dust! This is dirty little secret of business consultants.

Most business consultants are only interested in selling their time or their ‘Business Plan in a Box’ but know that for a business plan to be useful, it has to be part of a Business Management System. But this is a much harder proposition for consultant to sell, particularly to small business owners who are just looking for a quick fix. So most consultants just sell a quick fix solution- a business plan that they know will, within months, end up on bottom shelf. Once owners have prepared their “fill in blanks” plan, they expect it to transform their business overnight just by its mere existence. And because this does not happen, they never look at it again.