Make Nice to Assistants

Rouge Wavers, I’ll say it once, right here, up front: Today’s assistant is tomorrow’s executive. Making nice with assistants is not only a matter of courtesy and basic human decency, it can be a career move. Assistants are the gatekeepers. And they have pretty tough jobs; they work inhuman hours, they don’t get paid much and they often have “difficult” bosses. I think we are all familiar with SWIMMING WITH SHARKS.

If you could zoom through the phone and live five minutes of an assistant’s day you’d sent them warm cookies and milk. Assistants live on the phone and have to learn how to suss out the Important Call from the Bullshit Call in a nanosecond, plus monitor the mercurial mood of their boss(es) and make sure the soy latté is hot and on time – or it goes in the trash and another hellish day has begun. Some assistants are quite warm and polite – others – yeouch. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.

If you find yourself needing to speak with an assistant for any reason – to find out where to query, to ask if the manager or producer is accepting unsolicited material, to firm up the time of your meeting – be not only polite and understanding, be sincere and treat them like the hard-working human beings they are. It won’t go unnoticed.

After the call, write down the assistant’s name for future reference. When you call next, refer to them by name. Yes, yes, assistants cycle in and out and by the time you call next a new person might be there but make an effort. It will be appreciated and you will be remembered.

Just last Christmas I delivered gifts to two assistants and some executives at two first-look prodcos on the Fox lot. The assistants were happy to be included and when I recently spoke with one of them, he was friendly, he gave me some skinny and passed my message on to the exec so quickly that she called me back less than ten minutes later. Assistants grease the wheels and they have the skinny like nobody’s business. Skinny, Rouge Wavers, is golden in this town.

It won’t be long before a one-time assistant is on the other side of the desk from you and they will long appreciate your professional, polite and friendly treatment of them way back when – oh – nine months ago, when they were starting out.

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