The Gatekeeper’s Guide:

Business owners and executives are leaving the home office more and more frequently to go on business trips around the world. It’s simply a part of modern professional life.

What does that mean for you as an assistant?

You may answer the phone so often at work that you’ve forgotten just how critical telephone screening skills are. We tend to become robotic with tasks that we complete multiple times a day, and that can lead to death by repetition. You make assumptions that can lead to missing information, the repetition dulls your bright telephone personality, and your once razor-sharp judgment becomes lax over time. Skills become dull and rusty if you don’t work to maintain them and push to be better every day.

Too many assistants overlook how incredibly important telephone etiquette and gatekeeping skills are. Are you one of them? Answering calls on behalf of someone else, effectively screening those calls, understanding what information should be released, and knowing how to do it all competently are very complex skills that top-of-their game assistants must command. There’s a lot on the line for assistants who must be the gatekeeper for their leader. You must balance protection with professional courtesy.

Regardless of whether you’ve just started taking calls in your professional career or if you’ve fielded millions of calls, this brand-new eBook, The Gatekeeper’s Guide: How to Effectively Screen Calls, will serve to develop and sharpen critical telephone skills.