Paving the way: Our first EA team member and mom-to-be
Executive Assistant, Gina von Hardenberg, shares her learnings as a two-time pioneer. Read about her experience as our first executive assistant and our first expecting mother.
I joined the team in November 2019. I’m the first EA — Executive Assistant — here, which was exciting because I had the opportunity to shape the role and define how I wanted to work. Even though it’s a relatively new role, it’s an important one as we have five C-level executives. And since we’re scaling quickly, it’s an ever-evolving set of responsibilities.
Although I worked as an executive assistant early in my career, my background is primarily in customer relations and event management. Before Taxfix, I spent several years working in Thailand at a health and sports resort. This experience taught me a lot about communication and time management. From coordinating Olympic team visits to establishing a CRM department, I picked up many of the useful organizational skills that go hand in hand with EA work.
Lessons learned as the first EA at a scaling startup
Since joining Taxfix, I’ve grown a lot personally and professionally. It’s a fast-paced environment, where tasks change from one moment to the next. My time here also made me look at the executive assistant role in a new light. Here are just a few of my learnings from the past year:
Be flexible
Life as an EA in a startup is much more than troubleshooting, calendar management, and sending emails — you need to be flexible. That’s one thing that really drew me to this work in the first place, there’s tons of variety, and you never quite know what to expect.
I like to start each morning by getting the basics out of the way, like catching up on emails and liaising with internal stakeholders. Then I go into more deep-thought projects like coordination, strategic planning, and prep work for upcoming meetings. Of course, there are often ad-hoc requests that pop up last-minute, so I have to be agile and handle things as they come my way.
Plan ahead
Personal time management is critical — not just the time management of others. If you can’t organize your own time, you run the risk that you won’t be able to support others to complete their tasks on time either. One practice that’s helped me stay organized is to end each day with a prudent look at the next two days. I dive into the calendars of myself and our leadership team and map out deadlines, to-dos, and reminders. That way, I can start every day with a fresh overview of what to tackle.
Have empathy
The ability to relate to others is an essential skill for any people-facing role. My time abroad working in Thailand taught me a lot about empathy and being open to different people. It’s no surprise that Thai work culture is very different from German work culture. For example, Germans are notoriously punctual, whereas Thai people are more laid-back. In these cross-cultural scenarios, you have to take the time to understand the person that you’re talking to. How do they work, and how can you get them to deliver on what you need from them?
Since all but two of our C-levels come from different cultural backgrounds, I had to learn to navigate their varying styles. As I got to know our leadership team, I began to understand the rhythms of how they each like to work — who wants their meetings early in the morning or who’d rather work a bit later in the evening.
Helping is not the same as assisting
An excellent executive assistant has a passion for helping others — not just assisting them. Assisting someone assumes that you’re there to do something for someone else, and that’s where it ends. On the other hand, being helpful means you have your own initiatives to make someone else’s life easier. I like that as an EA, you get to help people be the best versions of themselves. You support your managers by finding the right time — and enough time — to work on what’s truly important for the business.
On being the first Taxfix mom-to-be
When I first found out I was pregnant, I was anxious about telling my bosses as I had just passed my probation period. Fortunately, my fears were completely unfounded. Every single one of the C-levels was incredibly supportive and happy for me. One of their first questions was, “what do you need from us?” It showed me how much I’m valued — that they like me for me and for the work that I do.
Since I’m the first woman to go through pregnancy while at Taxfix, it’s a really exciting time for the whole team. I have a baby bump now, so it’s fun to see how happy everyone is when we get a chance to meet in person. Even my direct supervisor stays up to date on my progress and usually knows how far along I am more than I do.
What I truly appreciate is that our Head of People, Marie, asked to use my current journey as a case-study for future parents. As a company, we’ve always been very flexible with our working parents, but now we’re developing more formal support guidelines. Especially for new parents moving to Germany, there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved in becoming a parent. It was great to hear that the company was willing to explore this with me and that I would be able to help others down the line.
[For more from our working parents, read Working from home with kids]
Growing the EA Team
In addition to growing my own family, I’m working on building out the EA Team as well. We have a junior executive assistant joining in the next few weeks and are still searching for one more senior member. This will be a really interesting time since we’ll have the opportunity to shape the structure of our team and the course of the executive assistant role in general. The great thing about building this team up from scratch is that we have a lot of control over this function’s future.
On a personal note, I’m actually a bit sad to be going on maternity leave. I really enjoy the people I work with and the management team. I feel like I’ve developed a very close relationship with them, which is not something I expected when I started out. And although I’m thrilled to become a mom, I’ll also be looking forward to rejoining my developing team.
Interested in joining our team? Check out our open positions.
