One week before the meeting of the Management Board with the Supervisory Board, the meeting documents are to be sent. Your manager, the CEO, is about to
go on holiday for another week and is unreachable. You both check the meeting documents before mailing them to the participants, he agrees upon the documents and is curious how the Supervisory Board will react to the plans of the new strategy. You know that the CFO does not fully agree with this new strategy. Two days later, you receive a call from the CFO who would like to change one of the meeting items that relate to the underpinning of the new strategy. In your opinion, this will change the course of the new strategy and you are not sure you should send it. Consultation with the CEO is not possible he is unreachable. What are you going to do?
Advice
Each CEO makes sense to agree with his secretary what to do in situations where the organizational interest is at stake and the CEO is not or poorly accessible. The responsibility of a management-assistant has limits and so she must be able to assume that the CEO will support her. In this specific case, the secretary should act on her intuition that the modified document should not be sent.
