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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
It can seem at times as though all of academic administration today is focused only on the need for continual change and the endless pursuit of "the big idea." But most academic leaders, from department chairs and program directors through university presidents and chancellors, are far too busy helping their institutions flourish for them to divert critical energy and resources to yet another untried theory or management principle. Academic Leadership Day by Day takes an entirely different approach to developing your proven academic leadership: It introduces one practical and field-tested idea each day for an entire academic year. Rather than requiring you to devote days or even weeks to administrative training (which may prove to be of little use in the end), this manual gives you no-nonsense suggestions that you can consider on even your busiest days. Experiment with the suggestions made each day, discover what works for you, and then build on your successes for the benefit of your institution and its programs. Significant improvements often result from small, gradual, and consistent efforts, and Academic Leadership Day by Day is your guide to becoming a more accomplished, confident academic leader a few minutes at a time.
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Seitenzahl: 328
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFFREY L. BULLER
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
September
September 1 - Take advantage of new beginnings.
September 2 - Know your limits.
September 3 - Read the biography of an exemplary leader.
September 4 - Attend a meeting just to listen.
September 5 - Review your program’s publications.
September 6 - Reorder your tasks.
September 7 - Be a coach.
September 8 - Waste time.
September 9 - Learn from a bad decision.
September 10 - Reflect on respect.
September 11 - Provide an outlet for dissent.
September 12 - Tell your supervisor what you need.
September 13 - Learn more about today’s college students.
September 14 - Convey some good news and some bad news.
September 15 - Describe your supervisor.
September 16 - Stop—at least for a moment.
September 17 - Remember that it’s not all about you.
September 18 - Share someone else’s dream.
September 19 - Learn from what others teach.
September 20 - Evaluate without making value judgments.
September 21 - Be the change you want to see.
September 22 - Respect other people’s time.
September 23 - Consider the first thing you do at work every day.
September 24 - Find the weakest link.
September 25 - Go back to the future.
September 26 - Lead by serving.
September 27 - Simplify something.
September 28 - Study interactions.
September 29 - Seek your own satisfaction.
September 30 - Read a boring book.
October
October 1 - Take stock.
October 2 - Ask questions.
October 3 - Exhibit candor.
October 4 - Remove one obstacle.
October 5 - Look around you.
October 6 - Have confidence.
October 7 - Attend a campus event.
October 8 - See people, not tasks, as your first priority.
October 9 - Nominate someone for an award.
October 10 - Discover new ways to manage stress.
October 11 - Move on.
October 12 - Assess your telephone style.
October 13 - Learn from a case study.
October 14 - Practice self-doubt.
October 15 - Speak to a chronic latecomer.
October 16 - Put agendas on your agenda.
October 17 - Recommend a good book.
October 18 - Raise awareness.
October 19 - Plot an escape.
October 20 - Be unique.
October 21 - Show someone you care.
October 22 - Question an assumption.
October 23 - Define leadership.
October 24 - Stay on message.
October 25 - Celebrate something.
October 26 - Open yourself to persuasion.
October 27 - Ask, “Why?”
October 28 - Make time fly.
October 29 - Become your own life coach.
October 30 - Decide how you make decisions.
October 31 - Be frightened.
November
November 1 - Do something that really matters.
November 2 - Spend time with your best faculty members.
November 3 - Use only positive words.
November 4 - Discourage end runs.
November 5 - Know your legislators.
November 6 - Improve your telephone log.
November 7 - Envision a better future.
November 8 - Think holistically.
November 9 - Learn something new about academic freedom.
November 10 - Raise the bar.
November 11 - Expand access.
November 12 - Stop and smell the roses.
November 13 - Think like a novice.
November 14 - Seek common ground.
November 15 - Don’t take it personally.
November 16 - Establish boundaries.
November 17 - Accommodate differences.
November 18 - Identify your biggest challenge.
November 19 - Make the first move.
November 20 - Reflect on the relationship between students and faculty members.
November 21 - Examine workload carefully.
November 22 - Discover new sources of administrative insight.
November 23 - Glow with pride.
November 24 - Embrace your greatest frustration.
November 25 - Build a team.
November 26 - Share your story.
November 27 - Clarify responsibilities.
November 28 - Change your environment.
November 29 - Take a chance on someone.
November 30 - Provide context.
December
December 1 - Prepare for the home stretch.
December 2 - Identify an opportunity.
December 3 - Remember that having fun matters.
December 4 - Don’t sell beyond the close.
December 5 - Learn something new about tenure.
December 6 - Embrace uncertainty.
December 7 - Stop being busy.
December 8 - Notice where the shoe pinches.
December 9 - Redouble your efforts.
December 10 - Think like a student.
December 11 - Bookend your day.
December 12 - Consider the law of unintended consequences.
December 13 - Mix it up.
December 14 - Build flexible time into your schedule.
December 15 - Remember that you’re a symbol.
December 16 - Identify your favorite word.
December 17 - Simplify your focus.
December 18 - Support those who support you.
December 19 - Identify your brand.
December 20 - Write an article on academic administration.
December 21 - Explain the system.
December 22 - Associate with someone you admire.
December 23 - Have a meeting standing up.
December 24 - Trust your instincts.
December 25 - Take a day completely off.
December 26 - Make a wish.
December 27 - Count your blessings.
December 28 - Reflect on your achievements.
December 29 - Share credit.
December 30 - Identify the first major task you’d like to tackle in the new year.
December 31 - Consider why students leave.
January
January 1 - Do an anonymous good deed.
January 2 - Create a leadership journal.
January 3 - Thank someone.
January 4 - Document your successes.
January 5 - Stop procrastinating.
January 6 - Listen to an opposing view.
January 7 - Learn something new about assessment.
January 8 - Reread a favorite book.
January 9 - Pay a visit.
January 10 - Discover time puddles.
January 11 - Continue reinventing yourself.
January 12 - Improve one policy.
January 13 - Find a way to say yes to someone.
January 14 - Talk about research.
January 15 - Balance your life.
January 16 - Set your priorities.
January 17 - Let a student gush.
January 18 - Attack your ignorance.
January 19 - Demonstrate good stewardship.
January 20 - Review your institution’s mission statement.
January 21 - Expand your resources.
January 22 - Dare to dream.
January 23 - Focus on your lowest priorities.
January 24 - Get back in touch with someone who made a difference.
January 25 - Share a meal.
January 26 - Release one frustration.
January 27 - Solve a problem.
January 28 - Be distinctive and concise.
January 29 - Set short-term goals.
January 30 - Reach out.
January 31 - Enjoy a sense of accomplishment.
February
February 1 - Plan for spontaneity.
February 2 - Think metaphorically.
February 3 - Praise sincerely.
February 4 - Identify a possible successor.
February 5 - Update your résumé.
February 6 - Return to the classics.
February 7 - Contact the parent of a student.
February 8 - Immerse yourself in history.
February 9 - Assess your job satisfaction.
February 10 - Celebrate someone else’s good news.
February 11 - Study your competitors.
February 12 - Offer encouragement.
February 13 - Review your evaluation.
February 14 - Think about potential donors.
February 15 - Let a faculty member reminisce.
February 16 - Continue your education.
February 17 - Track your use of time.
February 18 - Write yourself a letter of recommendation.
February 19 - Imagine if money were no object.
February 20 - Offer to be someone’s mentor.
February 21 - Apologize to someone.
February 22 - Write a note to a prospective student.
February 23 - Consider the needs of an employee.
February 24 - Manage your workload.
February 25 - Articulate your vision.
February 26 - Review patterns of expenditure.
February 27 - Decide what you would change.
February 28 - Read the job listings.
February 29 - Take advantage of a rare gift.
March
March 1 - Be a philosopher.
March 2 - Think of something outrageous.
March 3 - Reread your institution’s strategic plan.
March 4 - Invite a member of the staff to lunch.
March 5 - Describe a “typical” student.
March 6 - Take a personality test.
March 7 - Analyze trends.
March 8 - Be your own consultant.
March 9 - Envision your dream job.
March 10 - Explore your faculty’s scholarship.
March 11 - Reallocate 5 percent of your budget.
March 12 - Identify your most wasteful practice.
March 13 - Think big. Really big.
March 14 - Develop five new interview questions.
March 15 - Challenge your own leadership style.
March 16 - Recall a poor judgment.
March 17 - Relax. You’ve earned it.
March 18 - Identify a pressure point.
March 19 - Remember good administrative advice.
March 20 - Make your environment more accessible.
March 21 - Review your computer files.
March 22 - Learn something new about strategic planning.
March 23 - Identify a bad habit.
March 24 - Empower others.
March 25 - Find a hot-button issue.
March 26 - Increase opportunities for research.
March 27 - Reflect on your proudest accomplishment.
March 28 - Improve your public presentations.
March 29 - Examine your use of pronouns.
March 30 - Explore a few other best practices in higher education.
March 31 - Finish something.
April
April 1 - Do something foolish.
April 2 - Audit your committees and meetings.
April 3 - Reread your institution’s disaster plan.
April 4 - Reward yourself.
April 5 - Define your purpose.
April 6 - Assess faculty and staff morale.
April 7 - Sort through a stack of papers.
April 8 - Expand your knowledge of higher education law.
April 9 - Build a bridge.
April 10 - Learn a new software application.
April 11 - Overplan your day.
April 12 - Chart your progress.
April 13 - Check a blind spot.
April 14 - Slow down.
April 15 - Explore your insecurities.
April 16 - Remember your favorite professor.
April 17 - Get excited.
April 18 - Identify a significant problem.
April 19 - Think like a pilot.
April 20 - Jot a note to a member of the staff.
April 21 - Chat with a colleague.
April 22 - Outline a plan.
April 23 - Walk through your facilities.
Live in the moment.
April 25 - Remove your mask.
April 26 - Ask someone about his or her vision.
April 27 - Ask, “What if?”
April 28 - Indulge your creative side.
April 29 - Study your students.
April 30 - Identify your Achilles’ heel.
May
May 1 - Start something.
May 2 - Evaluate yourself.
May 3 - Fill a need.
May 4 - Engage in hero worship.
May 5 - Spot an elephant.
May 6 - Listen actively.
May 7 - Share a treasure.
May 8 - Reward others.
May 9 - Reorganize a drawer.
May 10 - Reflect on the law of reciprocity.
May 11 - Use your resources.
May 12 - Describe your coworkers.
May 13 - Become disillusioned.
May 14 - Learn something new about budgeting.
May 15 - Make up for lost time.
May 16 - Audit your organizational structure.
May 17 - Practice concision.
May 18 - Brag about someone.
May 19 - Read about academic leadership.
May 20 - Resist the temptation to be cynical.
May 21 - Be a good public citizen.
May 22 - Define who you are.
May 23 - Pay it forward.
May 24 - Take a calculated risk.
May 25 - Assess your network.
May 26 - Set a clear development goal.
May 27 - Change your inner voice.
May 28 - Learn from the fragments of broken promises.
May 29 - Build outward from individual successes.
May 30 - Reinvent the wheel.
May 31 - Start your own daily guide.
The Author
Index
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFFREY L. BULLER
The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration
The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership
The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career
Classically Romantic: Classical Form and Meaning in Wagner’s Ring
Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buller, Jeffrey L.
Academic leadership day by day : small steps that lead to great success / Jeffrey L. Buller.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-90300-1 (pbk.); 9780470907597 (ebk); 9780470907948 (ebk); 9780470907962 (ebk)
1. Educational leadership—United States. 2. Education, Higher—Effect of technological innovations on—United States. 3. College administrators—United States. I. Title.
LB2341.B742 2010
378.1’01—dc22 2010026650
HB Printing
Preface
Whenever I speak to leaders in higher education, they inevitably ask for ideas about how to handle the heavy workload of their jobs and manage their time better. They’re always interested in learning ways to improve their academic leadership and become more effective; they just don’t know when they’d ever find the time to read a book about academic leadership or to fit new approaches into their already overcrowded days. I have written Academic Leadership Day by Day with precisely this type of administrator in mind. The entries in this short guide have been created for several audiences:
• For academic leaders at all levels, from department chair and program director through chancellor and chief executive officer, I wanted to create an administrative equivalent to all those familiar books with titles like Daily Thoughts for Daily Improvement or An Idea a Day to Streamline Your Life. I must admit that I’m hopelessly addicted to books of this sort. I love the notion of taking a suggestion, boiling it down to its simplest form, and presenting it in a way that makes it useful to even the busiest people in only a few minutes each day.
• For administrators who believe that they need to turn their institutions upside down with continual change and the implementation of one grandiose strategy after another, I’d like to offer a rebuttal. If a school or program is facing a major disaster—economic collapse, severe enrollment decline, a scandal that landed it on the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education, or something similar—then, by all means, go ahead and initiate a radical change, because channeling everyone’s energy into a brand-new initiative is probably necessary. But not every problem is a crisis. As my friend Don Chu likes to say, not every problem is really a problem. For institutions that have been reasonably successful and just want to get better, diverting people’s attention from their core tasks of teaching, scholarship, and service to focus on “strategic visioning,” “repositioning,” and inculcating a culture of continual, significant change is at the very least unnecessary. Even worse, the sense that everything about an institution must be constantly turned upside down can end up being highly destructive. There are plenty of little things that each of us can do to become better administrators, more effectively serve the needs of our stakeholders, increase our own job satisfaction, and improve the overall success of our institutions. In fact, some of the best administrators I’ve known weren’t those who spent their days trying to implement big ideas. They were the ones who got the little details right and realized that small steps lead to great successes. In fact, you might say that the theme of this book is that if you take full advantage of each little moment that comes your way as an academic leader, the big issues will largely take care of themselves. Increasingly I’ve learned that small improvements are the best way to tackle big issues; sometimes they’re the only way. To those who trot out the old objection that you can’t cross a twelve-foot canyon in two six-foot jumps, I’d reply, “Of course. I couldn’t agree with you more. But how many times in your travels have you ever really had to cross a twelve-foot canyon?”
• For readers who regard the typical book about academic administration as an invasive species that has somehow been transplanted from the world of business to the world of higher education, I’d like to provide a resource that’s practical because it relates to what academic leaders really do. The suggestions in this book are all drawn from my own experience as a department chair, dean, and vice president for academic affairs, as well as dozens of workshops that I’ve conducted for university administrators all over the world. I’m certain that every reader will find some of the entries in this book more useful than others, but I’m equally sure that each person’s list of the suggestions that really mattered to him or her will be different. For this reason, I’ve avoided offering ideas that may sound impressive but are ultimately impractical (the bane of most management books) and have tried to fill each day with advice that works.
• For those who know someone who has recently been appointed to an administrative position, this book would be a useful gift. You can include Academic Leadership Day by Day with a card of congratulations (or perhaps a sympathy card) inscribed, “You’re going to need this!” I wish I’d received a book of this sort when my dean told me that I was going to be my department’s next chair—effective immediately. I had no idea what my new job entailed. Every other member of my department was only a year or two from retirement, and I was the youngest member of the faculty. My teaching load at that time included at least four courses every semester, not to mention scholarship I needed to complete if I ever wanted to be considered for promotion and tenure. I simply didn’t have time to read a library of books on academic leadership and decide which of them was useful. A guide that gave me one good idea a day would’ve been perfect, so I’ve finally gotten around to creating one. I hope it finds its way to all brand-new university chairs, not to mention deans, provosts, and presidents.
• For faculty members or academic leaders who hope to attain a higher position in administration within a year or two, I wanted to write a book that would help you prepare for the application process and interviews. You’ll find in these daily entries a year-long coaching session that will help you prepare for the types of questions you’re likely to be asked and for the level of experience you’ll be expected to have. If you follow the suggestions I have outlined in this guide, you’ll be a better administrator at the same time that you amass the sort of expertise in budgetary management, program review, institutional advancement, and other activities that today’s administrators today are expected to master. You can think of this book as your daily administrative horoscope. But rather than offering you only vague suggestions about things that may possibly occur in your personal life, Academic Leadership Day by Day will guide you to small but significant steps toward greater administrative effectiveness. You may already have considered many of these suggestions on your own, and several of the others may strike you as extremely easy, perhaps even somewhat trivial. But in order to keep each day’s activity manageable within the schedule of an active administrator, I’ve focused on the small tasks we know we ought to be doing rather than the extravagant plans we’ll probably never fulfill. My goal is to give you that extra voice of encouragement you’ll sometimes need to take even a slight step toward making a big improvement in your program and perhaps also open the door to an exciting career opportunity in the future.
If you’re bothered by inconsistency, I should warn you now that Academic Leadership Day by Day encourages you to try one approach one day and then a few weeks later to do the precise opposite. For instance, you’ll find advice in these pages to think as positively as you can only a few entries before I recommend that you practice a little self-doubt, instructions about not wasting time building something that others have already perfected only to be told a week or so later to go ahead and reinvent the wheel, encouragement to plan as carefully as you can rubbing shoulders with the advice to focus only on today, and so on. That contradiction is not accidental. No single approach works equally well for every administrator every day with every problem. By taking a few small steps to experiment with different approaches at different times, you’ll end the academic year with an entire toolbox of ideas you can use as new opportunities arise and unanticipated challenges occur. You’ll discover that you’ll come away from this book with a better understanding of which tools work best for you and which don’t fit your personal style or situation. You’ll have a better sense of how to respond to difficult problems that no one ever told you were in your job description.
To switch metaphors for a moment, think of this book as something of an administrative buffet. You don’t have to like every dish that’s offered to you—you actually don’t even have to sample them all—but you can pick and chose among the suggestions I’ve offered in order to find those that suit your taste, institution, and individual needs. There is so much variety in academic life today that some of these entries may not relate at all to what you do. One person may see the entry about sharing a meal with students in the dining hall and think, “What dining hall? We’re an online university,” while another person may think, “Which dining hall? We’ve got more than a dozen campuses.” That sort of question will inevitably arise in a world where colleges and universities vary almost unimaginably in size, mission, delivery platforms, scope, and focus. Feel free, in other words, to pass by ideas that do not relate at all to your situation and to focus on those that you find truly appropriate to your unique position. I hope that by the end of the academic year, you’ll have encountered more of the latter than the former.
Academic years begin on many different dates, and it’s unlikely that yours will start precisely on September 1. But it didn’t feel right to begin in the middle of a month, and there was no way to select the correct date for everyone’s calendar every year anyway. So if the suggestions in this book don’t begin until a week or two after your semester is already under way, consider that my gift to you: a few days of leisure at the start of a busy year. I’ll get even with you anyway by continuing to offer suggestions for several days after graduation next spring. Oh, and one last word of advice: you don’t have to wait until next September 1 to begin using this guide. Simply find today’s date, dive in, and begin improving your program for your faculty, students, staff, and yourself. Have a terrific year!
Jupiter, Florida
Jeffrey L. Buller
August 15, 2010
September
September 1
Take advantage of new beginnings.
We’re privileged in higher education to experience several beginnings each year. The beginning of the academic year brings new possibilities. So does the start of the calendar year. And so does the approach of a new term, though in a less dramatic way. All of these beginnings offer an incredible opportunity: we can let go of what wasn’t successful in the past and rededicate ourselves to the potential of the future. We can be continually enriched by new students, new colleagues, and new ideas. So as the academic year gets under way today, spend a few moments looking for opportunities to take a fresh start at your approach to administration. If you’ve made decisions in the past that didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped, release yourself from their burden. Don’t lose track of the lessons you learned from them, but give yourself permission to let go of the guilt or disappointment that may still be attached to them. Make the year that’s just begun the one in which you start making the sort of difference you’ve always hoped for. Continue today’s reflection until you can identify some specific objective in your professional life that would be exciting to achieve and resolve that this is going to be the year in which you achieve that goal.
September 2
Know your limits.
It’s no secret that there are both things you can control and things that are beyond your control, and it’s a wise person who knows how to tell the difference. Sometimes, however, academic administrators blur the line between the two because they’re so eager to advance an idea that they waste valuable energy trying to transform things that are impervious to change. Like it or not, some people can’t be brought onboard an endeavor no matter how persuasively you speak. Some budgetary situations are so dire that regardless of how painful they may be, major cuts will have to be made. Some potential donors are so committed to the causes they already support that it’s impossible to interest them in a project with a different focus. And despite the best advice you give, there are certain things that you just can’t make people do and certain people you can’t encourage to do anything at all. With these limitations in mind, take a candid look at whatever in your environment or working life is beyond your control. Make a resolution that you’ll let certain things go and stop frustrating yourself by continuing to devote useless energy to something you can’t change. What will result is that you’ll now have much more time, energy, and enthusiasm to spend on projects where you can make a positive difference.
September 3
Read the biography of an exemplary leader.
As a way of contributing to your own professional development, select a biography of a leader you’ve always admired, and start reading it today. The leader you choose doesn’t have to be a figure from higher education. It can be someone who demonstrated great leadership skills in the arts, government, business, the military, nonprofit organizations, religion, humanitarian causes, or any other branch of activity that interests you. As you read the book, try to identify specific values that enabled this leader to be successful and consider ways in which you could demonstrate those values in your own work. Whether we realize it or not, we’re often attracted to heroes and role models who demonstrate the same qualities that others also see in us (although almost certainly at a different level). Be sure to notice, too, ways in which the leader you’re reading about differs from you in some significant way—in the manner in which you would have approached a particular situation or a core principle that you hold dear, for example. The goal, after all, is to be inspired by a great leader’s example, not to try to duplicate everything that he or she achieved or represented.
September 4
Attend a meeting just to listen.
Effective academic leaders learn as much as possible about all the programs, committees, and people they supervise. As a way of growing in knowledge, ask to be invited to a meeting of a department, committee, or task force somewhere within your area of responsibility. Make it clear that your goal isn’t to make a presentation or even to answer questions (unless those questions are particularly germane to the topics on the agenda), but simply to listen to the discussion as it unfolds. By sitting quietly and attending to others as they talk, you’ll gain a better insight into the issues that different committees are grappling with right now—and you’ll learn more about how they address those issues—than you would by reading through volumes of minutes and white papers. Remember, too, that your goal should not be to critique the operation of the committee, but simply to learn how things really work at your institution.
September 5
Review your program’s publications.
Take some time today to gather as many of your area’s publications as you can. Don’t forget that the term publications now includes electronic resources, such as Web sites and podcasts. Go through all of these resources and pretend that you’re seeing them for the first time. Forget that you know anything at all about your institution and its programs so you can take a fresh look at the impression that these materials convey. Is there a consistency of image and message, or do the materials seem to convey conflicting impressions? If you were a potential student, donor, or faculty member, what about the style, content, and theme of these materials would make you eager to become involved in this program? You may come away from this activity with the sense that some of your materials need to be revised or replaced. But today’s activity will be equally successful if you are satisfied with the publications you now have and develop greater appreciation for everyone whose work went into them.
September 6
Reorder your tasks.
When students are having difficulty completing exams successfully, it can be beneficial to review with them the ways they approach questions during a test. Some students do better if they work consistently through an exam from beginning to end; if they try to skip around and do sections out of order, they easily become distracted and forget to complete certain questions. Other students do better by answering the easiest questions first; in this way, they build their confidence and are less likely to run out of time by devoting all of their energy to one or two particularly challenging questions. Still others perform best when they start with the hardest questions; by the end of the test period, their energy or ability to focus may be lapsing, making it harder for them to succeed at complex or challenging problems. In one way or another, all of us are like these students. Sometimes we’re most productive when we work consistently through whatever comes our way. Sometimes we’re more effective when we take on our greatest challenges early in the day when we have more stamina. And sometimes doing a series of easy tasks builds our energy and confidence, making thorny issues less daunting to tackle. With this revelation in mind, experiment today with reordering your tasks. Find out whether one of these approaches is more productive for you than the others and, if so, whether it is always more productive or only when you must deal with certain types of issues.
September 7
Be a coach.
Coaches teach in ways that are different from the methods most instructors use. They hector, cajole, praise, flatter, motivate, intimidate, and challenge. Students often accept a far more scathing critique of their shortcomings from a coach than they would from a professor in one of their courses because of this different relationship. We expect coaches to set almost impossibly high expectations for us and to use whatever strategies they think are necessary to help us reach those expectations. Of course, not everything that a coach does involves badgering team members. Good coaches also convey a can-do attitude and help individuals achieve a higher degree of excellence than they ever thought possible. Coaches reinforce positive values even while they refuse to accept excuses or self-pity when things aren’t going well. Today, consider how you might bring some of these coaching strategies to your responsibilities as an administrator. Who on your faculty and staff could benefit from some excellent coaching, not just to make the program better but to make that person better and more successful at what he or she does?
September 8
Waste time.
The title of today’s suggestion is, I must admit, intentionally misleading. Today’s goal really isn’t to waste time itself, but to become more aware of the ways in which you waste time. All of us have habits or practices that aren’t as efficient as we might like them to be. Perhaps we hold on to responsibilities that could more productively be delegated to others. We may proofread our e-mails two or three times for minor typos when the recipient is unlikely to care about an occasional insignificant mistake. Or we may agonize over the phrasing of a memo that could have been written in next to no time if we had asked an administrative assistant to prepare an initial draft that we then polished and adapted to our own style. It’s possible, too, that we may waste time working with a committee for months to develop a new policy or outline a new procedure that isn’t measurably different from what we could have found already in place at dozens of other colleges and universities if we had performed a quick Internet search. Make it your goal today to be conscious of how you spend your time from moment to moment. Try to identify at least three to five practices that aren’t your most productive uses of time. What could you accomplish for the benefit of your program if you hadn’t wasted time on these inefficient activities but instead had directed your energy toward goals that made a more significant difference to your students and faculty members?
September 9
Learn from a bad decision.
Not all of our administrative decisions end up being successful. There are always opportunities that we missed, mistakes that we made, or choices that we later came to regret. Spend a few minutes today identifying and reflecting on a truly bad professional decision. Engage in this exercise not to wallow in blame or attempt to rewrite history, but to learn something important from your error. Had you neglected to use important information that was available to you? Were you overly hasty or confident? Did you rely excessively on the advice of others? Use this reflection as a means of becoming a better administrator. Try to identify at least one thing you’ll resolve to do differently in the future in order to avoid adding to the list of decisions you later regret.
September 10
Reflect on respect.
Spend a few moments today considering how much respect other people seem to give you in your position and how much respect you believe you are giving others. Most administrators discover that the amount of trust they receive is almost directly proportionate to the amount they give the people around them. Sometimes academic leaders balk at this idea and say, in effect, “Presidents, deans, and professors shouldn’t be the ones deferring to students. Respect has to be earned, and, like it or not, it can move in only one direction at a college or university.” In some ways, that observation may be true. But respect isn’t the same as obsequiousness. Respect is the way in which we demonstrate that other people have value, even if that value arises only from their potential. The president who doesn’t show consideration for deans, the dean who disrespects faculty members, and the professor who is dismissive of students undermines his or her own authority. Evaluate yourself candidly today on the level of respect you’re demonstrating to others. Then consider whether there seems to be any correlation between the amount of respect you show your colleagues and the amount you’re shown in return.
September 11
Provide an outlet for dissent.
Colleges and universities thrive on dissent. Students are regularly being challenged to examine accepted truths critically and to regard no answer as final. Professors spend years perfecting the art of examining the ideas of others, seeking contradictions or other types of logical flaws, and developing new perspectives. It’s only inevitable that these practices will spill over from the study of an academic discipline to an examination of policies, procedures, and decisions that are made throughout higher education itself. For this reason, no matter how congenial your institution may be or how accomplished you have become as an academic leader, you are likely to encounter frequent, vigorous dissent. And that’s a good thing. Dissent helps administrators keep their perspectives sharp and prevents institutions from falling into groupthink. Learning about opposing views before a final decision is announced can even help us avoid mistakes or ill-considered actions. So devote a few minutes today to considering a new venue where people will be safe when they engage in constructive dissent. You could set aside a certain number of office hours every week or two when anyone who wishes can feel free to voice to you, without fear of retribution or condemnation, any view he or she wishes. You could establish an online threaded discussion where comments, suggestions, and opposing opinions can be expressed anonymously. You could survey your faculty, staff, and students to gain a better sense of their priorities. Each campus and each unit is likely to have its own preferred method for voicing dissent. But whatever it is, there are powerful and important voices out there that, one way or another, you need to hear.
