33,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Drawing on research from the fields of neuroscience, faculty development, work productivity, positive psychology, and resilience, The Peak Performing Professor is filled with techniques, strategies, and practical tools for managing the complexities of academic life while maximizing professional potential. This much-needed resource reveals the four skill sets (PACE) that enhance peak performance and shows faculty step-by-step how to: * Power their work and lives with purpose and meaning. * Align all of their activities with that purpose. * Connect with mutually helpful colleagues and intimates. * Energize themselves to thrive in this interesting and engaging career. To help develop these essential skills, the book contains exercises that can help faculty hone their abilities to anchor their work, roles, and use of time in their most deeply held values; to integrate their personal and professional lives into a seamless whole; to experience more work-life balance; and, ultimately, to create a legacy of a life well-lived. Administrators will also find the book a useful tool for guiding their faculty to produce, stay engaged, and experience job satisfaction. "The first time I saw Susan present her Pyramid of Power model, I knew I needed to learn more. This book provides both the ideas and the practical advice that can help faculty and faculty developers make our lives more effective and more livable." --L. Dee Fink, author of Creating Significant Learning Experiences "An amazing book--essential reading for every faculty member. The integration of sound scholarship and practical advice is extraordinary. This book will power faculty workshops and faculty lives!" --Barbara Walvoord, professor emerita, University of Notre Dame; author of Effective Grading
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 549
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Ähnliche
Contents
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: Practices of Peak Performing Professors
Why You Don’t Need Time Management
What You Need Instead: Life Management
Great Work, Great Life
Your Peak Performances
How Productive and Happy Are You?
Part 1: Power Your Work and Your Life with Purpose
Chapter 2: Your Ideal Life
Articulate Your Internal Agenda
Envision Your Ideal Life
Anchor Your Ideal Life to Your Pyramid of Power
Work from Purpose
Chapter 3: Your Purpose
Paths to Purpose
Evaluate Your Purpose Statement
Chapter 4: Your Mission
Start with Strengths
Explore Your Values
Identify Your Audience
Write Your Mission Statement
Frequently Asked Questions
Chapter 5: Your Vision and Goals
How to Write Your Vision and Goals
Chapter 6: The Dream Book
Dream Globally, Live Locally
Constructing Your Dream Book
From Global Dreams to Local Lives
Use the Dream Book for Any Project
Work Your System: Some Reminders
Alignment Anxiety
Part 2: Align Your Life with Your Power
Chapter 7: Establish Priorities
Passion
Vision
Mission
Chapter 8: Align Projects with Priorities
Which Projects Further Your Visions?
Plan the Goals Within a Project
Anchor Your Projects with a Time-Focused Theme
Live Your Double Life—Temporarily
Relate Your Ancillary Goals to Your Top Priorities
Chapter 9: Organize Projects
Project Management: Planning
Project Management: Keep Track of It All
Chapter 10: Align Resources
Align Supportive People with Your Goals
Align Your Energy with Your Goals
Align Your Attention with Your Goals
Align Your Space with Your Goals
Chapter 11: Align Your Work Habits for Success
Work from Strength
Connect Your Daily Goals with Your Vision
Adopt a Growth Mind-set
Set Standards and Benchmarks
Instill Structures and Rituals
Increase Your Perception of Abundance
Celebrate Success
Part 3: Connect with Mutually Supportive People
Chapter 12: Engage Others: Meeting and Greeting
Form a Quick Impression of the Other
Make a Good First Impression
Making Connections
Chapter 13: Collaborate for Mutual Benefit
Manage Networking Information
Expand Your Network Related to Your Goals
Make Further Contact to Continue Conversations
Form Bonds and Alliances Around Common Goals
Create Productive and Satisfying Relationships
Chapter 14: Negotiate Mutual Needs: Solve Problems and Manage Conflict
Steps for Meeting Mutual Needs
Manage Emotions in Relationships
Part 4: Energize Yourself for a Long and Happy career and life
Chapter 15: Wellness
Healthy Eating
Exercise
Rest and Restoration
Chapter 16: Well-Being
What Is Happiness and Well-Being?
Happiness and the Life and Work of the Professor
Paths to Happiness
Part 5: PACE Your Roles and Responsibilities
Chapter 17: The Professor
Chapter 18: The Teacher
Teaching Strategies
Quick Steps to Effective Course Design
Create a Lively Learning Atmosphere
Make Assessment Work for You
Apply Effective Work Habits
Study and Share Innovative Teaching Methods
Advise Students Effectively
Chapter 19: The Scholar
The Difficult Transition from Graduate Student to Scholar
Think “Body of Work,” Not Publications
Writing Work Habits
Chapter 20: The Servant Leader
Leverage Your Service for the Greatest Benefit
Get the Most from Your Service Positions
The Satisfaction of Service
Chapter 21: Life Roles
Your Role as Householder
Friendship and Family Roles
Your Partner Role
Your Role as Parent
Epilogue
References
Appendix
Index
Cover design by Michael Cook
Cover image : ©lightpix/iStockphoto
Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Brand
One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—www.josseybass.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robison, Susan, 1945–
The peak performing professor : a practical guide to productivity and happiness / Susan Robison. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-10514-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-41886-4 (ebk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-41621-1 (ebk)
1. College teaching. 2. College teachers. I. Title.
LB2331.R54 2013
378.1′—dc23
2013022220
About the Author
Susan Robison, Ph.D., is a psychologist, author, coach, counselor, and consultant. A former academic department chair and professor of psychology at the Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU), Susan is the author of two leadership books (Discovering Our Gifts and Sharing Our Gifts published by the National Council of Catholic Women) which formed the basis of a leadership development series for a national women’s organization held at various sites throughout the U.S. and Europe for twelve years, training over 3,000 participants for leadership positions.
Susan was part of the consortium team that coauthored a faculty development book (Thinking and Writing in College published by the National Council of Teachers of English) with Barbara Walvoord and Lucille McCarthy which led to numerous articles on research and to invitations to conduct faculty development workshops in writing-across-the-curriculum pedagogy at colleges around the country.
Susan received a B.S. in psychology in the natural sciences from Loyola University (Chicago), and a M.S. and Ph. D. in general experimental psychology from Ohio University. At her first teaching job at a branch campus of Ohio University in Lancaster (OU-L), she was the only psychology professor on the faculty and in her second job at NDMU, she taught all of the undergraduate psychology curriculum except for abnormal and psychometrics. Susan has been particularly known for her curriculum innovation. While at OU-L, she designed what might have been the first psychology of women course in the country and at NDMU designed the first human sexuality course in an undergraduate institution in the Baltimore-Washington area. In her later teaching days, Susan taught graduate leadership courses in the graduate program in nonprofit leadership and development at NDMU and consulted to national nonprofit leadership teams. She has been honored to work with a number of National Science Foundation Advance programs at various universities, a privilege to give back to the agency from which she received funding both during graduate school through an NSF traineeship and as a young faculty member through a NSF Research Grant.
After achieving tenure and the rank of full-professor, Susan broadened her education in the scientific part of psychology by training in counseling through a one-year post-doc in cognitive-behavior therapy sponsored by the Maryland Psychological Educational Foundation followed by several years of individual counseling supervision. She and her husband opened a counseling private practice where Susan still works part-time today. She is a well-known community speaker to church, civic, and business groups in the Baltimore area on diverse topics such as marriage, parenting, and time and stress management. Her consulting work with women executives and business owners led to her receiving a prestigious business woman’s award, the Mandy Goetze Award in 2004 and being selected in 2007 as one of the top 100 minority and women owned businesses in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
Currently, Susan divides her time between her local counseling practice and her faculty development consultation business, providing faculty development workshops and consultations on college campuses and at higher education conferences to professors who want to work productively and live happily.
Acknowledgments
Many people have contributed to the creation of this work. I am grateful for the:
Dedicated to my daughter, Christine Robison Gray, and her generation of professors that they might have productive careers and happy lives.
Introduction
PACE Yourself for Productivity and Happiness
Purpose and laughter are the twins that must not separate. Each is empty without the other.
—Robert K. Greenleaf
TO OUTSIDE OBSERVERS, a career in the professoriate may look like a pretty cushy job. People think all you have to do is show up for class 15 hours a week, give some tests, do a little grading, maybe write some stuff. You get a long winter holiday to spend with your kids, and you have summers off. What could be stressful about a job like that?
What isn’t obvious to outside observers is the set of performance demands imposed by the tripartite job of the professor. Like a triple-threat actor, who sings, dances, and acts, many professors also perform three very different professional activities—teaching, writing, and serving—each of which could itself be a full-time occupation. You have to do all three jobs—and well. No wonder you can feel distracted and pulled in many directions.
Peak Performing Professors
The professoriate has never been an easy career, and it is not getting any easier. Part of the challenge is historical: the vocation was designed for celibate male monks in the Middle Ages. If this history seems new to you, ask yourself what you wore to the last graduation ceremony you attended. Our cap-and-gown dress is reminiscent of the monk robes worn by those early professors, even though the professoriate gradually evolved into also being a calling for celibate men who were not monks, then for married men, and then for single women. Only recently have married women, dual-career professors, and two-professor couples aspired to combine the demands of the professoriate with the demands of family life. It is no wonder that attempting to have a personal life while at the same time working at a career designed as penance for celibate monks presents a near-impossible challenge (Pannapacker, 2012).
In addition to that legacy, changes in definitions of faculty work that are related to national economic trends are adding to current faculty stress (Gappa, Austin, & Trice, 2007) and are contributing to what Lee, Bach, and Muthiah (2012) call “the malaise of the academy” (p. 69). Increased workloads result from both changing student enrollments and fewer teachers teaching more courses. Major institutions are experiencing a downturn in enrollment at the same time as many urban and community colleges are experiencing an increased enrollment of adult students. The trends listed here illustrate the stressors affecting the professoriate today.
More online or blended courses:
Mastering the technology to manage these courses can entail a considerable learning curve for faculty while increasing demands for staff support time from overloaded technology support services.
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses):
These free online courses sold to universities as a substitute for courses taught by local faculty are scaring faculty, deans, provosts, and university boards alike worried about the quality of degrees and the future of brick-and-mortar higher education.
Budget cuts affecting pay, benefits, programming, equipment, and staffing:
Faculty experiencing e-mail and website breakdowns may find fewer technology wizards on campus to rush to their rescue.
Loss of perceived job security
through decline or elimination of tenured and full-time positions on many campuses.
Increased expectations
from accrediting agencies that the outcomes of higher education be quantified.
Increased pressures for faculty scholarship funding
, coupled with increased competition for limited grant money, which makes those pressures unrealistic.
Demanding students
and their helicopter parents.
These trends repeat the theme of doing more with less and underscore the toll that career demands take on faculty, their health, and their social networks (Astin, Astin, & Lindholm, 2011).
If you are challenged by the tripartite job description and the increased pressures listed here, you are not alone. Only 22% of professors report that they are simultaneously performing all three professorial roles well (Fairweather, 2002). That statistic means that at any one time, 78% of professors are struggling with one or more of their roles or with the demanding combination of all three. Add to those demands the fact that graduate education usually emphasizes the preparation of future scholars with little if any preparation for students’ future teaching and service roles.
Professors who do not hold the tripartite job description but have mainly teaching or research positions experience proportionally increased job demands in the roles that they do occupy. For example, the job description of a community college professor often requires teaching six courses a semester with many service obligations such as advising large groups of students. Similarly, professors with primarily research positions are under constant pressure to submit successful grant proposals to support equipment, graduate students, and their own salaries.
Although changes in higher education have increased pressures on faculty, studies have long found that the biggest stressors for faculty may come from within themselves (Gmelch, Lovrich, & Wilke, 1984). A more recent study by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 confirmed that conclusion. The three biggest stressors faculty reported—namely, self-imposed high expectations, lack of personal time, and difficulty managing household responsibilities—are self-inflicted (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009). These stressors are caused either by professors’ unrealistic perceptions or by their limited ability to set and carry out goals. To paraphrase the words of Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” When faculty project their frustration onto their institutions, the downside is that the process causes independent faculty to relinquish control for their stress. A more hopeful mind-set for autonomous faculty is to approach stress reduction by increasing skills in self-regulation. Readers will not need to implement all of the practices found in this book to do so. Even small changes can make big differences.
When I do workshops on work-life balance and time management at higher education conferences and on college and university campuses, I hear three kinds of concerns.
Time management and work-life balance
How do I balance all the responsibilities of teaching, writing, and serving?
How do I streamline my class preparation and grading time and still promote significant student learning?
How do I get unstuck on my research projects so that I can respond to editorial comments on articles to “rewrite and resubmit” and so that I can direct projects from concept to completion in a more timely fashion?
Work habits
How do I set priorities and keep track of all of my tasks so that I don’t forget deadlines and details for my tasks, whether they are urgent, short term, or long term and whether they are driven by my own agenda or other people’s?
How can I cut down on distractions and get to work?
How do I stay focused on work or personal goals and prevent stress crossover, in which I worry about home at work and work at home?
How do I stop myself from falling further and further behind?
How can I manage my productivity so that I can feel good about my workdays?
Requests and demands
Can I achieve what I want and what my institution wants of me and still have a life?
How do I decide about requests for my time? How do I say “No” without upsetting people?
How can I work well with colleagues toward mutually beneficial goals so as to not waste their or my time?
What can I say to people who want to gossip, complain, and interrupt me with their social trivia?
With so much to do and so little time to do it, the professor’s job seems at times to consist of an unending series of performances badly done, half-done, or left undone. Even when done well, those performances sometimes don’t seem to be appreciated either for the effort involved or for the results obtained.
As I visit campuses around the United States, what professors tell me is that they want to live well while they do the good they do in their jobs, caring about students, knowledge, and their institutions. However, concerns about unfair workloads, mistreatment by “them” (students and administrators), poor pay, underprepared students, vague tenure requirements, and overloaded e-mail in-boxes can so preoccupy professors that they engage in less-than-healthy coping strategies, such as meeting in the lunchroom to engage in that favorite faculty diversion, the “ain’t it awful” complaint session. These faculty sufferers seem to agree with Saint Alphonsa Muttathupandathu, a mystic of the early 20th century, who said, “A day without suffering is a day lost.”
If you are searching for a more optimistic mind-set but wonder whether you are deluded in the hope that you might ever experience work-life balance, please be reassured that it is possible to combine a well-done job as a professor with a satisfying personal life. The purpose of this book is not to solve the institutional problems touched on here; that would be the goal of a different book, one that I hope colleagues with institutional experience and perspectives will write. The purpose of this book is to give readers the tools to increase their own productivity and satisfaction in areas over which they have control—namely, how they manage the challenges of their professional and personal lives.
One activity that won’t help you work better or live more happily is participating in those gripe sessions with fellow faculty-lounge sufferers, even though sharing such complaints might give you a bit of short-term validation about how tough life is. The need for you as a professor to approach your job with intention and skill has grown more urgent. To ignore that need is to risk being swept away by the job’s demands into an unhappy and dysfunctional state at a time when you are increasingly held accountable for your time and tasks.
What will help is taking action to better your life by working more intentionally, streamlining your work habits, improving your relationships, and taking good care of yourself. The key difficulty we as faculty face in using these strategies is the battle within ourselves. We approach our careers like children at a well-supplied buffet, so hungry that we heap too much on our plates and then are unable to eat it all. We worry about how to get it all done. We want to produce scholarly work, but class time looms on the clock and we must prepare. Just as we get moving on some writing, it is time to stop and visit Mom. The internal conflicts of all our goals present the biggest challenge to our ability to self-regulate. Because our careers are so rich in possibilities, we will always be challenged by having too many goals, a condition that can paralyze a person so much that few goals are accomplished (Baumeister & Tierney, 2011).
The antidote to rumination and paralysis is a system for selecting key, high-yield goals and focusing on them in the moment. The ability to select key goals is called willpower: deciding what is worthy of your time and attention. The ability to focus on these goals is way power: the know-how to get specific tasks done quickly and effectively. The early parts of this book (Parts 1 and 2) will lay out the practices of peak performing professors who exhibit good habits of willpower and way power. As you will see later in this book, both willpower and way power need support—the support of helpful others and the support of your own wellness and well-being practices to be successful (Parts 3 and 4). These practices can be summarized by the acronym PACE, which will help you remember key practices of all peak performers:
P
ower your work and life through purpose.
A
lign all of your activities with that purpose.
C
onnect with people who support your purpose.
E
nergize yourself to thrive in this interesting and engaging career.
The last part of the book will apply the practices outlined here to the specific professional and personal roles and responsibilities of the professoriate (Part 5).
Who Are the Peak Performers?
While stressed-out faculty loungers are depressing themselves over reheated mac and cheese, other faculty are working productively and enjoying life. These peak performing professors are not an elite group of Nobel Prize winners. They have the same degrees, disciplines, and teaching loads as their colleagues who are struggling to meet the job’s endless deadlines. Peak performing professors, however, are characterized by two qualities: their long-term happiness about their work and lives and the quality of their performances in each of their professional roles. This combination results in teaching that leads to learning while using a minimum of focused preparation, scholarship that earns the respect of their colleagues and builds a body of work instead of merely a series of publications, and service that infuses their institutions with wisdom and leadership. In short, peak performance is about what professors do and how they feel.
These professors aim to do competent, even creative work, year after year, while at the same time creating satisfying lives. Their careers and lives demonstrate that those goals are not mutually exclusive. I am intrigued whenever I meet these professors at conferences and campuses, marveling at how these faculty manage all that they do while many of their colleagues struggle so painfully with the demands of the profession.
It may seem paradoxical and even unfair that the professors who work at having a life in addition to working on their careers often do better with both. These professors get awards for teaching and research, receive promotions on the first try, and are honored for their service to their institution and their professions. They are not professors with a solitary focus, for while they achieve at work they also seem to have time for other pursuits. They play oboe in the community orchestra. Their kids are eating quiche in the dining room instead of gobbling pizza in front of the TV. They and their spouses are reading the Great Books aloud to each other in front of the fireplace while many of their colleagues can’t seem to find time to check in with their mates about car pool schedules.
These peak performing professors are not perfect people. They have their bad days and semesters just like all of us. However, peak performing professors spend the majority of their time and energy in interesting work and enjoyable personal time. Rest assured, you can join those productive, happy faculty by adopting similar practices of working intentionally from a sense of meaning and purpose. Like many of my readers, I too struggled as a young professor to do a good job at work while balancing the rest of my life. A few years into my second academic job, I hit a wall of frustration. I was shocked because on paper, I had everything I needed and wanted: a job at a nice college compatible with my values, a great husband, a house in the suburbs, and a wonderful baby. Why wasn’t I happy? Was I ever going to feel less overwhelmed?
As a psychologist trained in research I looked for answers in the psychological literature. There weren’t any. The psychological research literature presented nothing at that time that could help an overwhelmed assistant professor become happier and more productive. I did find some helpful information in business books on time management (Bliss, 1978; Lakein, 1973). Although I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the results, those first-generation (“Generation I,” or “Gen I”) time management programs helped me piece together a way of working and living that would prove to be more satisfying and productive than what I had been doing. I learned to ask myself periodically during the day, “Is this activity the best use of my time right now?” (Lakein, 1973), and “Am I spending my time on important activities such as preparing for class or merely on urgent ones that are less important such as visits from textbook sales reps?” (Bliss, 1978).
Then a chance occurrence prompted me to experience a paradigm shift toward a new way of thinking about time management. One steamy Baltimore July afternoon, I decided to keep cool by cleaning out my basement. While going through some childhood mementos, I discovered a little notebook from the first retreat I attended back in seventh grade. It contained notes about my purpose in life that, although written in childish and overly flowery language, reminded me that even at that age I already knew that my life purpose involved education and service.
As I challenged myself to write a more current purpose statement, I realized that I didn’t have to do everything right to be successful as a professor. What I needed to learn was what you will learn in this book: how to use a purpose statement to figure out the right things to do, how to do those things quickly with sufficient quality, how to connect to the right social support for my work and life, and how to energize myself with adequate self-care practices to continue to do these things for many years without burning out.
With a simple criterion for evaluating how to spend my time, anything I did that fit the purpose statement was a good use of my time, and anything that didn’t probably was a waste of my time. Those insights helped me reorder my relationship with time. We became good friends and have remained so ever since. I shifted from the advice of the Gen I time management books and workshops to a different understanding of time management, what I am calling second-generation time mangement, “Gen II”: the understanding that managing one’s time is really about managing one’s life by connecting all one’s activities to a sense of purpose. I learned that the same units of time could produce frustration or rewards, depending on whether my activities were related to my purpose. Since that time in the mid-1970s, other consultant-writers have also created systems based on living from purpose (Covey, 2004; Warren, 2012).
In a sense, this present work found me. When my Gen II practices helped me earn rank and tenure and opened scholarly and service opportunities that added to the quality of my work life, other faculty observed that I seemed to “have it all together” and asked for my advice. The truth was that I didn’t have it entirely together, and you don’t have to have it all together either; but I did find that the practices that had helped me become more productive and happy were also useful for other professors.
I have continued to develop the peak performing professor model by listening to faculty concerns and questions and by incorporating research on peak performance from seemingly disparate fields into a model that is simple, easy to understand, and doable. Here is a sample of some of the lessons developed in the last ten years in this seemingly unconnected literature.
Business productivity research
: Peak performance work habits for time and project management predict employee engagement (Harter, Schmidt, & Keyes, 2002). Peak performers successfully set goals and sustain energy (Goldsmith, 2009; Gollwitzer & Oettingen, 2011; Halvorson, 2011; Hays & Brown, 2004; Loehr & Schwartz, 2004).
Happiness, well-being, wellness, and positive psychology research
: Peak performers live longer and better and work more easily (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008; Frederickson, 2009; Lyubomirsky, 2008; Seligman, 2002).
Sports psychology research
: Peak performers in seemingly different fields such as sports, music, the military, and the martial arts produce consistent achievement without burnout by focusing on deliberate practice and mastery (Brown, 2011; Ericsson, 2009; Garfield & Bennett, 1984; Leonard, 1992; Loehr, 1991, 1997; Loehr & Evert, 1995).
Neuroscience and social intelligence research
: Peak performers make the most of brain processes for fast, effective thinking and for effective connections with helpful colleagues (Amen, 2006; Arden, 2009; Davidson & Begley, 2012; Goleman, 2006; Medina, 2008).
Faculty development research
: There are predictable best practices for aspects of the tripartite faculty roles in teaching (Bain, 2004; Fink, 2013; Walvoord, 2008; Walvoord & Anderson, 2010), research and writing (Boice, 1990, 2000; Gray, 2010), and serving in the academy (Kouzes & Posner, 2003).
Running through these bodies of knowledge is a consistent thread about how people feel when they are at their best. Call it flow or optimal experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008), personal best (Kouzes & Posner, 2012), ideal performance state (Loehr, 1991), full engagement living (Loehr & Schwartz, 2004), expert and exceptional performance (Ericsson & Smith, 1991), or “the zone” (Lardon & Leadbetter, 2008; Young & Pain, 1999), there is a state that when experienced brings out the best in people. That state seems to be created when purpose and skills combine with challenge to produce the magic of the peak performance zone, that place where one’s labor is rewarding, engaging, and productive.
I knew this switch from time management to life management was bearing fruit when a doctor at a workshop for medical school faculty came up to me during the break, grabbed my hand, and with tears in her eyes said, “This workshop is exactly what I needed. None of the half dozen time management workshops I have attended have spoken to my specific needs as a faculty member. What is different in your model is that it goes beyond time management to help me integrate my sense of meaning and purpose into my work and my life as a professor. I hope you will put these practices into a workbook for other faculty.”
The result of that conversation is this volume, a faculty development book that goes beyond presenting a set of tips on time management to helping readers create a life management system to weave their professional and personal roles into a seamless garment of productivity and satisfaction. To be a peak performing professor, you don’t have to be a star who wins awards; you just need to perform at a level closer to your own individual peak performance zone by clarifying your goals and implementing them. Applying the practices of this book will move you beyond the immediate concerns of what to do during the next workday to high-yield activities that lead to both long-term success and to a legacy of work well done and a life well lived.
Who Will Benefit from This Book
This book is for the professors whom I have met at my workshops, who want great work and a great life. Although some of them are feeling overwhelmed, disorganized, and unproductive, others are doing fairly well but want to produce more for their efforts. Some, including faculty development directors, directors of teaching and learning centers, and deans and vice provosts or presidents of faculty, have even discovered and applied many of their own best practices during their careers and are now interested in helping their students and colleagues live better lives. These academics recognize that faculty with low engagement cost their institutions both directly, through lower productivity and increased health care expense for stress-related disorders, and indirectly, through hiring costs entailed when faculty leave after failing to meet tenure requirements.
How to Get the Most from This Book
While this book has a scholarly basis, it is primarily a workbook with short didactic lessons on the practices of the peak performing professor. Instead of presenting a whole new technology for you to master, this book codifies and improves on activities that you already do, such as designing courses, preparing for classes, and making to-do lists. With better practices in place, you are likely to perceive that you have more time, both because you have more joy in your workdays and because you are working more effectively, leaving you with more discretionary time to use as you wish.
This journey to a better life is individualized and does require that you expend a bit of time and effort to develop and maintain important habits; however, let me reassure readers who are worried that the practices in this book will make them feel guilty about yet another list of “shoulds.” I know that most readers are not starting from scratch. As a professor you already know some key lessons about learning that can reassure you that it is a process, not a state.
Learning takes place when the brain changes (Zull, 2002). Those changes are not instantaneous but rather happen in stages (Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, & Norman, 2010; Duhigg, 2012; Ericsson, 2009; Robison, 2010). When it comes to brain neurons, what fires together, wires together (Hanson & Mendius, 2009). True mastery of a complex skill may take as much as 10,000 hours of practice (Ericsson, 2009).
Active learning leads to more change than mere reading does (Bonwell & Eison, 1991).
A growth mind-set (a belief that with instruction, feedback, and practice, knowledge and new habits can be acquired) trumps a fixed mind-set (the presumption that people are born about as smart as they are ever going to be and are limited in how much they can change [Dweck, 2008]).
The steps for learning practices that can help you replicate your personal best consistently and that result in continual improvement include the following:
Since I don’t know where you are in the process of learning good professorial work habits, I will lay out the life management system from the beginning. Most readers will benefit from reading and doing the assessment in Chapter 1 and the exercises contained in Parts 1 and 2, which are foundational to setting up your system. With that foundation in place, you can individualize your tool kit with the practices in Parts 3 through 5 that address your current, most pressing needs, such as improving collegial relationships, engaging in better self-care, and applying these practices to professorial roles and responsibilities at work and at home.
You may already have systems that work well for you and just need to tweak them to perform at your peak more of the time, or you may be struggling to figure out how to live the life of a professor. Either way, this book can help you tesser quickly to a new experience of productivity and happiness. In case you missed reading Madeleine L’Engle’s best-selling children’s science fiction novel, A Wrinkle in Time, to tesser is to travel through a portal in the time-space continuum, like a space warp or wormhole. Imagine that a car is traveling down a road when suddenly the road surface folds, as though a giant is folding a map, and the car continues seamlessly along the road, skipping all of the mileage in the middle of the trip. With tessering, someone can travel instantly from one place to another without traversing the real-time pathway of the trip. I hope that the techniques in this book will allow you to tesser to your peak performance zone, skipping some of the mileage and mistakes that I went through in my journey from being a stressed-out young professor. What you have in your hands is the book that I wish I had had back then.
Chapter 1
Practices of Peak Performing Professors
If you want to change the world, whom do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.
—Aleksandr Solzhehnitsyn
“BOY, DO I need you,” said the slightly disheveled, out-of-breath woman as she flopped into one of the last remaining seats near the front of the hotel ballroom where my workshop on peak performing professors was about to begin. Her lopsided name tag identified her as Mary, and she looked as if both her alarm clock and her hairbrush had failed her this morning. She continued, talking more to the air than to me: “I’m a mess. I can’t seem to figure out what to do, when to do it, and for whom to do it.” As if the “for whom” didn’t give her away as a professor of English, my guess was confirmed when she took the Peak Performance Assessment Tool (see the exercise later in this chapter) and distracted herself by correcting my word choice and punctuation.
Later that afternoon, during the coaching session that the conference organizers had arranged, I met with Mary, who expressed concerns similar to those of other faculty discussed in the Introduction to this book. After her download, she exclaimed, “Wow, I’m even more of a mess than I thought! I really need your help in managing my time better.” I reassured her, as I am reassuring you, that things might not be as bad as they seem. Many faculty are just a few tweaks away from living their ideal lives. Because these professors are so close to their own situations, however, they just can’t see what those key changes are—or they would have already made those tweaks. What many professors think they need to resolve their confusion is better time management. As it turns out, they are misguided in their quest.
Why You Don’t Need Time Management
The effort to manage time so that you can get more done is misguided for three reasons. First, time can’t be tamed. We can’t actually manage, save, or borrow time. The ideas that we can “find time,” “make time,” “save time,” and “lose time” are not helpful concepts because time exists only as a mental construct, one that varies independently of anything you do to control it. Humans confuse their devices, such as calendars and clocks invented to measure the movement of the moon, sun, stars, planets, and seasonal changes, with the grandiose notion that we actually manage those celestial occurrences.
Instead, every Sunday night at midnight the magic reset button is pushed, and you get a new supply of 168 hours for the new week. You don’t control getting those 10,080 brand new minutes, but you can use them any way you wish. While you are thinking about this precious gift, one minute has passed and you have only 10,079 minutes left in the week. The key question is what to do with all that time that is given to you free of charge each week. Each decade Americans gain more “free time” but perceive they have less (Robinson & Godbey, 1997), because they fail to make conscious choices about how to best use that time. No wonder we panic and think time is running out (Pillemer, 2011).
Second, the goal of trying to manage time is likely to leave us feeling discouraged and inadequate. The reason is that while we are fooling ourselves that we can control time, we are not focusing on what we can control, namely, our actions—actions that can lead to high-impact work and great lives.
Third, Gen I time management techniques were developed to help office workers sitting at desks manage pieces of paper—not to help professors. Tips such as “handle each piece of paper only once” probably work well for office workers at desks. Such techniques, however, don’t help you manage the many responsibilities of your tripartite job description, a job that takes place in the classroom, lab, clinic, and meeting room as well as at your desk and that requires you to handle ideas and relationships in addition to pieces of paper.
Faculty want more time to get all of that work done. While it is logical to look to time management to help with that quest, the key to your “getting more time” into each day, week, and year is to change your perceptions about time by bringing your choices about how you use time under more conscious control. What we need instead of time management is life management, a set of practices that help us manage the entirety of our lives and especially the precious resources of our energy, attention, and relationships.
What You Need Instead: Life Management
Life management requires you to answer some important questions. You want more time—but time for what? What do you want to accomplish in your work and in your life? How do you wish to live? Your answers form the foundation of a system that will connect all your activities and goals to a deep sense of purpose and that will lead to what most professors long for, a more authentic sense of vital work and a vital life (Lee, Bach, & Muthiah, 2012). As a natural result of being connected with your purpose, you will find it easier to connect your countless tasks with the time available to do them.
Every day you make hundreds of decisions about how to spend your time and what tasks to do:
Should I start writing this article or finish the other one?
How long should I prepare for class? How will I know when I’m done?
Should I chair that committee I’ve been asked to chair?
What do I want to do on my next sabbatical?
When should I leave work?
What work shall I do tonight after dinner?
Even though we autonomy-loving professors want to feel free and in control of our destiny, making hundreds of decisions a day about how to use our time can wear us down. Research on the effect of choices on satisfaction highlights an interesting paradox: too many choices, beyond eight options at a time, can paralyze us from making a decision (Iyengar, 2010; Schwartz, 2004). Furthermore, making many different decisions a day about what to do, when, and how can lead to what Roy Baumeister and his associates have called “ego depletion,” the experience of fatigue and overwhelm caused by using the brain to make those micro decisions all day (Baumeister & Tierney, 2011).
Ego depletion is caused by a chemical phenomenon in the brain. Doing things by sheer willpower and effort can deplete the glucose supply to the brain, causing the fatigue of ego depletion, in which people can no longer push themselves to act disciplined even if they value such actions. Baumeister and Tierney (2011) suggest that this factor can lead to less ability to match our decisions to our true values and therefore to poorer performance on our jobs. You know this effect when you get paralyzed about what to do in the 15 minutes between the end of class and the start of your next meeting. You also know it when you have controlled your diet all day only to succumb to the temptation of a cookie binge after dinner.
The key to working your brain at its peak all day, every day, is to underwhelm it. I’m not advocating that you make laziness and sloth your new lifestyle. Instead, this book will help you PACE yourself to front-load your decisions about your activities, by making a few value-based decisions on the front end of a month, week, or day and then working from your plan instead of straining your brain with hundreds of micro choices a day. Baumeister and Tierney (2011) promise this benefit of doing so: “Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges” (p. 17).
First, get clear about why you are engaged in this career and what specific goals you want to work on (the P or Power of PACE). Second, divide the steps toward those goals across time and monitor your progress so that you stay on target toward completion of those goals (the A or Align) without having to make micro decisions about what to do next all day long. Third, enlist the help of mutually supportive others in your professional and personal lives (the C or Connect). Fourth, maximize the energy available to do all that you want to do without burnout (the E or Energize). By applying the magic of precommitment to your plans, you will remove the overthinking that leads to ego depletion, because you make a few key decisions at the front end that can unfold almost automatically at the back end (Baumeister & Tierney, 2011). For example, writers who write at the same time each day get more writing done than those who hope to get some writing done sometime during the day only to find out that they lack the “willpower” to do so (Boice, 1989).
The participants in my workshops call the paradigm shift from Gen I time management to Gen II life management “life changing” because it puts time management in proper perspective, as a set of tools to support a life based on a sense of meaning and purpose, rather than as a goal in itself (Seligman, 2002; Sinek, 2009). (For a detailed summary of the differences between the Gen I and Gen II approaches see the appendix to this book.) The benefits of this shift are well worth the effort to learn how to create great work and a great life.
Great Work, Great Life
If you are like most faculty, you entered the academy motivated by the concept of doing great work—work that is meaningful, impactful, challenging, and successful (Stanier, 2010). You also want to have a great life, one that you find satisfying and meaningful because it represents your most authentic self. In other words, you hope to be a peak performer who does good while feeling good. Exercise 1.1 invites you to define what having great work and a great life mean for you at this time in your career and life. Doing so will help you establish a baseline so that you can measure how close you are to your ideal.
In case you had trouble defining “great work” in this exercise, let me offer a definition relevant to this book: effectively doing high-impact work in a timely fashion. Living a “great life” means different things to different people, but just in case that question stumped you, I will again offer my description: experiencing a moderate level of happiness, well-being, or life satisfaction frequently in the short term and a steady, moderate level of satisfaction over the long term of your life.
Whatever concerns you have written down in this exercise have been voiced by your peers who have attended my workshops. For the past seven years, I have collected their pre-workshop concerns and post-implementation comments during workshop follow-up interviews. These professors, perhaps like you, had unanswered e-mail, desks piled with papers, and never-ending to-do lists. These professors, perhaps like you, were letting obstacles keep them from their maximum productivity and satisfaction. While most of those professors came to my workshops hoping to learn a Gen I system for managing time, what they got instead was a Gen II system that goes beyond managing time to managing life. In the complementary coaching sessions after the workshops, these professors reported that implementing just a few tools or techniques from a workshop helped them to tame their paper tigers, say “No” more frequently and gracefully, and improve their self-care. In short, these professors learned how to find and stay in their peak performance zone.
Your Peak Performances
You might not have thought of yourself as a performer, but, like the jobs of actors, athletes, teachers, writers, and leaders, the job of a professor is one of performance, with much in common with the jobs of other performers because you produce observable products for audiences who score or measure your performances. As you learn to better manage yourself and your tasks, you will achieve and stay in your peak performance zone consistently and get back into it readily when things go off course.
Your personal peak performance zone is that sweet spot where the challenge of your tasks meets the ability of your skills in the right environment. This right environment is both external, when you are performing for the right audience in the right venue and format, and internal, when your brain is well rested, well fed, and in the right mind-set. When you are in the peak performance zone, you know it and your audience knows it. This response from your audience may be obvious when you are teaching and can receive immediate feedback from students, but audience response is also a factor in your scholarly work, even though the delay between submission and feedback is so lengthy that you may have forgotten you even wrote the piece that just got accepted. Your service work also involves production—of decisions, reports, and facilitations. Lest you think this book recommends that you approach your work like a robot, rest assured that the book aims at helping you experience satisfaction in your work and your life. With your life management system in place, you will be at your peak much of the time as you perform those responsibilities, while maintaining better work-life balance. In case this sounds like a promise that can’t be kept, the truth is that you have already had some experiences in which you were performing at your peak.
Exercise 1.2 asks you to study the elements of one or more of your own peak performance experiences so that you can extract their similar lessons and apply them to your current situation. Maybe you have experienced this peak performance zone while teaching, writing, or chairing a meeting. Perhaps you had such a moment back in graduate school while writing your dissertation or in your youth when you were in a school play or competing in sport.
If you study several experiences when things went well and when you did not feel you performed at your best, you are likely to see that the elements of the second category contrast sharply with those of the first. Peak performance is working at your personal best as you define it, not in competition with anyone else. As researchers have studied peak performance experiences, however, several similar elements emerge as people describe those experiences, including focus, timelessness, ease in moving through the work, feeling at one with the task, clear goals and feedback. People also describe nonpeak experiences in similar terms, reporting distraction, a feeling of being overwhelmed or confused, a sense of time-dragging tedium, and a feeling at being at odds with the task (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008; Ericsson, 2009).
The peak performance zone is not merely a momentary feel-good experience, such as a good time on vacation. The zone also produces results. The product or outcome might be a well-prepared class, a well-run meeting, or a well-written article. The goal of peak performing professors is to find the sweet spot in which their efforts consistently produce good outcomes. This book is a workbook of practices that can move you closer to your peak performing zone and, if you already are performing well, increase the chances that you can stay consistently in that zone. These practices also will help you increase your satisfaction level with all areas of your life. But don’t just trust me on these promises; do your own assessments, before and after you put these practices into action.
How Productive and Happy Are You?
The words assessment, evaluation, and measurement strike fear in the hearts of academics, who conjure up images of student evaluations, promotion and tenure committees, and regional reevaluation teams. Professors scare themselves needlessly, because assessment can be extremely useful. Centuries ago Plato taught that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I would add: “That which is not measured cannot be improved.” Whether you measure your effectiveness with qualitative data such as journal entries and descriptors or with quantitative data such as scores on assessment tools or numbers of articles published, data can assess both your starting point and then your progress toward your goals.
For the peak performing professor, assessment is helpful on both a micro level and a macro level. On the macro level, your institution may require objective methods to assess faculty productivity, usually most strongly emphasizing the scholarly aspect of the tripartite job description (Middaugh, 2011). Your teaching may also be evaluated on the basis of student evaluations, a practice that recently has been called into question as researchers delineate the difference between measuring student perceptions of good teaching and measuring student learning resulting from the teaching (Nilson, 2010). Furthermore, very few institutions evaluate the quality of service, although some institutions I have visited are starting to use 360-degree leadership measures, such as the Leadership Practices Inventory, to evaluate administrators (Kouzes & Posner, 2003).
There are several problems with the use of the term productivity. It evokes for many an industrial-age image of widgets rolling off a conveyor belt while an efficiency expert with a clipboard stands by making notes. Academic productivity is often measured by number of scholarly publications, a macro measure that is too narrow since it fails to take into account any measure of teaching and service. Assessment on the basis of publication measures outcomes over which faculty have only marginal control, since journal editors determine whether articles are published or rejected. Using publication as a measure of productivity means that faculty’s effective efforts are separated from measurable results by such long periods of time as to make the assessment meaningless to the daily life of the faculty. Although life as a scholar might be measured by publications, it is lived from one writing session to the next. The peak performance literature across fields such as sports and neuroscience emphasize that peak performers improve their overall performance by improving their micro-level performance, setting small achievable goals for practice sessions, measuring those results, and taking a gradual approach to building helpful lifelong habits (Ericsson, 2009; Gollwitzer, Fujita, & Oettingen, 2004; Halvorson, 2011).
Higher education assessment experts define and study helpful institutional productivity measures, but this book will ask you to develop your own definition of productivity by dreaming globally and acting locally. In the academy, faculty have bosses with reasonable performance expectations about the faculty tripartite job description. You should know what those expectations are and incorporate them into your long-term planning. The reality, however, is that your academic bosses do not manage your days and goals; you do. And that’s a good thing, because research on employee autonomy has shown that employees with greater choice regarding how to do their own work had greater job satisfaction, which contributed to better performance (Spreitzer, Kizilos, & Nason, 1997). Given that level of autonomy, faculty are more like self-employed entrepreneurs than employees. This book will take the controversial position that if faculty define productivity and happiness for themselves with a view to their own long-range success, they will achieve goals that serve both themselves and their institutions and will stay engaged for the potential long haul of those partnerships. Your bosses may not see the everyday ways that you are working, but they will notice the results. The real boost to productivity, even on institutional measures, will occur when you first define productivity in ways that fit your values, including the value of success in academe, and then manage your productivity on a micro level. This book aims to show how to do both these things.
We will begin with several global measures of your self-rated productivity and happiness, and then we will use a specific survey measure to assess how PACE practices might bring you closer to becoming a peak performing professor. Using these subjective measures will increase both your motivation and your focus as you target the areas across your job description that you want to improve.
On a practical level, your own definition of great work must eventually intersect with that of your workplace or you will be an iconoclast working in isolation with no support from your institution—or, worse yet, you might even become unemployed. So in addition to practices that will improve your work habits and increase your satisfaction, this book also includes practices that guide you to negotiate with like-minded colleagues and bosses so that your great work is part of a larger whole—an institution that provides high-quality education for students and a supportive environment for scholarship (see Part 3 of this book).
