My project list feels really long — only slightly shorter than the number of emails that seem to make their way into my inbox in a two-hour period when I am in meetings. I am a vice president, so maybe that is to be expected. But I also feel the weight of an aspect of management work that is even heavier on college campuses than at many businesses: the volume of relationships.
Higher education has always been a people business. Our mission is to develop people. To succeed in higher-education administration, you have to be able to cultivate and maintain relationships. I work in the enrollment area, which means I have relationships with everyone on my team of 35, with all of the other cabinet members, and with a significant portion of their teams. I develop relationships with prospective students each year, while trying to maintain relationships with current ones. I cultivate relationships with parents, alumni, school counselors, vendors, consultants, coaches, and reporters. That’s a lot of relationships.
In addition, most institutions have a more egalitarian workplace than many other types of businesses, which means just knowing someone’s boss is not enough to get their support or to get a project done. In most cases you need to win hearts and minds. Honestly, sometimes the amount of energy needed to keep all of these relationships going is exhausting.
Over the past few months, I hit a bit of a wall with my bandwidth. The results in my area were strong, but I found myself coming to work angry every day, for reasons I could not quite articulate. I constantly felt as if, no matter how hard or fast I worked, I never had enough time or mental energy to carry everything I had on my plate. Maybe you can relate. After this went on for weeks, and I began to really resent the people who seemed to consistently ignore my emails, I realized something had to change.
Categorize and rebalance your projects. The best part of being a vice president has to be having an assistant. This is a luxury I’ve never had before, so I take full advantage. My very insightful assistant was previously a manager in a retail store, so he has a special ability to cut through the foibles of higher-ed culture with business logic. So I asked him to play “executive coach” and analyze my work style: What am I doing that seems to be effective, and what is clearly not working?
He offered a very powerful suggestion. I told him that I felt as if I was giving too much energy to too many projects and that I was looking for a better approach. He suggested that part of my problem was that I was treating all of my projects as equally important and equally urgent, which made it seem as if I was fighting in all directions at once.
For the next hour, we organized my project list. We created an “A” column, where we put the highest-priority items — things that were either strategic or important and urgent. That is where I should be spending most of my effort. In the “B” column we put projects that were important but not urgent, or important to me but could be assigned to someone else on my team. In the “C” category we placed projects that were neither strategic nor urgent, and actually were things for which I should not be the leader. In those cases, I should let projects and people come to me and not spend energy pushing them forward.
I was amazed by how much that simple exercise helped me prioritize how I should spend my day. By assigning projects to those buckets, I was able to let go of some of the mental bandwidth I was spending to try to push all of the projects forward at the same time. Being able to resolve items in the “A” column gave me a great sense of satisfaction, so when projects in the “B” and “C” areas took more time than expected, I was better able to live with that. After all, I could always move them up to an “A” if they increased in importance.
The final work category we created was one I called “Clear Conscience.” These were the projects that had probably caused me the most stress over the preceding weeks, because they were problems or opportunities for which I felt a sense of responsibility but did not have control. They could be fixed or acted upon only if others took the initiative to make them happen.
I created that fourth category of projects to let them go. By putting things there, I was able to say, with a clear conscience, “I have done everything within my power to bring these to the attention of the right people and to help them understand their importance. Now it is up to others whether they will act on them or not.”
Adopt a consultant’s mind-set. This concept, related to my Clear Conscience list, emerged from another recent change I had been working on making — not trying to do other people’s jobs. Higher education is filled with very smart, analytical people who see solutions to institutional problems in someone else’s territory, and feel compelled to speak up. We end up distracted from our own work because it’s always easier to fix something you’re not technically responsible for.
That occurred to me on a day when I was feeling particularly stretched. I sat down, looked at my project list, and realized that roughly 80 percent of the items on it were not even in my area. They were things I was trying to persuade other people to do because I believed they would help me to do my job better and help the institution succeed. That, I knew, had to change.
I have been a consultant on projects at several other universities in the past few years, so I applied that approach to my own daily work. When you consult, you do the research and assess the situation. You analyze the data, synthesize it in a way that will be most easily received, and deliver it to the people with the authority to make changes. Then those people have a choice: Will they follow your advice, or not? It is not the consultant’s job to ensure that they do so.
Applying that mind-set to my daily work, I realized that I needed to (a) prepare my very best analysis, (b) deliver it to the people who can make changes (often to my boss and their bosses), and (c) let them decide what they will do with it.
Keeping a consultant’s mind-set allows you to give your institution your best without trying to do other people’s jobs for them. Even when you see something that you know is about to break, if you have done everything you could to advise people about it, and they decline to act, you can’t rescue them from the natural consequences. You cannot be responsible for other people’s decisions, only for your own.
Work with those who want to work with you. Institutions are famous for creating silos, in which people or departments insulate themselves and have difficulty cooperating with others. Sometimes the silos are structural. Other times they are driven by a few personalities who do not want to play ball unless it’s by their rules. Working with siloed individuals can be a major source of frustration. You waste a lot of time and energy trying to coax them out, and often they will be only reluctant participants.
My advice? Invite them to the game, but if they do not respond, ignore them to the degree you can. Do not spend a lot of time trying to convince them.
Instead, focus on the people who do want to play and create a coalition of the willing. My most satisfying work experiences have involved gathering groups of people who were enthusiastic about the task at hand and eager to work together to make it happen. As much as you can, surround yourself with the doers and with people who value the institution’s success over that of their own small area.
That does not mean you should exclude people who are tentative. Invite them. Make a strong pitch for what you can achieve together. Show them the data. Offer them incentives, if necessary. But if they refuse your best-faith effort to bring them on board, shake the dust off your feet and move on.
That step is probably the hardest to put into practice. But some people just do not want to change how they do things. You may have to let go of some projects — even ones you are confident could work — because you cannot spend the time and energy to fight with people who refuse to be part of the solution. In such cases, the best thing to do is to inform your supervisor of your effort, and then let it go. Concentrate on projects you can move toward completion.
Changing how you operate in the workplace is not always easy. If, like me, you have been in higher education for a long time, you have probably developed patterns of how you do your work. If those approaches work for you, then keep at it.
If, however, you are struggling to find enough room in your day, and feeling increasingly stretched by the size of your to-do list, consider rebalancing how you prioritize your projects and the way that you manage the relationships that go with them. Find your own “executive coach,” and take a fresh look at how you can rebuild your bandwidth.
