Photo by Sear Greyson
As you read this, here in New Zealand we will be celebrating the appearance of the star cluster we call Matariki. These stars can be seen at mid-winter and using the Māori lunar calendar, mark the start of a new year. A new year is always a perfect time to take stock and consider change!
This is a simple ‘tactical’ post about freeing up time that is leaking away regularly and doesn’t need to. Today I’m looking at the black hole called ‘admin’. My definition of admin is everything that isn’t directly linked to people.
Admin(istration) is part and parcel of running a school. Done well it supports the important work (which is always to do with people) and can actually create time. Done badly it swallows up your most finite resource and gets in the way of things like, efficiency, progress, and the will to live.
And some people love it.
A good system or an efficient protocol can be things of beauty. For some of us there is a siren like pull towards perfection and where better to find that than in a neatly documented plan? The people we work with are harder to ‘polish’. They are unpredictable and always changing. But not so your duty roster – it can be refined and tweaked until it almost glows with perfection. Efficient, fair and perfectly presented. Even laminated.
But, and it’s a big but, admin tasks cost time and energy – yours. And quite frankly some of them don’t need to be done and some of them don’t need to be done by you.
So, I have two simple challenges for you this week.
One – identify one admin task to stop. Neither you nor anyone else will ever do it again.
Two – identify one admin task to delegate. Someone other than you will do it.
STOP IT
Let’s look at the ‘stop it’ tasks first. There’s a long list of things that belong here and I have been (and am) as guilty as the next person in maintaining some of them. Things like:
- Printing out newsletters (do you know how many people even read them?)
- Writing behavioural notes about minor lunchtime incidents (soul destroying)
- Collecting ‘lost and found’ uniform items in a central location (creating learned dependence)
- Sending home paper copies of Board minutes (wasteful on every front)
- Personally adding all the items onto a shared staff calendar (that’s not a shared calendar)
- Putting stray teaspoons/cups/stuff into the staff dishwasher after every break (… wrong on every front)
DELEGATE IT
These tasks aren’t on the ‘stop it’ list because they are actually useful. But just because they are useful does not mean you have to do them.
Depending on the size of your school and hence the number of people available to help, this list will vary. (If you are a U1 leader, your main gains are going to come from challenge one!)
- Creating rosters
- Following up student absences
- Answering the admin telephone as you pass it in the Office
- Doing anything with paper-based mail
- Running payroll
- Taking minutes
- Add your own
Because you are not a robot and are a real person with all that it entails, I guarantee that you are regularly doing some time sucking tasks that you shouldn’t. I know I am.
And every regular task that you do eats into the precious 168 hours you get each week.
Of course, the items you pick to eliminate/delegate may not be easy to lose as others will probably be very happy that you are doing them. In fact, it’s guaranteed that some on your team will absolutely see a particular task as yours and yours alone.
Principals often strike this when moving to a new school. They are likely to be told directly that some admin tasks are theirs because that’s how it has been done by their predecessor . . . somewhere in the conversation will be at least the hint of “because that’s how we always do it”. If you feel this disingenuous little justification surfacing, you know you’ve just brushed up against the status quo – and unless your new school is perfect, it’s your job to challenge this. I’m not suggesting straight away though, rather once you have established yourself and have some reciprocal trust built up. I suggest making a few ‘back of the envelope’ notes as things occur to you in the early days – new eyes are sharp eyes.
And just to prove I often struggle to follow my own advice, here is an admin task I’m trying to delegate and at this point am failing miserably . . .
Outside the main entrance to our Office is a large whiteboard. It is smack bang in your line of sight as you come up the stairs to enter the building. Every visitor to the school and every student who needs something from the Office passes it. It’s blue chip, gold plated visual real estate.
For a long time, every day I would add something new – a quote, a reflection on the weekend sport, people’s birthdays, key events that day, congratulations, and of course the date (to prove it was fresh). But . . . if I wasn’t on site in the morning on any particular day, yesterday’s messages were still there. If I was away for two days, the material was two days old, you get the idea.
So, I found someone in the Office team who was willing and able to take over this task. Their handwriting is much nicer than mine and their ability to draw entertaining pictures outstanding.
For almost a fortnight all went well. The whiteboard was interesting and fresh and I relaxed into having one less thing on my self-imposed to do list. But it didn’t stay that way, and after a while it was clear that their commitment to this task had waned. We are now doing a sort of Russian roulette type dance until one of us cracks and will do the job. We both know the system is broken!
Given that ever school leader has a different list of admin tasks, and given it is highly unlikely that all (any?) of them are in your actual job description, you absolutely have the right to do a bit of deletion and or delegation. Two items – that’s my challenge to you.
Mānawatia a Matariki
Dave