As a Leader, you’ve probably noticed that your daily work can roughly be divided into two buckets: Big, long-term projects to either facilitate the team in working more effectively or to support one or more of the organization’s big picture goals, and dealing with surprise conversations, crises, or opportunities that come up.
There are proactive ways you can reduce some of these surprises, but they’ll never disappear entirely. In fact, being on call for issues like this should be a leader’s top priority.
A leader’s workload often looks very different than an individual contributor’s. Also, it can have different and less predictable “peak times”, leading to a to-do list that can be rather feast or famine. Also, it’s somewhat harder to decide what is worth your finite time, and what isn’t.
Here’s some questions you can ask yourself to determine whether or not there’s a good reason for you to do a given task.
1. Is this worth doing at all? If not, cross it off your list.
2. Could somebody else do this as well as you, or even just well enough? If so, delegate.
3. Could this task be a way to train a team member to take on more responsibility? If so, use this as a teaching opportunity.
4. Does this task support one or more of my personal or organizational goals? If so, add it to your list.
5. Would working on this task allow me to strengthen my relationships with students, faculty, administrators, or other internal/external stakeholders? If so, it’s probably doing yourself, if you can do it without being overloaded.
Being a productive leader looks and feels very different from being a productive individual contributor, to the degree that it will feel weird at first. There’s just no way of getting around that. A full day could end in 10 things being checked off your list, or one, or even none, because you got a surprise phone call that meant that everything nonessential had to be pushed back to the next day. The sooner you can accept this reality, the more confident and competent you will become.
