How do you decide what to delegate?
I'm a terrible delegator. I'm just really bad at that. I don't know whether it's just being female or wanting to control the situation, but I'm not a very good delegator. But I will delegate any budget thing. I would delegate budget stuff to my dog if I could.
[An AA] had to say something to me about that once. It was maybe a couple semesters into a schedule process and somebody came in my office and said, “Can I switch classrooms?” And I said, “Oh yeah, I'm sure it'll be fine.” After they left, [the AA] said, “I'm in charge of that.” And it helped that she said that. We could do that about several things — she had a way to do that. It really did make it easy to let her just do what she felt like was her job, you know?
What is the best productivity/time management trick you've learned?
Honestly, I think it's not to expect so many things to get done in a day or week. I think productivity for me is more like I made a good stab at that particular thing, because hardly anything gets finished. It was one of the hardest things when I was very first a dean. At the end of the summer, everybody was like, “OK, I'm turning in my grades and leaving.” And I realized that didn’t happen in the dean's job. It just kind of goes on and on because so much of it is about people needing to talk about their problems and planning for the day. You just don't have that starting and ending and starting over kind of thing. It's just there all the time. That's the relentless part of it.
What tips would you offer to a new manager? Hard skills? Soft skills?
Well, you know, I'm not a good Excel person, but I think, if people had any interest in it, it would be really good to know that. I think really trying to familiarize themselves with a few years of FTE, so you have an idea and a little bit of history about that. Familiarize yourself with the history of the departments and look at productivity a little bit. What classes, what times do well? It doesn't fix everything, but you at least can say, “Look, three semesters in a row, we canceled these classes. Why are you continuing to offer them at the same time?” Soft skills? Listening. Don't just tell them how you did it at your old job. Don't tell them how some other department does it. If you do say that, you can find a better way to say it. Be humble in your questioning and in your conversations with people. Somebody reminded me of this recently. Instead of saying, “Have you tried so and so,” or “At this school we did this…” just say, “I wonder what would happen if we did this?”
What is the best lesson you learned the hard way?
Tell the story to someone else. I always think of this story: I had some students who came to complain about this teacher and then the teacher came in and complained about them, and then I tried to get them to work together and it was so confusing to me. I could not figure out what the solution was. It was too nebulous — it wasn't just really badly behaving students and it wasn’t just a bad teacher. So I ended up calling [a former colleague] and just said, “Let me tell you the story and see what you think.” She had a whole new look at it and I realized I kind of had the story in the wrong order in my head. I don't think it got super resolved, but it really made me realize that I was doing a lot of internal perseverating and I could have just talked to somebody about it.
Is there a post-it that you keep on your computer to remind you of something important?
I have this thing up on my wall right now — it's not the same thing — but it says “Get into the habit of asking yourself, does this support the life I'm trying to create?” It reminds me to think about whether this is really how I want to do this. Is this really how I want to be in my life? I mean, man, I've man blown it a bunch of times in that way, you know? This is a thing in all of these jobs; we wait way too long to make changes in our lives — not that you should jump jobs or anything like that — but it takes a long time to get to the next thing. So I think a question is always, what do I want to do next? And am I working toward that? It’s like I say to faculty when they get tenure. “In about five years, you're going to be burnt out. So in about three years, start thinking about it. Don't wait five years, because it takes a couple years to get to your next iteration, whether it's taking on a project or applying for a different job. How do you want to reinvent yourself?
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Something to think about:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
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The Rabbit Hole (resources, content, etc. that are relevant to the job):
A brief but deep dive into what it really means to listen: I’m Listen Like You Mean It Author Ximena Vengoechea and This Is How I Work
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