Tomorrow's Academic Careers
Time Management for Department Chairs
Don?t let yesterday use up too much of today. ? Will
Rogers
Time, money, information, physical resources, and human
resources are the five basic resources that must be managed wisely in any
organization in order to achieve specific goals. The management of time, at
least in principle, is an illusion in that time exists independently of the
other four resources and cannot be created, bought, sold, or otherwise
manipulated like the other resources (Douglass and Douglass, 1980). Money, by
contrast, can be transformed into information, physical resources, and human resources;
consequently, time and money are the two resources that department chairs are
most concerned about. Although department chairs do not think of themselves as
?managing? human resources, these are without question the department?s most
valuable asset; in fact, typically, 85 to 90 percent of a department?s budget
is directly tied to human resources. Although faculty cannot be managed in the
way other resources can, the chair?s leadership skills can influence faculty to
perform at their
optimal level. (We will discuss this in more detail in Chapters Six through
Eight.)
In principle, time and money are not interchangeable, but
for practical purposes, many tasks are of such a nature that tradeoffs between
time and money can be made. For example, we hire assistants to help us perform
tasks that we would otherwise have performed ourselves (trading money for
time). Or we engage in services that consume our time but generate revenue that
will be available for us (trading time for money). Time management is not only
about prioritizing tasks and activities but also about making wise trade-offs
that effectively utilize our combined resources of time and money.
There are many ways in which time and money are similar
and some ways in which the two are fundamentally different. A similar
characteristic of time and money is that wasting either one represents a lost
opportunity to reach something that is of value to you or your academic unit.
Perhaps the biggest difference between time and money is the attitude most people
have toward consuming the two resources. All of us, from time to time, make
poor financial choices that result in a loss of money (in large or small
amounts) that could have been spent better. Most people feel bad about wasting
money. Yet the truth is that most of us waste large portions of our own time as
well as other people?s time and don?t feel the least bit bad about it.
One important element in improving your management of
time is to ask the following question: Am I making wise choices in trade-offs
between time and money at both the professional and the personal level? At the
professional level, this mostly translates into deciding which tasks to
delegate and which to do yourself. If you choose to do one yourself, you are
consuming your time, and if you delegate it, you are consuming your
department?s financial funds (assuming that you could reduce the hours of your
assistant or colleague if you delegated less).
In making good trade-offs between time and money in your
job, consider the monetary cost of every task or activity that you choose to
do. For example, in deciding whether to have one or two department meetings
each month, consider the cost of these meetings (more on this in Chapter
Seven). Does the cost of the tasks you are doing reflect an effective use of
time and money, or could those resources have been used to greater benefit
elsewhere?
Scarcity Versus Abundance Mentality
Do you frequently use phrases like ?it?s a zero-sum game?
or ?I can only do so much?? Do you believe that increasing resources for your
academic unit is a matter of effective competition or effective cooperation?
Take a look at the phrases in Table 3.1, and think about which types of words
and phrases are most common in your vocabulary. If you are like most department
chairs, you probably associate mostly with the words and phrases on the left
side of the table, those common to people with a ?scarcity mind-set.?
Scarcity-minded people think in terms of resources being limited, that there is
only so much to go around, and that the only way to increase resources Is
through competition. Their gain is some else?s loss. Abundance-minded people
tend to focus on their potential rather than their limitations. They believe
that there is ?enough for all of us,? and they regard their successful peers as
mentors rather than as competitors (Covey, 1989).
Table 3.1 Expressions Commonly Used by Leaders Who Think
in Terms of Scarcity and Those Who Think in Terms of Abundance
Scarcity Mind-Set Abundance Mind-Set
Budget restrictions New source of revenue
Inequity Unused potential
?There are ?haves? and ?have nots.?? ?We are all very
fortunate.?
Competition Cooperation
Zero-sum game Win-win
Can only do so much No limit to our potential
Closed system Open system
Political decision Rational decision
Beyond my control Potential to influence
But wait a minute, isn?t my university?s budget fixed, so
that if I get something, someone else has to give something up? If you think
short-term, maybe so, but not if you think long-term. Suppose you are trying to
get funding for a new tenure-track position. Does that mean that another
department will have to lose one? Not necessarily. For both public and private
institutions, budgets are highly dependent on total enrollment. Moreover, if
you have been successful in recruiting more new students for your programs, it
is likely that you have also been responsible for increasing enrollment for
other departments. Departments, colleges, and universities, as well as state
and federal budgets, are all open systems. They can all grow or shrink without
doing so at the cost of another unit. Let?s now consider two examples involving
scarcity- and abundance-minded thinking.
Example 1
At University X, near the end of an academic year, a dean
announces at a chair?s meeting that the college has some residual funds that
need to be spent on a onetime basis before the end of the fiscal year. The dean
asks all department chairs to bring back ?wish lists? from their departments
related to equipment and classroom technology enhancements for discussion at
the next chairs? meeting. One particular department chair, Dr. Z, decides to
devote a large portion of his next department meeting to developing such a wish
list, putting more items on the list than can be covered by the funding but
hoping that his department will at least get funding for its top one or two
priorities as what he and his faculty consider their ?fair share.?
The chairs? meeting that follows turns out to be a
disaster. By majority vote, it is decided to create a ?master list? that
includes all of the proposed items, and each chair is given a number of votes
that can be placed on any items of choice. The items that receive the most votes
are then funded, up to the point where all funds have been depleted. The chairs
of some of the largest departments in the college, including Dr. Z, feel that
this process is unfair in that having the same voting power for every
department regardless of size is unfavorable to the larger departments. Added
to that, many of the small departments are forming alliances to support items
of common interest, whereas the largest departments are proposing items of more
isolated interest. In the end, a curious application of the 80/20 principle is
achieved whereby 80 percent of the funds are given to only 20 percent of the
college.
Example 2
At University Y, several chairs and an associate dean
from the natural sciences get together to write a STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) grant proposal. All science departments agree to
support a proposal that is aimed at improving the quality of precalculus
instruction by having more classes taught by regular mathematics faculty
instead of graduate instructors and providing more extensive mentoring and
training of the graduate instructors who teach courses. By thinking in terms of
abundance rather than scarcity, everyone involved works in synergistic
cooperation to write a win-win proposal. The chairs all agree that this project
will be of benefit to the students they serve over the long term. For example,
if a biology student has a bad experience in mathematics, that will increase
the chance that the student will switch majors or even drop out of college
completely. Seeing that all science and engineering majors have to take
mathematics, a win for th
e Mathematics
Department is a win for everyone.
Let?s compare these two scenarios. In Example 1, the
scarcity-minded thinking of everyone involved results in substantial feelings
of inequity, lack of trust, and polarization between departments. A large
dollar amount is spent with more negative impacts than positive. In Example 2,
abundance-minded thinking allows everyone to think ?outside the box? to achieve
an overall win for all. Note that in these examples, scarcity thinking happens
even in the process of distributing unanticipated resources, whereas abundance
thinking happens even when there are no resources to distribute.
I want to emphasize that being abundance-minded does not
mean being in denial or ignorant of the impact that a major challenge, such as
budget reduction, can have on your department?s operation. The main difference
between scarcity and abundance thinking is that scarcity-minded people tend to
see changes as threats and abundance-minded people see them as opportunities.
Being abundance-minded does not mean that you have endless capacity to do ?more
for less.? Scarcity - and abundance-minded people alike can do ?more for more?
and ?less for less.? There are a number of factors over which you have no
control. State budgets for higher education rise and decline with changes in
the political climate and the economy. Budgets for private institutions are
affected by other factors that you cannot control. A crash of the stock market
can significantly lower a private institution?s endowment, and in a recession,
donations tend to decline and fewer people can afford to send their kids t
o expensive
private institutions.
But being an effective department chair is not just about
producing more with your resources. During lean times, your focus should be on
protecting your key investments, namely, your valuable faculty and their
loyalty. You can?t maintain the same production with fewer resources, so you
should prioritize by suspending the functions that can most easily be
reactivated once resources are restored, along with those that should have been
eliminated anyway. Use the lean times to plan your strategy for the good times
to come. History shows that good times always follow lean times, so be prepared
to present your needs to your dean once resources come back to your school or
college. Leaders who are negligent during the good times and panic during lean
times are the ones who tend to buy high and sell low. In contrast, those who
plan for the good times during the lean times are the ones who buy low and sell
high.
How Much Is Your Time Worth?
Much of the time management literature points to the
importance of knowing the value of your own time. Figuring out your value is
not complicated math. It basically involves dividing the number of hours you
work per year into your annual salary. However, there is a slight difference in
what an hour of your time is worth to you and what it is worth to your
institution. Douglass and Douglass (1980) give detailed instructions for
figuring out how much you are costing your institution per hour, taking into
account not just salary and benefits but also cost of office space, utilities,
secretarial support, professional development, and equipment, and counting as
total hours worked only hours during which you are actually producing (that is,
subtracting time spent eating lunch, drinking coffee, going to the bathroom,
checking your personal e-mail, and so on). If you had to bill your institution
for the hours that you actually worked, how many ?billable? hours are you
producing each
year? Suppose you
make $100,000 per year in salary and benefits and you work an estimated 2,000
hours per year. That would result in an hourly rate of $50 per hour. But when
you figure in the cost of your secretarial staff, your office space, and other
overhead and the percentage of time that you are being productive, it is more
likely that your hourly rate is on the order of $200 to $250 (which is closer
to the hourly rates charged by professional consultants).
Questions to Consider and Practical Tips
? Compile a list of the major assets among your four
tangible resources: money, information, physical resources, and human resources.
What proportion of your (financial) budget is associated with each of the other
three resources mentioned?
? How much control do you have over each of your tangible
resources? For example, what portion of your budget is locked into salaries
over which you have no control?
? How much is an hour of your time worth? Add up your
salary, benefits, and other work-related expenses paid by your institution, and
divide it by the estimated number of hours you work per year.
? How much is an hour of ?department time? worth? Based
on a calculation similar to the one suggested for your own time, how much does
a one-hour meeting involving all your faculty and staff cost your institution?
? Consider the relationship between the time and money
that you control at both the personal and department level. Are you making wise
trade-offs between time and money? For example, could you free up time by
hiring people to do things that you) or your department) are currently doing?
Are there tasks that you (or your department) are currently doing for which the
cost is higher than it would be to hire someone else to do them?
? Review the expressions listed in Table 3.1, and circle
the ones you use most commonly in your vocabulary as a leader. Do you have a
scarcity or abundance mind-set? If you are predominantly scarcity-minded, do
you believe that your mind-set limits your imagination in terms of the growth
and prosperity of your department?
Tomorrow's Professor: Time Management for Department Chairs
