Lessons on Leadership from Port-a-Potties

Watching construction on a new high-rise building from a seat at my favorite St. Louis coffee store, I noticed a towering crane hoisting two Port-a-Potties into position on the upper floor.  The crane is usually used for lifting steel girders, concrete, and other heavy and large objects into position.  Eventually, it will help position the glass and steel siding and roof-top mechanical systems.  

But on this day, the crane was lifting portable toilets.  And that got me thinking about how many tasks on a construction site are ancillary to the actual constructing: scaffolding holding stairways in place, external elevators, water stations for workers, an office trailer where blueprints can be displayed, and, of course, Port-a-Potties.  All of these are absolutely essential to getting the job done, yet none will be around once the contractor is done.  Somewhere, in putting together the winning bid for the project, the estimators must have taken these extra factors (time and money) into account.

Every enterprise must do the same.  Even one or two-person businesses have a certain amount of "bureaucracy" from tax filings and wage-and-hour reports, not to mention maintenance of computer networks and data systems.  Training--"professional development" in school lingo--is another such resource-consuming essential.

Our experience is that leaders in independent and higher education do a super job of estimating time and money for what happens inside classrooms when students are present, or for what happens at the bench (or equivalent) during research, but they fail to allow for all the other activities that go into running a school or lab or whatever.  Then, training and planning meetings and reports get crammed into whatever space remains in the schedule; usually none, from whence comes much stress.

No Port-a-Potties means very unhappy workers.  It was a good use of an expensive resource (the crane) to use it for lifting new ones onto the top floor.  What are the portable toilets of your organization, and are you spending enough time and money to get them into position well before the need becomes acute?