Steering Through the Tempest: How Academic Leaders Can Maintain Focus Amidst Daily Distractions

A new school year approaches in the Global North, and with it comes a raft of opportunities and challenges ahead of school leaders. Along with progress toward implementing the strategic plan, there are building projects, capital campaigns, curriculum revisions, and onboarding and acculturating new faculty and staff. Along with these mission-critical activities will come an array of important but ultimately distracting activities of daily living in a school. There will be unhappy stakeholders, unexpected facility problems, and trouble implementing new technology platforms to be sure, and each of these emergent issues distracts leaders from the longer-term and strategic work they know their institutions need.  

The above is true for presidents, heads of schools, provosts, deans, and department chairs alike. It is also true for governing boards, whose essential long-term, strategic work too often devolves into a microscopic focus on what happened on campus last week or last month. Emergent problems do require handling, but how can leaders do this without losing the plot? The trick is to work on what matters in the near term, yet somehow preserve time and energy so you can work on the long term. 

We will dig into this topic further in future posts about how boards, senior leaders, and academic middle administrators can avoid becoming worn down by the inevitable in a school's daily life.