Steering Your Board Through the Tempest (Part 2 of a series)
In the second in a series on how academic leaders can avoid the distractions that abound in their daily lives and work, Triangle Associates Senior Consultant and Partner Abbi DeLessio points out that school leaders have likely already mastered the art of detecting the signal in the noise. The trick is for them to help their governing boards do the same.
President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.” The same can be said for school leaders, from heads of school and presidents to deans and department chairs. Academic leaders are accustomed to and proficient at managing both the important and urgent issues they face on a daily basis—as educators, they have been doing so for their entire careers. They are adept at evaluating multiple streams of information to find the ‘signal in the noise,’ enabling them to screen out distractions and address the issues at hand, appropriately and competently. This ability to deal with distractions is a hallmark of seasoned leaders and one they use daily with great effect. Indeed, once could say the ability to separate the essential from the extraneous is an essential life skill for leaders.
There are, of course, times when the urgent and the important collide, and the resulting ‘noise’ makes maintaining focus difficult for even the most accomplished leaders. It is at these times that a variety of different tactics should be employed to facilitate refocusing on what is truly critical and making decisions accordingly. Delegating whenever possible to free up focus for critical matters, reassessing priorities to assess whether an urgent matter truly needs immediate attention (Steven Covey’s famous urgency-importance matrix comes to mind), and learning to confidently say ‘no’ when pushed to address non-essential issues are all methods utilized to keep things on track. Perhaps the most important tactic is to ruthlessly prioritize, focusing on tasks that are both urgent and important, concentrating on what is truly significant for the long-term sustainability of an institution.
But what of governing boards? What role do they play in the mitigation or elevation of distractions? Often we observe academic leaders who are otherwise comfortable and confident in prioritizing and making decisions faltering when their governing boards become involved. Often, under the guise of ‘wanting to help,’ governing boards assume a firefighting posture, rushing in to provide guidance and assistance in dealing with crises or emergent issues. While well-meaning, these attempts are typically misguided and unnecessary. In their zeal to be helpful, boards can often cause more harm. Their engagement can add one more distraction with which a leader must deal, diverting attention from the issue at hand towards managing the concerns and interventions of the board. This is especially true when board members assume that everything is both urgent and important.
At times such as these, it is essential that boards, like doctors, follow the dictum of ‘first, do no harm.’ Boards would be well advised to follow the ‘prescription’ put forth in an April 2020 article from McKinsey & Company. While referring specifically to the COVID crisis, the recommendations apply to all boards in the face of emergent situations. First, do not increase management’s burden; school leaders have enough on their plates without the board adding more. Second, augment management capacity, but do so only as management requests, e.g., wait to be asked before you dive in to help. Finally, continue to focus on framing strategy for what comes next; taking a long view helps shift the board’s gaze from the immediate to the longer term. Following this guidance will provide powerful support while allowing leaders to do their best: effectively addressing the intersection of urgency and importance to ensure ongoing success.