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    Time Management for Department Chairs
    Time Management for Department Chairs
    Time Management for Department Chairs
    Ebook206 pages2 hours

    Time Management for Department Chairs

    By Christian K. Hansen

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    "Department chairs who have asked themselves the question 'Who knows where the time goes' should ask Christian Hansen for the answer. His book, Time Management for Department Chairs, will help chairs maximize the investment of their most important resources—their time, focus, and energy."—Don Chu, author, The Department Chair Primer

    "Department chairs take note: Hansen's Time Management for Department Chairs can change your life in just three hours. Written by a seasoned academic chair, the author offers practical ideas and strategic advice about how to increase your day-to-day effectiveness (and sanity) by using proven approaches to managing expectations, organizing tasks, running meetings, monitoring communication, controlling calendars, avoiding interruptions, containing crises, and everything else in between. If you want to learn how to strike a better work-life balance, this book should be at the top of your reading list!"—Christine Licata, senior associate provost, Rochester Institute of Technology

    "It's about time—the resource department chairs have the least of and what faculty want the most! Christian Hansen's book is filled with insights, techniques, and artful strategies to help chairs maximize their time while working effectively with faculty and balancing their personal and professional lives. This book is a life saver!"—Walter Gmelch, dean, University of San Francisco

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateJun 1, 2011
    ISBN9781118087251
    Time Management for Department Chairs

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      Book preview

      Time Management for Department Chairs - Christian K. Hansen

      The Author

      Christian K. Hansen is associate dean of computing and engineering sciences in the College of Science, Health and Engineering at Eastern Washington University (EWU). He also holds an appointment as professor in the Department of Mathematics and served as the department chair from 2001 to 2009. Before joining EWU in 1993, he worked as a reliability specialist at the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (INTELSAT) in Washington, D.C. He holds a master of science degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in statistics from the Technical University of Denmark.

      After publishing more than two dozen scientific articles within his technical discipline, Hansen has recently focused much of his research on time management and academic leadership. He has led several workshops for department chairs, including presentations at the Academic Chairpersons Conference and the Jossey-Bass Department Chair Leadership Institute. A longtime volunteer with the IEEE, he has served in numerous leadership positions, including vice-president for publications, secretary, newsletter editor, and treasurer of the IEEE Reliability Society. He and his wife, Kelly, an elementary school teacher, have three teenage children living at home.

      Acknowledgments

      I would like to acknowledge with gratitude and appreciation the individuals who most positively influenced me during the creation of this book:

      My wife, Kelly, my son, Jonathan, and my stepdaughters, Kaitlyn and Amanda, for their love and patience during this project. The privilege of spending time with them has been the greatest reward for learning to manage time wisely.

      My mother, Birgit, and late father, Carl Evald, for their lifelong encouragement and guidance, always leading me to seek my highest potential.

      My sister, Ida, and brother, Axel, for their mentorship and many rewarding conversations over the course of my life.

      My colleagues in the Department of Mathematics. Without their collegiality and the uninterrupted time given to me during my sabbatical in the fall of 2009, this project would not have been possible.

      Two fine deans I have had the pleasure of working with, Dean Emeritus Ray Soltero and Dean Judd Case. Without their leadership and mentorship, I would have never survived eight years as department chair.

      The editorial staff at Jossey-Bass, in particular Executive Editor Sheryl Fullerton, for her support and enthusiasm for this project.

      Three external reviewers—Christine Licata, N. Douglass Lees, and Jeffrey Buller—for many thoughtful comments and suggestions that greatly improved the final manuscript of this book.

      Above all, I thank God, the creator of time, life, and all the treasures we enjoy, without whom nothing else would have mattered.

      C.K.H.

      1

      IT’S ABOUT TIME

      The Highly Effective Department Chair

      There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

      —Ronald Reagan

      Writing this book took me about 567 hours, including many hours during my sabbatical in the fall of 2009 studying the literature on time management and department chair leadership and writing many pages of content that did not make it into the final version of the book. Prior to that I spent eight years as chair of the Department of Mathematics at Eastern Washington University, during which time I spent an estimated 2,147 hours reading and replying to e-mails, writing memos, and doing other routine office tasks, 954 hours preparing and revising course schedules, and 221 hours dealing with student complaints, all of which gave inspiration for many anecdotes and case studies presented in this book. I don’t have an accurate count of the number of times my colleagues or students interrupted me in the middle of an important task or the number of hours I wasted completing tasks that turned out to have no meaningful payoff. Yet if you read at the same rate as I do, you will be able to read this book and learn what I learned during this time in less than three hours.

      Like most department chairs, I spent most of my professional career prior to accepting this position teaching college classes, writing research articles in my field of specialization, and serving in numerous service functions, none of which had any relevance to the skills needed to be a successful department chair. Among those skills, I found time management to be the most crucial one. A few years into my first term as chair, as a recovering workaholic and urgency addict, I became a self-professed student of time management. Through studying, presenting workshops on the topic at professional meetings, and writing this book and several articles (Hansen, 2007, 2008, 2009b), I have remained a student of this subject rather than an expert.

      From this perspective, this book is different from any other time management book available. Nearly all such books are written by experts in the field, authors who have given workshops and seminars to thousands of professionals around the world and appeared frequently on prime-time network television. With the exception of one time management book (Whisenhunt, 1987), all books on time management referenced in this book are written by someone who has never served in an academic leadership position. Authors like Alan Lakein, Alec MacKenzie, and Stephen Covey have all made significant contributions to the foundation of time management, but their books are written with the private business professional in mind. This is not a coincidence, for this audience makes up the vast majority of today’s workforce. My book is written for a much smaller audience, the audience of department chairs. With respect to articles on time management specifically written for department chairs, only a handful are cited in this book, including Crandell (2005), Hecht (2005), and Hedges (2003). Here are some of the ways in which department chairs’ time management problems differ from those of business professionals:

      More complex reporting structures (spider web organization rather than tree organization)

      Different measures of productivity (student preparation for careers, intellectual property, and service to the community rather than revenue generation)

      More complex hiring structures and reduced mobility among employees

      Workloads defined by functions rather than time commitments

      More focus on people than on things (85 to 90 percent of university budgets are allocated to people)

      This book offers no new fundamental theory of time management. It does not attempt to introduce a fifth generation of time management or a ninth habit of effectiveness. It offers practical advice on how to effectively lead an academic unit and manage its resources, with a focus on making the most effective use of time for the department chair and everyone with whom he or she interacts.

      The Need for Balance

      Everyone knows that if we had more time, we could do more. But we cannot get more time because we already have all the time there is. Time management is not about creating more time but rather about making the best use of the time we have. Much of what is discussed in this book is about creating balance: balancing chair and faculty workload, balancing time spent on the various duties of the chair position, balancing productivity with product capability, balancing work and family, and so on. Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 principle (Koch, 1998) indicates that imbalance rather than balance is the natural state of affairs. Thus with time management, we seek to create balance by working against our natural tendency to create imbalance.

      You Are Already Doing a Great Job

      In spite of the complex nature of the job, new department chairs usually receive inadequate training, if any at all, before stepping into the position (Chu, 2006; Gmelch and Miskin, 2004). Many new chairs are overwhelmed with the number of demands placed on their time and get buried in paperwork, faculty evaluations, and meetings. My impression from talking to many department chairs and to researchers who have studied the chair profession itself is that in spite of the lack of preparation, the vast majority of chairs are perceived as being successful in their job. This view of the department chair may be biased because most of the ones I have met actively seek to improve themselves by studying the literature and attending conferences for people in their profession. Certainly anyone reading this book would fall within this limited scope. So if you are like most of the department chairs I have met, chances are that you are already doing a great job.

      Effective time management skills represent only a small subset of the skills needed to be a successful department chair, including those discussed in the general leadership books for department chairs, such as Buller (2006), Chu (2006), Conway (1996), Gmelch and Miskin (2004), Hecht and colleagues (1999), Leamyng (2007), Lees (2006), and Tucker (1992). It is certainly possible for someone to have good time management skills and yet do a poor job as department chair. More commonly, I have seen department chairs who are doing well in the job in spite of poor time management skills. Consider the following comment made by rock legend Alice Cooper in his 2007 book Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: When I think about all the time I wasted drunk, it makes me cringe. There are four albums that I don’t even remember writing or recording! I look back at those albums and there are some good songs on them. I would love to rerecord some of those tunes now that I am sober and make them into really great songs. They may have turned out okay, but I know they could have been so much better (p. 202). Similarly, many department chairs are doing a great job but could be doing an even greater job by overcoming their addiction to urgency, personal disorganization, and stress, and their lack of ability to prioritize. Many department chairs work 50, 60, or more hours a week, sacrificing their personal lives, shortchanging their families, and putting their health at serious risk.

      Mastering time management does not imply that hard work can be avoided, and in most cases the job of department chair will require a workweek of more than 40 hours, at least during busy periods. The 80/20 principle suggests that 80 percent of our results are accomplished through only 20 percent of our efforts, but to propose that 80 percent of what a department chair does in a week could be done in one day’s hard work is absurd. Neverthe­less, the 80/20 principle can be very useful in determining areas where department chairs can improve in their use of time.

      Like Alice Cooper, who traded his dangerous addiction to alcohol for healthier addictions to golf and music, you, by learning time management, can trade your addiction to urgency for healthier addictions to results and effectiveness. Applying the methods discussed in this book, you should be able to identify areas in which your use of time is not very effective and make changes that will result in spending more time on the aspects of your job that really matter and eliminating many that don’t. You may already be doing a great job, but with effective time management you could be doing even better and make your job more enjoyable.

      Personal Time Versus Department Time

      Most time management books are written with the individual person in mind. However, considering personal time management in isolation leads to the false belief that each individual’s time is worth more than everyone else’s. A department chair is not only responsible for managing his or her own personal

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