What great education leaders subscribe to? What makes them great? What happens in their hundreds of daily interactions that allow them to get the best from people?
Higher education management is challenging. Managing the education system and becoming true guardians of children’s future requires putting in place lean management: that cuts the waste to a minimum and improves quality & consistency of output. It’s a daunting task.
Simple can be much harder than complex. You may have to work harder to find ways to make something simple.
Whether you are president, dean or director, here are 6 basic principles that will aid you in achieving leaner operations at your higher education institution.
- Play it like chess; not checkers.
There are numerous styles of management, but one thing common between truly great managers is they discover each person’s uniqueness and capitalize on it. They play it like a game of chess, not checkers. The difference?
In checkers, all pieces are the same and can move in the same manner. They are interchangeable. In chess, each piece has its strengths and weaknesses. To win, you need to know how each piece moves and bring these different strengths together.
Higher Education Management is highly individual-centric. A critical part of education leaders’ job is to find ways for individuals – students as well as teachers – to grow, while making sure the institution reaches new heights as well.
- Understand the thin line between a leader and a manager.
While both, a leader and a manager, assume supervisory functions; the job of a manager is more people-oriented, and leaders is more institution centric.
While great education managers discover unique characteristics of each of their team members; great leaders find universal binding points and capitalize on them. The latter requires finding causes/issues that cut through different sexes, ages, races, and personalities.
Both functions are pertinent for effective higher education management.
- Five functions of best practices in higher education.
Successful higher education leaders develop their management style around five sets of general functions: Planning, Organization, Staffing, Controlling and Leading.
Planning is about choosing appropriate goals and determining strategies to achieve them. The organization is the process of establishing strong work relationships geared toward organizational goals. Staffing includes selecting and recruiting capable teachers. Controlling is about evaluating where you are going wrong. And leading entails a vision that keeps the organization together.
- Follow the Pareto Principle.
First fix the easiest and most obvious areas, and then go about the rest. This is called the Pareto Principle or 80/20. It advocates that in improving an organization, about 80% of the changes you want to bring can be incorporated by putting in only 20% of efforts. Once done, you can focus on the remaining 20% of the areas where you wish to bring improvement.
- Emphasize on organizational efficiency first.
In higher education management, you can lead by focusing first on organizational efficiency that includes:
- Your Customer – Students (ask what their needs are, what would give them better value for money, etc.),
- Your Product – Education (How can you make it better, faster and affordable)
- Other areas – Teachers, Infrastructure & Administration (How can you promote efficiency?)
Popular executive education programs use 5S model to get started with organizational efficiency. They are:
- Sort (Remove everything that’s not needed),
- Straighten (Establishing transparency so labels and arrangements are easily located),
- Shine (Inspect everything minutely),
- Standardize (Checklists and audits to recognize abnormalities), and
- Sustain (Making changes a common practice).
- Have a continuous improvement mindset.
There is no one correct solution in higher education management. Changes are needed to be continuously reviewed or reformed. The idea of lean management works because one takes a proactive approach to simplify practices by also innovating them par with the new age. However, once the change is implemented, it’s easy to slip back into old practices. This requires a continuous improvement attitude that would sustain the best practices.