Management is hard. Very hard. It takes special skills to meet the needs of your staff, meet the demands of your superiors, all the while getting your own work done. Sometimes without the authority you need to act quickly, especially if you work in a bureaucratic agency. In addition to the actual work, you must also deal with your feelings and the emotions of the front lines, at the same time showing support for leadership’s decisions, even if you don’t agree with them. I understand if you’re exhausted dealing with all your management responsibilities. Your work takes a toll.
And it takes a lot of time of time do. Because there are your own job tasks to complete in addition to providing the support and nurturance your team needs. You need your team to be at their best to best meet the needs of the people you serve. You need to be at your best in order to direct your team and deal with leadership. How do you find time to do it all? There’s only so much time. And it’s important it all gets done.
Prioritizing
Make a list of everything, no matter how small or trivial, you have to do. Include both your job tasks and your people tasks. Then categorize them as urgent, important, administrative, or nice to complete. The urgent tasks are those with immediate deadlines that cannot be negotiated. The important tasks are those that must be done but have no specific deadlines. These include the job responsibilities you are evaluated on, building your staff, and completing work that has future deadlines. Administrative tasks include things like scheduling shifts, making copies, ordering supplies, and overseeing a mailing. Nice to complete are those that tasks that add the finishing touches to a job pretty much done or something that you have taken on that are not part of your job responsibilities.
Then take the categories, with all the tasks you have identified under them, and order them:
1. Urgent
2. Important
3. Administrative
4. Nice to complete.
Then go under each category and number each task in the order it needs to be completed, using the same criteria again: Immediate deadlines, future deadlines, job evaluation criteria, building team relationships, administrative, or not in my job description.
By the end of the exercise, you will have a prioritized list of all the tasks you need to complete. Now add one more thing to your list of tasks: self-care activities. Often, we get so pre-occupied with what needs to be done for the job that we forget about ourselves. We are so busy pouring out what we have that we forget to fill up. Filling yourself up, doing something to rejuvenate yourself, is extremely important, particularly given the demands and stresses of your job. If you don’t take time to fill up, sooner or later you won’t have anything to pour out.
Scheduling
Now take each prioritized and ordered task and put a time frame around it. Actually schedule, in minutes and hours, when you are going to do what. Make sure to include filling yourself up time. This was, you schedule time for the important things as well as the urgent things. And you are addressing the needs of leadership as defined in your job description.
Got more than eight hours worth of work to do?
Consider delegating some of the administrative tasks. Or not taking on the nice to complete tasks. You can always negotiate with your superiors what exact tasks they want specifically you to complete or if someone else on your team can do it.
Still got more than eight hours worth of work?
Have a talk with your supervisor about your workload. It is unfair to you to ask more than is humanly possible. I wouldn’t say that to my supervisor though. What I would tell my supervisor are the negative effects my team, the agency, and I are experiencing and ask him or her to problem solve with me. If your supervisor thinks your workload is reasonable, ask him or her for some help in managing your time. If you are doing the best you can and are still not meeting expectations, your supervisor should be able to help you further prioritize your tasks, teach you how to do the tasks more efficiently, or provide technology or other support that will help you do your job as expected.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Of course, my suggestions only work if you are getting clear messages from your supervisor. If you’re not, then you need to talk to your supervisor and ask him or her for the immediate priority. Don’t let him or her say all of it. Go in with your own plan and ask if that is acceptable. Or go in with options about what results you will get by doing one task before or after another. Don’t just present a problem. Present a solution to the problem. Your supervisor may revise or not accept your solution, but you have shown initiative for getting your job done. Kudos to you!
Then document the conversation. If you are getting mixed messages, you need some way to remind your supervisor of the plan he or she agreed to.
Sometimes leadership’s priorities change in response to changes in the internal or external environment. You may or may not know why the changes are necessary. And that information may or may not be shared with you. Sometimes you will know right away about the changes. Other times you will know much later. Show initiative and be proactive by regularly checking in with your supervisor and asking if priorities are still the same. Maybe at a weekly or monthly supervision session. Your prioritized list is a good place to start. I always appreciated my staff checking in with me before putting in a lot of time on a project to make sure that it was still what I wanted. It also gave us time to report on progress and clarify any outstanding details about the project. Which helped me do my job better and prioritize my own tasks.
Wrapping It All Up
Management is hard, especially when everything is important. Take the time to plan your day, week, and month. Don’t just fly by the seat of your pants and wonder why you are not meeting expectations or your team is not performing. Keep the lines of communication with your supervisor. Ask questions. Present solutions. Take initiative. Be proactive. Check in periodically. Do the most important tasks first. And don’t forget to take of you too. You will find that you will get what you need to get done when it needs to get done. With personal reserves intact.
**********************************************************
About the Author
From volunteer to executive director, Joanne Oppelt has been working with nonprofits for more than 30 years. Rising through the ranks at various agencies, she built effective, efficient, sustainable fundraising systems at every stop. Now she shares her hard-learned secrets. An experienced fundraiser, author, trainer, and consultant, Joanne’s mission is to help growth-driven nonprofits build sustainable revenue streams. She envisions a world where nonprofits are equipped with the tools necessary to sustain themselves. Joanne is the author or four books and co-author of twelve. She can be found at https://www.joanneoppelt.com/
2 Responses