Page 5 - Leadership Basics 8

Foreword

Take a straw poll of your colleagues and ask what they need ‘more of’ to implement reform,
motivate teachers, improve student outcomes and generally achieve their vision for the department
or other unit. It can be guaranteed that almost all of them will answer that they need more time.
Like you, they have discovered that time is as valuable, and as scarce, a resource as money and
people willing to take on extra responsibility. They know that being a leader is about getting things
done through other people, but that before this can be done effectively and efficiently they must be
able to organize themselves. A big part of this is being able to manage their time.
To develop higher‐level time management skills, mid‐level leaders need a system or plan which
reduces the time they spend on minor or unimportant tasks, and so increases the time they spend
on actions which are really important both personally and professionally. The increasingly complex
nature of school in terms of rapid reform demands more than ever that we consciously consider and
plan how they can best use time to produce maximum results. This is vital if we are to ensure we
have time for ourselves. The first step in managing time is to determine or clarify what it is that you
really want to achieve as a professional – you vision and propose. Once this is set it is important to
work out how you can better organize your time to achieve this purpose – this is called efficient time
usage and is all about organizing time better. As a starting point for this booklet, we assume that
you have already articulated your purpose as a leader, except for a small section we will concentrate
on the later, or the practical strategies which can be used to better organize and utilise your time.
By the end of this module, you will have:

 Explored one approach to controlling and maximizing your time.
 Thought carefully about how you presently spend their time.

 Challenged yourself to reduce factors which ‘steal’ your time.
 Considered ways in which you can better organize their time.

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