The behaviors of skillful administrators
Bell Pull, St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, Winston Salem, NC
Last week Matt Lindsay and Jesyca Hope from the Kansas Independent Colleges Association (KICA) invited me to give a workshop on academic structure to 14 Chief Academic Officers. Thanks to Matt and Jesyca for the invitation. And thanks to the CAOs for reminding me what is good in the work of college administration.
It isn’t a great time to be an administrator. Everyone says they want to lead, hardly anyone says they want to administrate. The reputation of administration is declining and under siege. Managers are busy building empires, raising their salaries, and amassing power. They are more concerned about systems, efficiency, and consistency than they are about helping an institution actually run. They duck responsibility and shun the hardest work. Or at least that is how the story goes.
The story is probably true somewhere; all stories are true in one place or another. And yet it is more routinely true that administrators are doing hard, complex, fraught, nearly invisible work so that the institutions they serve and the colleagues they love can get to the next day. The most skillful of them do their work in particular ways. This is what those ways look like to me.
Administrators are ministers, not leaders. The root of “administrate” is also the root of “ministry” and “minus” and “minor.” That root doesn’t necessarily imply holiness or spirituality. But it does imply a willingness to serve an organization, to care for its soul, to be subordinate to it. Most good administrators were great at something else before they became good at their current job: they were teachers or scholars or analysts or problem-solvers. It is a measure of their commitment that those former greatnesses stay behind as they become skillful administrators.
Administrators watch much and speak little. Skillful administrators are quiet in part because everyone they meet wants to talk to them: the employee with a complaint or an idea, the leader with an imperative, the vendor with a product. They are quiet, too, because they are watching–seeing what is common and what is rare, weaving together threads of conversation into a story. They know that to say too much too soon is to lose the chance to hear more. And they know that when they speak, others will take their words as pronouncements not considerations. And so, when they speak, they speak briefly, and only of the things most important at that moment.
Administrators see smoke where there is smoke. Advocates and grievants, leaders and followers all want to see fire wherever there is smoke. Fire is exciting. It illuminates. It burns. There may be fire, it may yet come. When it does come, a skillful administrator will see it first. But until it does, skillful administrators see and work in the smoke, and remind people that what they are seeing is, in fact and obviously, smoke, before it is anything else.
Administrators may like people but they prefer being alone. This, too, is in part an accommodation to reality. People come to administrators for things: funding, permission, information. It is the thing, not the interaction with the administrator, that is their goal. And so administrators pass entire days alone surrounded by people. That aloneness is a gift. An administrator who serves an institution well will, in time, displease everyone, and so comfort in isolation is a necessarily healthy thing. And independence allows the skillful administrator to do the right thing, at the right time, for the good of the institution.
Administrators know that no plan will take them where a path does not lead. The organization will make plans. That is what organizations do. Plans intend to define the future, to shape it in favor of the organization. No plan has that strength. When it is unleashed in the actual world, that world will push the plan where the world will. The administrator’s job is to note the path, to show how the path turns the plan into something else, perhaps spectacular, certainly more real, and then to help the institution make good on that new thing that no one planned exactly.
Administrators care about systems and tools but they give their organizations ritual and love. Most organizations want to be machines.They build systems using tools–software, templates, rules, policies–that become techniques, algorithms of action, habits of distance from reality. Techniques hope to manipulate, they see people as objects. Administrators know that their organization would not be an organization without systems and tools. But they know, too, that systems and tools leave a gap at the organization’s heart. Skillful administrators fill that gap with rituals that knit people together, and love when only love will work. Most people never see these things. The start-of-the year event is just fun, a kind word in a moment of crisis is just the right thing. The administrator knows, though, that without such rituals and kindness, the people who rely on the organization would suffer more.
And so, the good administrator plans the next event, gets the agenda right, speaks about the right things in the right ways, takes note of the sadness and the joy in the room, takes care of the people who bear them. And then goes back to the office, to hone the policies and update the agenda for next year.