How to create the perfect principal entry plan [Part 5 of 6]

Most school leaders drown in operations because they try to do it all themselves — and call it productivity. This chapter shows you how to simplify, delegate, and score real wins by doing less ...

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Part 5: Pare Down to Scale Up Operations

When leaders start thinking about how to plan for a new school year, they usually think of operations first. That’s why I’ve saved it for last—because we have to plan for the important before the urgent.

Now that we’ve done that, let’s talk about how to handle the urgent.

It’s probably not hard for you to think of all of the operational challenges facing you: onboarding new faculty, welcoming students and families, establishing policies and managing district mandates, filing reports, creating the master schedule, and maintaining the facilities—just to start.

Three principles will help to guide us as we tackle the quickly-growing to-do list.

Less Is More

In 1960, Random House founder Bennett Cerf challenged one of his most famous authors to a bet: Write an entire book using just 50 words. The prize: $50.

That author was Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.

The book born out of this dare became his most beloved children’s book, Green Eggs and Ham, and it has sold over 200 million copies to date.

The surprising and profitable lesson from this little experiment was that less is more. The greater the constraint, the greater the creativity required. With only 50 words at his disposal, Dr. Seuss had to access his creativity in a new way, and it led to a breakthrough.

What’s even more remarkable is that 49 of the words he used only had one syllable! The 50th had three: anywhere.

Dr. Seuss liked this strategy of using constraints so much that he employed it in all of his future books, too (Clear, n.d.).

While handling operations can feel like a chore, we can access greater creativity—perhaps even make it fun—by establishing constraints for ourselves. Constraints work because they force us to boil the task down to its most essential elements and change the way we perceive what we’re actually trying to accomplish. They help us shed the weight of “the way we’ve always done things.”

French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1939) knew the power of distilling an idea or a task to its most fundamental levels: “It seems that  perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away” (p. 59).

Dedicate just one hour per day to handling operations-related issues, or set aggressive deadlines for operations tasks. In his blog, James Clear (n.d.) describes how he commits to a schedule for writing articles ahead of time, and it’s forced him to get creative with finding time for writing: “Constraints force you to get something done and don’t allow you to procrastinate. This is why I believe that professionals set a schedule for their production while amateurs wait until they feel motivated.”