One of the difficult jobs of any leader is to get people to do something differently or to get them to do what you need them to do.\u00a0 If only a clear command, beautifully expressed, was enough. \u00a0If only you could click your fingers and \u2018whoosh!\u2019 the task was done! Alas \u2026 even the most respected and beloved leader is not capable of inspiring 100% adherence to task – people can be tricky like that, the pesky things. Of course, the lean textbook answer to this challenging question would be \u201cinvolve people in the change, help them to see the problems and encourage them to come up with the solutions\u201d \u2026. \u00a0but what if you just need something done and fast? When there\u2019s no time to coerce or influence, you just need the thing to be completed. What then?<\/p>\n
When people are busy, when they are being bombarded by hundreds of emails, you do have to think of some kind of strategy to help them to get the task done. The obvious thing to think of here is the good old idiom of \u2018carrots and sticks\u2019.\u00a0 What rewards could be offered to tempt people to get the job done and what woody, painful, branchy things could be used to thrash the potential recipient in case the carrot isn\u2019t tempting enough?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take a live task that we have in the Business School at the moment.\u00a0 Much work has been done to make sure that academics formally register any papers that they have successfully written and published to a centralised system. This must happen to satisfy the requirements of terrifically important, \u201cResearch Excellence Framework\u201d exercise and our commitment to make our research \u201cOpen Access\u201d i.e. making sure our research is freely available beyond publishing paywalls.\u00a0 However, we also need to know about any of the positions of esteem that our academic faculty possess – are they Journal Editors, or Non Executive Directors of external organisations for example? How can we consistently and reliably help our academics to let us know of these appointments as and when they occur? This is an ongoing challenge in that we don\u2019t just need everyone to complete the exercise once, we need to know about incidences of esteem on a rolling basis.<\/p>\n
The Research Office set up a form to collect the information but how to get people to fill it out? Let\u2019s share our approach so far:<\/p>\n
But these three actions alone probably won\u2019t be enough. What carrot could be offered? What stick could be brandished? \u2018If you fill out your Esteem Tracker you\u2019ll get a latt\u00e9? But how can you sustain that over a long period of time where we need to encourage people to do it regularly? One idea we have is that we will regularly go into the Esteem Tracker and make sure that we celebrate successes that we find out about more widely across the School, perhaps even organising an event or Breakfast Briefing around them, so people can tangibly see the benefit of inputting into the Tracker. \u00a0I am also a major fan of seizing the moment and, within all staff meetings, research committees and such like, a strategic post of the Esteem portal link in a Zoom Chat will be amazing in terms of encouraging staff to click the link and update information then and there. Regular touch points for key issues are key \u2013 I\u2019ve written more on this here – The Power of Persistence – Sarah Lethbridge’s Lean Blog – Cardiff University<\/a><\/p>\n The stick is a bit harder to find, plus we don\u2019t really agree with sticks in Cardiff Business School! There was a massive hard spiky stick (not of our making) when it came to submitting papers to our University portal for the REF \u2013 if you hadn\u2019t registered your work, you couldn\u2019t submit it into the Exercise .. but there\u2019s no such threat for matters relating to esteem \u2013 other than, we hope, the annual \u2018it\u2019s part of your PDR\u2019 activity i.e. \u2018we expect you to do this\u2019.<\/p>\n It\u2019s critical to encourage ownership of course, and when it comes to information about your achievements, you’d hope that there was an automatic incentive to be clear about what these achievements are … so one point of entry, one self-orientated completion of task could be really helpful – this is where staff web profile pages could play a role.\u00a0 Can the Esteem Tracker automatically update to their web profile page, or vice versa? Can we put the esteem tracker element on our web profile pages and extract the information we need from there? \u00a0To encourage confidence in the data collection task it is critical that the organisation isn\u2019t asking multiple times for the same things, that we make it easy and it should be in the academic\u2019s best interests to keep their publicly shared profile information as up to date and accurate as possible.<\/p>\n Will that still be enough however? What else could we turn to? As ever, the component of TIME, and how to be in command of time, is critically important I feel when trying to encourage people to do tasks, perhaps even more so than sticks and carrots. How can we encourage people to carve out and protect some time to doing this task?<\/p>\n My friend Dr Kerry Moore shared an approach that the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies have (informally) taken to carve out and protect time to do the very important task of writing. It\u2019s called the Pomodoro method because it involves dedicating periods of time to different tasks, which could be organised by a Pomodoro (tomato in Italian) cooking timer intervals (think 70s kitchen, red tomato that you can twist in two to set the time) being set at various intervals. Put simply, it requires a group of people getting together to proactively organise their time in a disciplined way. They write intensively for 20 minutes, have a 5 minute break, and then repeat 4 times. \u00a0You can listen to Kerry describe this approach excellently here: https:\/\/cardiff.cloud.panopto.eu\/Panopto\/Pages\/Viewer.aspx?id=1e2807a1-dd64-419b-bdef-ae8300d4edef<\/a><\/p>\n As she states at the end of the video the benefits of using the Pomodoro method for writing are:<\/p>\n \u201cProductivity .. and because of that it\u2019s rewarding. That sense of fulfilment that I have actually achieved something this week \u2026 it’s tangible and I think the protective time is really important ..it’s an easier way to .. discipline yourself to making sure that you do make time for things that are easily pushed aside when more immediate concerns .. come up .. the .. accountability \/ support of colleagues \u2026 there’s not many things where you can say – I look forward to it and it’s sociable .. it’s a fun part of the week, but also, I work really hard\u201d.<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to be trying the Pomodoro method in the Business School to encourage writing, but I also want to set up some Pomodoro type \u2018Update your Profile Page and Esteem Tracker\u2019 all staff sessions, to help academics carve out the time and space to do these important tasks, together.\u00a0 To hopefully move them away from being a chore, to an opportunity to get together in a light, enjoyable way, and get the work done.<\/p>\n