How are we investigating our story about time?

I look for patterns in moments, interactions, events and behaviors. It’s part of my Signature Presence and likely it’s the reason I am so drawn to human-centered design and to Leadership+Design as an organization and community. We build experiences where people come together, learn from each other and from those they serve, and interact with new content or mental models to improve their leadership. However, these experiences are investments of time. Professional learning and change do not happen spontaneously.

Over the past year or so, I have grown curious about the shifts (real or perceived) in human behavior relating to time. We all have the same number of hours in a day, but we interpret this reality differently, and our different interpretations drive actions or inaction. So often, we tell ourselves a story about time that strengthens a status quo in our individual leadership or the way our institutions show up for our students, families and faculty. What I have learned about stories is that often they should be investigated further to allow for deeper understanding of the root causes.

When I lead design thinking workshops or work with teams on any empathy building process, we discuss a set of truths that warrant deep empathy work: 

People don’t do what you think they do. 

People don’t do what they say they do. 

People don't do what they think they do. 

These sentences show that only by remaining curious and deepening your understanding of the complex challenges at hand, will we get a fuller picture of what’s happening below the surface. Since the use of time is a complex human challenge that affects our ability to make good things happen in our schools, I wanted to share some wonderings. 

#1: How are we spending time on professional learning?

For an educator or leader, professional learning can feel like a “just in time” valuable intervention, an investment in skill building, or an out of touch waste of time. Since it’s hard to create more PD days, evaluating how people are using this time is one of the best ways to increase its impact. Are you, as a leader, making the best use of your team’s time?

Here are some of the questions we ask at L+D:  

• What’s the best time of the day and year to engage adult learners? 

• How do you know? 

• Is it true across all generations, genders, experience levels, and differences in work-life balance?

• How does professional learning connect to the bigger picture of your school’s vision, values, and portrait of a graduate? 

• Are you spending the “right” amount of time on specific areas of your vision? 

• Are you spending time on control and compliance or in building efforts to achieve your vision? 

• How do you evaluate the personalized needs and growth of those attending professional learning?

• How can you assess the value of a professional learning experience?

• What empathy or measurement tools do you use to assess impact?  

• How often are you willing to reflect and make necessary pivots? 

#2: Are we maximizing human capital?

In coaching conversations, we ask whether professionals spend enough time on the skills and roles they are best at. Also, are they spending time on what they were hired for? Many leaders we partner with complain that they are firefighting or triaging all the time. At times, triage may be exactly what someone was hired for, but often it comes from misalignment of time management, priorities, or a culture where crisis management permeates the day to day. If you can get ahead of the day to day and carve out time for big projects, your impact (and job satisfaction) will be exponentially larger.

Questions leaders can ask themselves: 

• IIs the perception of time on specific tasks accurate? 

• How do you know? 

• Have you done a recent ”time audit” (like a food or activity journal) for yourself to gain self-empathy on where your time goes?

• If not, are you avoiding doing it or forgetting that it is an option to investigate?  

• Is there a story you are telling yourself about your role, skills, needs of the organization that is impacting how you spend your time? 

• Are you worried you aren’t good at what you are doing or not doing, have FOMO (fear of missing out), or do you just not like the stuff you are doing? Be honest. 

• What needs to shift for you to reallocate your time? Are the shifts internal or external? Skill/tool based, or something more structural?

Questions leaders can ask their teams: 

• Is the organizational structure supportive of the current or future vision of the school/organization? Are the roles designed to invest the time needed to achieve your goals? 

• How often do you conduct a “time audit” (by day, week or month) of your teams to ensure time is spent on the organizational priorities? 

• What needs to shift culturally, structurally, or financially to have impactful conversations on misalignments of time and priorities or outcome measures? 

• Are certain areas being neglected (like managing teacher professional learning) when you believe you have enough time allocated to those areas? 

#3: How do we allocate time to better understand our organizational norms and expectations?

The use of time and the relationship to spoken or unspoken norms is deeply emotional. The way leaders listen and gather these experiences, and name and make explicit the mental models that are being used help organizations to operate more smoothly.

Questions leaders can ask their teams: 

• How would you define the culture of time in your school organization? 

• How does this culture impact: 

• Meeting start/end times and the level of organization during the meeting? 

• The level of staff or faculty engagement? Assumptions of performance? 

• Parent engagement or boundaries held by the school?  

• The learning experience for students in classrooms? 

• Do you have conversations within your teams to name cultural or personal expectations about time? 

• How does gender, age, race, hierarchy show up when expectations are discussed or made? 

• Are these conversations held in safe spaces with curiosity about diversity and different backgrounds? 

• How do the expectations about time relate to change management? 

• Do you “not have time” to address the elephants in the room, the big picture, the future of the school, challenges the school is experiencing, etc? 

#4: How can we be playful and infuse joy into our adult world of work?

Joy is one of L+D’s core values. We believe joy is transformative and integral to healthy processes of change, creativity and growth. However, over and over again when priorities are laid on the table and time is allocated into boxes on a master schedule, joy and play are treated as non-essential. Maintaining a commitment to creating connection through joy and play will strengthen your community and serve to strengthen organizational impact. 

Questions leaders can ask themselves: 

• What comes up for you when your team is playing, creating or thinking, and how can doing this critical work be an expression of your unique gifts and innate joy?

• Is there a space for sharing what brings joy and safety to play together as professionals? 

• How is diversity honored as a community that has many ways to find joy? 

• Is joy an outcome to achieve, a result of an activity or meeting or is it something deeper? 

• How can we ask this question to the people we lead, and more importantly how can we embody this exploration as an organization? 

The above questions came to my mind as patterns emerged both in and outside of my work life. I am curious about how communities can thrive if we don’t ask ourselves why we feel the way we feel and are more aware of how others feel. A few years ago a partner said, “time is a slippery thing” and yet it communicates so much regarding what is or is not a priority.

I encourage you to think about the Wonderings. What you would add to the list? What questions you are willing to ask regardless of what may come up?