Administrators' Superficial Stuff

I was cleaning out a folder this morning and came across a form I filled in 3 years ago. The principal wanted us to list our "Personal Goals". No one has looked at it since I completed it in August, 2008. This task supported a theory I call 'Administrators' Superficial Stuff'.  The acronym is related to how the staff sees the administrator when such an activity is introduced. I was guilty of introducing these kinds of activities when I was an administrator. The process for coming up with one of these tasks goes something like this: an administrator, during the summer or during a lull in the usual rush of jobs involved in managing a school, gets an idea. They feel it is a great idea, and most of the time the idea is for all the right reasons. A few minutes on a computer creating a form or adding the idea to an agenda, and the idea now represents time out of the lives of other people. The administrator has now created a monkey for everyone. (See Blog from May 10th on monkey management.)
What administrators often fail to comprehend (myself included) is how much time they will have to spend taking care of the monkey. Take the "Personl Goals" form for example. If this was to be a serious effort to support faculty in achieving personal goals, the adminstrator should have collected the forms, read them, and had a pre and post conference with everyone. The faculty was about 40 members at the time . For sake of ease let's say the process takes the principal a total of 30 minutes a faculty member. That's 20 hours! Also once you start mucking around in someone's personal goals, there's no telling what kinds of monkeys might hop out of their cages. That is just the administrator's time. The 40 faculty members would need to fill in the form and attend the pre and post conferences. Let's say each faculty member spends an average of an hour filling in forms, scheduling and attending conferences, and waiting for the administrator to see them. That's 40 hours. The school secretary would have to check-off who turned in the form, schedule the pre and post conferences, communicate with faculty and administrator. At an average of 10 minutes per faculty member that is 2.5 hours. For a total of 62.5 hours of school personnel time.
Is it worth 62.5 hours of school personnel time to properly support a process for  40 faculty members to reflect on personal goals for the coming school year and discuss these goals with their supervisor? I'm not sure. I think that if you start the process you need to commit to the follow through.  In the principal's defense he did get shot a week before spring break and spent several weeks in a local hospital before being medevaced to Canada. After missing last year, he came back this year. He didn't have us fill in our personal goals.

For those interested my goals were: save money and improve my Spanish, sketching skills, and golf. I've acheived most of them. We live on a golf course. I play at least 3 times a week. The cost was $50 a month, so that didn't impact the first goal (save money) too much. My Spanish is better. I watch a Spanish telenovela every weeknight. The first two years I watched 2 a night. I suppose it was my advancing years that made it difficult to stay awake through the second one this year. A strategy I was going to use was to translate something (newspaper, book, comic,...) every day. That didn't happen. There is something I can shift into my retirement goals. Also, we will be leaving here before our current telenovela finishes, but it is now playing on the Spanish cable channel we get back in Florida. My sketching skills haven't improved very much. I've been working on drawing people. It is rare and usually pure luck if someone is able to recognize the subject of my drawing. I usually sketch people during faculty meetings. Faculty meetings ... those are often another example of "Administrators' Superficial Stuff". At least I found them useful for working on a personal goal.