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To start the Blog, I have decided to start with a series of ten articles which I have written as part of a Monthly Newsletter I write called the Czar Report. This Newsletter is available for subscription at my web site www.the-czar.com, so if you like what you see in these extracts from the Newsletter, I encourage you to sign up. If you do that, you will also start recieving a free, weekly newsletter.
Please enjoy:
THE LAW OF ADMINISTRIVIA – The Greatest Barrier to Leadership Success
One of the long-standing principles in economics is called Gresham’s law. It states that if two currencies are circulating in an economy—one a high-quality currency that everybody trusts and believes in; the other a poor-quality currency that everybody thinks has substantial risk—then “the bad currency will drive out the good currency.” This means that everybody will want to hoard the good currency and give the bad to other people whenever they can.
In leading, the same principle applies. I call it “The Law of Administrivia”. That Law postulates that… Required or less useful activity drives out desirable and useful activity. In other words, people will do the tasks that they think are easy, trivial, and required first, in order to get them out of the way. Then, with the time left over, they will do what is desirable or useful but not required. The amount of trivial administrative tasks (administrivia) tends to grow once the boss concludes you are able to handle what you have already been given to accomplish. Eventually you do less and less of what you want or need to do and much more of the administrative work. Worse still, since administrivia is usually easy work, while being a leader is hard work, you end up spending more time on the easy jobs. After a while, all that gets done is the required, the trivial, and maybe even the useless.
Of course, not all administrative work is meaningless or trivial. Indeed, much of the success in an organization rests on process and process controls. However, if they are the only activities a leader has time for, then they will ultimately hamper the leader’s effectiveness. Frequently, bosses forget how much time and energy real leadership really takes. Effective leaders use planning, organization and control as tools to handle the administrative work flow, thus allowing more time for the job of leading. If the administrivia consumes your day, then leadership will be driven out. If the administrative work is effective, then you will be free to lead.
Parts of the Law of Administrivia have been recognized for some time. Saul Gellerman wrote in 1968, “The simple fact is that most managerial jobs are already more than full-time jobs. The typical manager has more than enough to worry about. His typical solution is to arrange his problems in order of priority, deal with the ones he has time for, and just ignore the rest. In other words, that which is urgent gets done and that which is merely important frequently doesn’t.” What we are adding to this concept is that the “urgent” is often not essential to the mission, it is just easier to request or to accomplish.
Look at the activities that you engage in and determine if they are critical to your efforts to succeed. If your efforts to lead are frustrated because you are preoccupied with administrative tasks, then you need to find a way to break loose from the constraints of those activities. You will learn that if you do the leader work well, you will have plenty of time for administrative tasks. Free yourself from the shackles of administrivia with the realization that leader work is the only way to achieve your goals and objectives. It is the “good work.” You must fight the natural and destructive tendency to be ruled by “The Law of Administrivia.”
The Czar
