A Leadership Reflection During the Pandemic
[This reflection is from Phil Immordino, Manager - Client Systems Support for OIT at Princeton Univerisity. He is a current participant in the MOR Leaders Program. Phil may be reached at [email protected].]
As I write this I hope that you and all your families are safe and well during this worldwide pandemic. Many of us are now sheltering in place, working from home, and helping our institutions successfully do distance learning. This is something most of our schools have never done before. It’s a challenge, but we as IT leaders are an integral part of its success.
Since my return from our Stanford session, I have focuses on two areas: Delegating and Developing others. In terms of delegating, I was already doing lots of it previously, but I found I needed to do more. I self-confess that I had a lot of occupational hobbies. These were deterring me from having the time to do other things. I analyzed each one and turned them into delegation exercises to other direct and indirect reports. This has helped me also challenge my staff more by not always answering their questions for them. I now try to work with them so that they come up with the answer instead of me.
In Developing others, I decided to change up my group meeting methodology. In my group of 3 teams, each team has a bi-weekly meeting. Instead of always leading the meeting (me doing all the talking) as I had done in the past, I now ask the team members a couple of days prior to the meeting to come up with topics they want to discuss. We then spend a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting to pick out 3 to 5 of the topics for the discussion. I ask that the one who brought up the topic lead the discussion. I’m finding this engages the staff and allows any one of them to lead part of the meeting.
With recent events, if there was one thing that’s helped me get through these tough times its been now having the ability to comfortably delegate. These past two weeks have been a mad dash in getting our faculty ready to be able to teach remotely. Meeting upon meeting to discuss what we needed to put in place to make this all work smoothly. I found that I was able to quickly delegate the things that needed to get done so that I could better keep planning out scenarios that kept our operations running should we have to work remotely. My entire team is now working remotely as of today. We have a plan of action to do that successfully because with my being able to delegate I had the time to work that plan with my senior management.
Look forward to seeing everyone remotely next week.
Stay safe.
Phil Immordino