Running an impactful, effective education organization takes discipline. Yes, you read that correctly. And yes, I can see you visibly cringe or bristle in response to the word discipline. Your reaction is understandable, given that in an education context discipline usually refers to punishment meted out to students who don’t behave in an accepted way or who don’t follow the rules of the school.
To be clear, so that you don’t need to cringe, and so that you continue reading, I am not talking about disciplinemeaning punishment (noun) or to punish (verb). I am talking about discipline meaning “orderly or prescribed conduct” (noun), “training in habits of order and precision” (noun) and “to impose order upon” (verb). All of these are from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. This meaning of discipline is about using consistent and precise habits or routines if you will, to create order. It is about having a structure or framework for our activities, to incrementally build competence and to incrementally move towards an outcome or result.
Discipline is not a bad word. Writers talk about having discipline to write a certain amount every day, moving towards creating a final work, sentence by sentence and page by page. Athletes talk about having discipline to train and practice every day, to achieve a desired level of skill and fitness. Athletes also talk about trusting the process or the discipline to get them the results they are looking for. Even when they lose a competition, a game or a match, athletes pick themselves up and go back to their process. Look at writers and athletes with long, successful careers and you will see discipline.
So, what does discipline or “orderly or prescribed conduct” look like on a daily basis in an education organization? Here are some ideas:
- Having efficient, effective and documented procedures for key daily activities that everyone follows.
- Having clear and documented project workflows so that work transfers smoothly from one team to the next as a project (such as developing a new program) proceeds.
- Taking the time to put data into information systems accurately and completely to generate clean and useful data reports.
- Everyone doing the tasks and activities they were hired to do, and not things they want to do or feel like doing at a particular point in time.
- Organizing digital resources and documents in a transparent framework, using appropriate storage technologies, so they are accessible to everyone who needs them.
- Employees and their direct supervisors making sure that employees invest time and effort to learn the skills they need to do their jobs. Not what they want to learn, but what they need to learn—whether it be using Microsoft Excel, a student information system or a document storage technology.
- And one that is particularly important for education organizations with a revenue-generating mandate, following a clearly documented business development pipeline, with well-defined activities, that incrementally moves opportunities from concept to implementation.
The question of discipline in our education organizations is also crucial to discussions of how we use our time. When we talk about not having enough time to do our job, one of the first things to look at is how we are actually spending our time. It may very well be that we have too much on our plates, in which case look at what can be delegated to someone else. But in some cases, feeling time pressures results from not being disciplined—not making good decisions about how to spend our time and how NOT to spend our time.
Bring discussions about discipline into your education organization. Get everyone on the same page about the usage of the word. Then identify where you are collectively and individually disciplined and where you are not. As all writers and athletes know, success is not random luck. Success is built through relentless, consistent discipline. So too with education organizations.