Are We Busy or Are We Making Progress?

"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." – Michael Porter

The new academic year is in full swing. Students are back in classes. Committees are receiving their new charges. Workload assignments are being operationalized. Everyone is busy. Someone may ask a simple question: What is actually moving?

In academic pharmacy, activity is easy to see. Progress can be harder to recognize. A full calendar, a long list of deliverables, and a steady stream of meetings tell us people are working. They don’t necessarily tell us whether our important priorities are advancing.

Key Idea: Busyness is evidence of activity but not necessarily progress. Leaders need to periodically step out of the flow of work and ask what is moving, what is consuming capacity, and where a different choice may be needed.

Here are three ways to make that shift to turn your choice into next-level progress and results.

1. Define: What Are We Actually Trying to Move?

Key Idea: Before we can assess progress, we need to know what progress looks like. We often list priorities by what we plan to do: launch a program, create a task force, or review the curriculum. Those are all legitimate activities, but they don’t tell us what we are actually trying to change.

A more useful question is: What should be different because we did this work? Research by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found that progress in meaningful work, even small progress, can have a powerful effect on motivation and experience at work. For leaders, that means we shouldn’t have to wait until the final outcome arrives to recognize meaningful movement.

Try This:

• Choose one important priority and finish this sentence:

  If we make meaningful progress on this priority, what will be different?

• Compare your answer with the work currently underway. Are your activities actually designed to create that difference?

Example:
A college identifies faculty development as a priority. Workshops are scheduled, surveys are completed, and committees are formed. That’s activity. Progress might mean more faculty have clear development goals, are accessing opportunities aligned with those goals, and are actually moving toward them.

2. Examine: Is the Work Creating Movement?

Key Idea: Hard work and progress aren’t always the same thing. Work has a way of accumulating. A new initiative gets added. Another committee forms. A meeting stays on the calendar because it has always been there. Research on initiative overload has described what happens when organizations continue adding priorities without stopping or redesigning existing work. Eventually, everything competes for the same limited capacity.

Try This:

• Look at the activities surrounding one important priority and ask:

  What is clearly helping us move?

  What might be useful, but we are not sure?

  What is consuming capacity without enough value?

• Answer the question: What is moving because of this work?

Example:
An enrollment task force has been meeting for months. The team is engaged, reports are produced, and updates appear regularly on the leadership agenda. Yet recruitment practices haven’t changed and prospective-student engagement hasn’t improved. The issue may not be effort. The question is whether all that effort is creating movement.

3. Choose: Where Should Our Capacity Go?

Key Idea: Prioritization isn’t just deciding what matters. At some point, it requires deciding what will receive less. This is where leadership gets harder. Adding something is easier than stopping something. Capacity is finite. As Michael Porter reminds us, choices require require trade-offs. The Inner Leader has to step outside the activity long enough to ask: Am I making a strategic choice or simply allowing the work to accumulate?

Try This: Conduct an Activity-to-Progress Check (Take 15 minutes)

• NAME: Where are we trying to move? Define what meaningful progress would look like.

• NOTICE: Where is our effort going? Identify what is consuming time, attention, and capacity.

• CHOOSE: What deserves our capacity? Sort the work into Advance, Question, or Reduce/Stop.

• REDIRECT: What will we do differently? Choose one activity to stop, reduce, delegate, redesign, or deprioritize and decide where that capacity should go instead.

Final Thoughts:

There will always be plenty of work for leaders to do. The challenge is making sure activity doesn’t quietly become a substitute for progress. Sometimes leadership means making a choice about what deserves our capacity and what no longer does. Progress tells us the work is taking us somewhere.

Next Steps to Accelerate Your Progress:

Is your team working but struggling to move its most important priorities forward? EduLead-Rx works with academic pharmacy leaders to clarify priorities, strengthen strategic leadership, and turn organizational effort into next-level progress and results.

For more information, contact info@eduleadrx.com or schedule time to talk at edulead.as.me

#AcademicPharmacy #PharmacyLeadership #EduLeadRx #LeadershipDevelopment #StrategicLeadership #OrganizationalEffectiveness #Coaching