In a sports world trending toward specialization, the role of the small college athletics director still is very much that of a generalist. The key to being effective in multi-dimensional roles is to eliminate redundancy in your department using clarity and accountability.
Redundancy is the duplication of responsibilities or specific tasks. The most common issue for departments is not examining the “how” and “why” of the operation. Every athletics director needs to regularly examine the effectiveness and efficiency of his or her department. These simple steps will help.
Five Keys to Eliminating Redundancy
1. Step Back and Examine Your Operation
You need to review everyone’s job description for clarity or purpose, delineation of responsibility, scope of work and performance expectations. A newly hired athletics director has the perfect opportunity to engage in a review of his or her department’s operations to understand what people do and why. This also provides a natural opportunity to make changes where they need to be made. But this exercise is beneficial at any time, especially if a review of this type has not been done in several years.
2. Be Open to A Different Way
Engage everyone in the department in a dialogue about improving operations. You cannot make decisions based only on your own perspective. Coaches, support staff and even student-athletes can offer insights, if not solutions, to a better operation. Just because something is “the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t mean it’s the best or most effective way. Things change. People change. Circumstances change. We need to adapt as necessary.
3. Invest in Systems
Creating systems forces you to clarify purpose, responsibilities and intended outcomes. It is critical to define individual roles and responsibilities along with the expected working relationships within the department. Duplicated efforts are common when there is no clear way of doing things or an understanding of who is responsible for what. Systems help improve not only efficiency, but accountability as well.
4. Utilize Staff to Their Strengths
Sometimes good people get put into bad situations. You need to assess everyone’s strengths and weaknesses along with your department’s needs. If roles and responsibilities need to be adjusted or changed, do it. Personality types and skill sets vary widely. Finding the right fit for the job responsibility is more important than maintaining job titles.
5. Delegate and Trust
The athletics director must be able to set expectations and then let go. If you’ve put people in the right roles, properly outlined responsibilities and clearly defined outcomes there is nothing more for you to do. Let people do their jobs and hold them accountable.
Working smarter is not about working harder. It’s about clarifying what it is you want to do, communicating those objectives, assigning responsibility and holding people accountable. The athletics director must be the one to establish this expectation for department operations, but it is important to engage everyone in the assessment and solutions.