Career Growth & Leadership
Spring Forward with New Boundaries!
Spring is in the air! As many look forward to the Spring season, this can be a great time for you and your office to consider a new approach to boundaries to go with it! Developing new procedures in terms of how you as a team interact externally and internally can be helpful, but it is critical to empower team members by setting standards and sticking to them.
Options may include working with leadership to focus on emphasizing deadlines and lead times via highlighting rules and policies. Within organizations that have routinely allowed those deadlines to pass and allowed submissions to occur unhindered by faculty missing deadlines, now might be a good time to assess and express again what the rules are.
Beyond that, you have to be committed to those rules and sticking with them!
Deadlines and Late Submissions
“Your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency.” If you have routinely allowed late submissions, for example, fitting in submissions beyond internal deadlines and lack of action regarding missing deadlines, you need to clearly articulate that it is a new season with new plans regarding enforcement.
Consequences should be defined to ensure individuals adhere to written policy with no excuses-beyond actual emergencies due to unexpected circumstances. Explanations within policy may specify that without proof of an emergency, failure to plan ahead will not be accepted as it results in an expectation for the review of their colleagues’ submissions to be disrupted, to accommodate.
No
“No” might be the one word that isn’t said enough. For the most part, research administrators want to be supportive and find a way to make things work. However, by not following policy, we might be making things worse and not better long term. By allowing boundaries to be flexed to the point of being broken, we could ultimately be encouraging abuse of policy, deadlines and staff members.
Setting Boundaries
When support from leadership is in place, it is critical to articulate to all stakeholders that a commitment has been made to enforce policy, which includes consequences.. Managing that narrative clearly is key, particularly in the first instance of enforcement.
For example, for a late pre-award submission attempt that is rejected, you might share and clarify the process, i.e., share a message stating that a late submission was attempted, which was non-compliant, the proposal was rejected, and this should be understood as standard procedure going forward. There is no need to shame anyone or call out a department, but it is critical to highlight that policy is being upheld so others are less likely to attempt to violate.
If a new boundary doesn’t work, then it is a great moment to drive discussions with leadership around a set of policies that might be a better fit for your organization. Policies that are not enforced should be dissolved with last season’s snow! Caring for all employees can be written into new goals.