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The plight of middle managers is taking on the needs of those working above and below them within their organization’s reporting structure. It can be exhausting. And it’s often not limited to a small segment of people caught in the middle. Everyone answers to someone. Just as a CEO reports to the board which reports to shareholders, the president at a university has to answer to the trustees and back to the students and alumni.
One of the enduring traits of higher education is how its workers maintain relative autonomy compared to other industries, but still have sturdy, well-defined hierarchical structures (chairs, deans, provosts, directors, vice presidents, etc.). A harmful side effect of this work environment is burnout from having to bounce in and out of multiple working spheres. Described by researchers at the University of California (UC), Irvine, a working sphere is “a unit of work that has a unique time frame, persons involved in them, and use of particular tools and applications.”
For faculty on the tenure track, working spheres can be teaching, service, and scholarship. But for all higher education professions, including those in professoriate, working spheres are more vast, and unmanageable, with so much autonomous interaction from the variety of cross-functional areas of a campus. From managing a student worker to attending a committee meeting, the higher education professional can be easily pulled away from their core responsibilities.
The UC Irvine researchers, led by Gloria Mark, studied the attention fragmentation of information workers, finding that they switched working spheres about every 11 minutes and they maintained on average about 12 different working spheres.
Scott Mautz, author of “Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization,” refers to these switches from one type of work to another as “micro-transitions,” which leads to exhaustion.
“Odds are you wear many hats at work, more than you can keep track of,” Mautz wrote on his website. “It requires constant micro-switching, the tiring practice of moving from one role to the other, from high-power roles to low-power roles and back, all day long. One minute you’re adopting a deferential stance with your boss, the next you switch into a more assertive mode with your direct reports, then into collaborative mode with your peers.”
Mautz offers several “reframes” to help people think differently about these micro-transitions, such as thinking about their job as integrated, not fragmented 100 ways, into one vital job that they’re uniquely suited to do well. This reframe might help you soften the transitions when going from one working sphere to another, but you might need more drastic, concrete ways to set up boundaries between your working spheres.
After all, one interruption, even to check an email or speak to a visitor in your office, takes an average of about 23 minutes to return to your same level of concentration, according to a separate study conducted by Mark. In other words, the strain of being a middle manager is not only costing you cognitive energy but also time.
Here are four tips to ease the penalty you pay from micro-transitions:
Communicate your preferences to students and colleagues. Professors seem to have a handle on this with their office hours listed on the syllabus for students, but for other working spheres, all higher education professionals should have conversations with colleagues about their availability and how they prefer to communicate with fewer micro-transitions. Sure, you have to be more delicate when addressing this with a supervisor. But you should create a written plan to avoid costly switching, such as developing your own Personal User Manual.
Build an “on-ramp” for returning to a working sphere. According to informants in the UC Irvine study, 77.2 percent of interrupted work was resumed on the same day. Still, it’s important to capture a thought, or write down exactly where you left off, so it’s easier to pick up a task again. Even better, quit while you’re ahead. Stop once you have a great idea so you’ll be motivated to jump back into it later.
Time-block your schedule. Set strict boundaries on your bouts of work within a given sphere. Schedule 45- to 90-minute blocks within your day to work on a single task and remove any distractions, such as closing your email application. Time-blocking is often preached by Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor and podcast host who authored the popular productivity books “Deep Work” and “A World Without Email.”
Consider your different spheres as part-time jobs. Another oft-recommended tip from Newport, which has a hint of reframing but counters Mautz’ advice, is approaching your different roles as separate jobs with times that you ‘clock in’ and ‘clock out.’ These can include your faculty service, committee work, or even administrative tasks like checking email. Only conduct that type of work at a scheduled time, in an environment outside of your office, or, if you can, using a different email account. If you must, take it to the extreme: change your clothes or literally wear a different hat — whatever it takes to keep you from switching every 11 minutes.
Managing from the middle can sometimes feel like you are being stretched in many directions, but to manage yourself you must center your attention on one task at a time and avoid too many micro-transitions.
