Effective School Management

EXERCISE 10: Time Log
Day ..................................................
Date .................................................
Describe what happens in detail – the subject of meetings, telephone calls, letters, reading, conversations. Note the duration of each happening. Note the
name and position of other people involved. Include even casual encounters.
Time
What happened?
Duration
People involved
Comments
8.00
8.30
8.30
9.00
9.00
9.30
9.30
10.00
10.00
10.30
10.30
11.00
11.00
11.30
11.30
12.00

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140
EFFECTIVE
SCHOOL
MANAGEMENT
Time
What happened?
Duration
People involved
Comments
12.00
12.30
12.30
1.00
1.00
1.30
1.30
2.00
2.00
2.30
2.30
3.00
3.00
3.30
3.30
4.00
4.00
4.30
4.30
5.00
5.00
5.30

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ORGANIZATIONS
141
PART II
MANAGING THE
ORGANIZATION

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142
EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

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ORGANIZATIONS
143
THE ORGANIZATIONAL DIMENSION
Most of Part I was addressed to the ways in which managers deal with people
as individuals. However, managers also have to operate at points further along
the organizational dimension (Figure 9.1) and this is tackled in Part II. We
shall first look at some of the characteristics of organizations and their
implications for managers; then, in Chapter 10, at groups. Forming groups of
individuals, building them into effective working units or teams, and getting
these teams to work together effectively in pursuing the organization’s purpose
and goals, are at the heart of organization management. Teams, or whatever
word is used to describe these groupings of collaborating individuals, are the
building blocks of organizations, and managers (as we have seen) are the
glue that holds them together. But first we look at organizations as a whole.
ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS
We believe that all organizations, including educational ones, should be
actively managed against goals; in other words, not only should there be a
clear sense of the direction in which the organization is being steered but also
markers whereby we can assess progress. The words that we use to describe
concepts of direction and progress vary from the broad to the more specific.
At the specific end, we have words like ‘goals’, ‘objectives’, ‘targets’ and
‘success criteria’, which more or less define endpoints or milestones. ‘Aims’
are broader in concept, and subsuming the rest, we can talk of a ‘central
purpose’, a ‘reason for being’ or a ‘core mission’ for the organization. A sense
of purpose is like gravity – a continuous force that moves the organization in
a particular direction. There is no agreed generic word that describes these
concepts collectively, but we usually speak of ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ an
objective when we want to indicate a movement towards, respectively, breadth
or specificity.
Organizational aims (used here in a generic sense) nurture and steer
creative tension and release and harness energy; they keep the organization
on the move, heading in a certain direction. Some heads we interviewed