Ch-ch-changes

My university is going through some changes - hard ones and exciting ones. Through these changes, I am on the front lines for some of the biggies. I am learning a lot. Here are some highlights:

• Revisionist history begins the moment a resignation is made public.
• Being a leader should mean both making the hard decisions and being a decent human being about their implementation. 
• Related: just because someone is good at the decision making, there is no reason to believe that person will also be good at treating the people involved decently.
• Delegating only works if the people to whom you delegate have any freakin' idea of what you just asked them to do.
• If they don't, it's likely that many, many people will be angry with you for the lousy delegation.
• If you say that student credit hour production is only one metric by which a unit is judged, but it's the only metric you name, the message is that student credit hour production is the only metric people will know to use.
• The focus on student credit hour production may be in direct conflict with the stated goals of the university but that matters not at all when one is only concerned with cells in a spreadsheet.
• Hard decisions should really include any sense at all of an implementation plan. If there is no implementation plan, it is likely not the right time to make the hard decision.
• Keeping all of the balls in the air may not be the best strategy. Sometimes, you're better off letting a few land on the floor.
• It's very easy to slip into "using" language and to forget that there are humans attached to that leveraging and using who probably would find that distasteful -- no one wants to be used.

I'm sure there are others, but these are some that are weighing on my mind at the moment.