Tackling the Time Thieves!
Take back time across your team, reduce bottlenecks, improve delegation and cut the rework draining school operations
Time thieves are rarely just personal habits. They sit in how work moves between people: unclear ownership, duplicated tasks, slow sign-off, meeting creep, and decisions escalating upwards. It gets harder when you manage teams across sites or support multiple settings. The result is constant chasing, capable colleagues waiting for direction, and leaders stuck in the weeds.
This session keeps the practical time management focus, but adds the leadership layer. You will identify the biggest time thieves in school operations and use diagnostics to spot where your own behaviours may be reinforcing them. We cover delegation under pressure, coaching through complexity, and shifting from symptom firefighting to root-cause fixes.
In this session we explore
• The most common time thieves: duplication, unclear ownership, slow approvals, inbox churn
• Leadership impact and unintended consequences, where bottlenecks are created
• “It’s not them, it’s you” diagnostics, accidental disempowerment
• Delegation that sticks: outcomes, authority, guardrails, follow-up
• Coaching through complexity, building capability not dependency
• Diagnosing root causes, reducing recurring issues and rework
• Collaborator vs decisive leader, matching approach to the moment
• Boundaries, triage, batching and clearer comms across teams and sites
Take home points
• A diagnostic for time loss and bottlenecks
• Delegation techniques that speed up delivery
• Coaching approaches that reduce escalation
• Simple changes that cut rework and repeat chasing
• A clearer way to protect time for strategic work
This session is for
School business leaders, SBMs, CFOs, COOs, operations leads and senior leaders managing teams and delivery in school settings, including where work is shared across sites or locations."
Matthew Clements-Wheeler
About the speaker
Matthew Clements-Wheeler is a respected authority on the non-teaching side of running schools. For nearly 30 years he’s helped schools, trusts and charities turn chaos into strategy and panic into policy, working with leaders across the UK and internationally. A former Chair of the Institute of School Business Leadership, Matthew now spends much of his time persuading boards, governments and senior leaders to listen to the people who actually know how the place runs.