PMP356: Escaping the Black Hole of Urgency with Dr. Frederick Buskey

Frederick Buskey lives in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and helps assistant principals live and lead better by teaching them how to escape the black hole of urgency. Building on 32 years of K-12 and higher education leadership experience, Dr. Buskey provides simple frameworks and tools to help school leaders spend less time putting out fires and invest more time in growing teachers. Dr. Buskey hosts The Assistant Principal Podcast, writes a daily leadership email, and supports assistant principals through APEx, an online group coaching and learning community. For the past 13 years, he has supported education leaders in building sustainability in their work. 

In this conversation, Frederick explains how he has led principal licensure programs at two universities.

Here are a few of the ideas Frederick shares:

“Leadership is not making others like me, it is serving and trusting others.”

He also shares the five stages for being unstuck in work as well as 4 principles for strategic leadership. 

  1. Understanding urgent vs important: Being driven by tasks instead of people causes leaders to misplace their priorities.
  2. Realization or the U-Turn: Priority management vs time management. We can’t do everything. We choose what gets done and does not get done. Our choices reflect our values.
  3. Transition to Intentional Leadership: sustainability happens when we move from tasks to systems – and move from actions to identifying non-actions.
  4. Investing Time Into Practice – when you ‘save’ time by how you use it, you become intentional in where that time is now focused.
  5. Strategic Leadership is supporting and growing people. Strategy happens when you understand people, purpose, problems and progress.

Dr. Buskey also gave us permission to share the following images for these lessons:

Listen in to the entire conversation for even more takeaways! 

Read more about Dr. Buskey on his website and connect with him on LinkedIn.

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William D. Parker
William D. Parker
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