Here’s an oldie but a goodie from programmer Paul Graham:
My favorite advice comes from Graham’s thoughts on prestige.
“If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.”
I spent a number of years in the world of higher ed. It’s a politically challenging environment. Everything that needed to get done, even things that should be common sense like planning for the future, required an “initiative” from leadership. And each initiative brought its own coalition. And each coalition had committees and subcommittees. And people on these subcommittees dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy into presentations, documentation, and reports. The work would last for years. And by the time the committees had presented their recommendations to the coalitions, and those recommendations had been finalized into plans to fulfill the goals of the initiatives, the wind would shift and send the wildfires in new directions, and resources would be reallocated to extinguishing the new blaze, making previous efforts irrelevant and obsolete.
But people would go along with it. They’d clamor to join the new committees and fight for spots on the coalitions because everyone wanted to have a seat at the table.
There was prestige attached to these committees. It meant you were chosen, selected by leadership for your insight and wisdom and innovative solutions to big problems. You were among the elect, the trusted few who could guide a university to a better future.
Or you could jump the highest when told to.
The prestige of these committees cost a lot of people a lot of time and took them away from the work they were good at in the first place. They prevented people from creating things or thinking about new strategies or improving processes in daily operations. Committee work prevented people from improving the product or serving students.
I’m not saying you should refuse every time you get asked to join a committee. But maybe think about the purpose of the committee, if it’s a good use of your time, and if you’re being drawn in with the allure of prestige.