One J’s Perspective on Change
I feel like lately I’ve been internally sensing and expressing confusion about what my job is and what my next tasks should be. It’s not that I’ve been sitting by idly or that I haven’t had work on my plate, but I don’t feel this overwhelming pressure. While it’s kind of a nice change, I think it sometimes makes me feel like I have less of a purpose than I should. I’ve been thinking about that A LOT and processing in meetings with my supervisor quite a bit and even listening as others express similar sentiments. Although I don’t yet have “the answer,” I feel that I’ve recently had a break-through that will help me move past this. Here it goes.
As I think back to my time starting here at OSU (as a full-time staff member), I remember how excited I was to return to my undergraduate institution. At the same time, my previous supervisors from my time as an RA were still here and I really felt I had a lot to live up to and felt really pressured to impress.
The hall director position had been advertised to me as one with a great level of autonomy. I actually found a lot of what I did to be pretty prescribed and the CYA mentality to be pretty pervasive almost from the moment I got here. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t be creative about some things or that I couldn’t go above and beyond in other areas and put my mark on my buildings and projects. It just meant that if I wanted to do something that had a larger implication, I had to ask my supervisor who asked her supervisor who, in turn, had to ask her supervisor. I loved my work, my students, my staff and my job and became really comfortable doing what I knew I was “supposed to do.”
Whether people buy it or not, things are different now. You don’t have to have 20 people’s permission before you make a decision. You have the freedom to make a lot of different things happen. Sounds great, right? As a J, I can say it’s great in principle, but kind of tough to figure out how to make it happen.
I may be in a unique position, since few people completely understand my job, but for the most part I recently feel like we have an insane amount of freedom. Sure, there are a few guidelines to follow, some outcomes to shoot for and some overarching messages focusing on our need to “help students succeed.” The problem isn’t that we aren’t supported and that we don’t have flexibility - it’s that we need to figure out how to adapt from a very structured, there is a right answer, type-A approach to a very different philosophy. We need to define our work for ourselves and as a J, I think that can be very scary to be up against.
I think that is why people are sitting around bracing for change, an answer, or the secret to success that they’ve been longing to have. We are a department full of J’s who are waiting for someone to tell them where they are headed so they can either follow along or complain about the direction that’s been decided upon. I’m sure we’ll continue to get some direction (some has already come), but I recently realized that if I sit around waiting for a magical answer, then I’m just wasting my time and letting my experience and degree sit on the shelf and collect dust. (Not to mention putting off good work that our students could benefit from.)
I think for me, the biggest challenges are motivation and direction. I recently spoke with my supervisor about the fact that I was happy to be here and felt okay about my work, but that I didn’t feel inspired (as a general statement) and that I thought I needed that somehow. She asked one simple question that really helped things click. “Why is it someone else’s job to inspire and motivate you?” The answer: “I guess it’s not.” I really think that’s true. It’s really my job to search within to be motivated and inspired to do new and exciting things.
The other challenge of direction came full circle for me in our leadership meeting last week. We were talking about a lot of big picture things with the department, including how committees will be structured and roll-out for this year. As a group, we discussed some ideas, but ultimately pushed it back for our director to decide how to do. Now, maybe she was planning to do this anyway, but I feel this is representative of our leadership team as a group right now. (Myself included.) As of recently, we had been used to having some clear directions with some flexibility about how, within a set of prescribed guidelines, we want to get our work done. We were the true “stuck in the middle” people that Krystyne wrote about in her earlier post. I’m not sure this is still the case, even though that’s how some people still feel.
I think the reason we still feel that way is that because as a group, we have not risen to the challenge that should be expected of us as middle managers. Like our HDs are still used to waiting for answers from us, we are still used to waiting from answers from above. They’re not coming. We need to create the answers ourselves or at least engage in the process of creating those answers. (And my “we” is staff at all different levels) It’s not always someone else’s job to figure it out. We need to see it as our job, too.
I don’t know exactly how I’m going to proceed to motivate myself and to help be a part of creating direction instead of waiting for directions, but I know these are the challenges that I’m setting for myself and I’d welcome your suggestions and/or support.
Tags: Management, Staff