ACUHO-I News Blog

I have been spending a lot of time thinking lately about how change is hard, but not in the ways that I expected it to be. I think it’s normal to be uncomfortable about change… you don’t know what to expect, you aren’t sure if you are going to like it, etc. For me, though, what has been hard, along with the usual things, is shifting my paradigm about how I think it “should” be to how it “could” be.

After eleven years of full-time housing work, I like to think that I know a thing or two about this work and that my experience means something. And although that might be true, I learned all of it in the context of my supervisors and my environment and, for me, that has always been in the same place and for the most part, the same people.  I have never had to figure out if there was a different way to do things because “it’s always been done that way” and there weren’t a whole lot of new people in positions of power to change it. But now, there is. (more…)

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. (more…)

Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, has the ability to see the past and the future simultaneously. We mortals have a similar ability – vision, hope as well as fear are all residents of the future, while perspective, pride, and regret dwell in the past. As we look forward and as we look back the good and the bad weave together inseparably.

This series, Housing 360, is focused on documenting multiple perspective of a housing department in transition.  At Ohio State, the university as a whole is amid a cultural transformation so our transition within housing exists in a broader context of university transition.  We see the future: Our president sees an Ohio State that functions far less based on the bureaucratic ethic of fairness and operating with far more focus on common sense and the individual experience of the student. Our department is transitioning from a two-year period of being governed by numbers (i.e. counting the number of student programs) to a model of student engagement more akin to student affairs than accounting.

While we see the future, we also see the past:  The “CYA” behavior of assigning blame and distancing ourselves from our mistakes, have hindered us from learning from our errors – dooming us to repeat them.  If a shift in the culture has indeed taken place, the difficulty is in convincing people who have been formed by the culture of the past, that it is now safe to take chances and make mistakes.  While the future direction of the organization is largely a function of the vision of leadership, the cultural change brought about on the ground is largely a function of individual choice.  To commit to look forward and let go of past perceived transgressions of colleagues, who were operating in the context of a different organization.

My “default” settings, like most people, are set to avoid pain, but yielding to the fear of future pain is a prescription of paralysis.  The question for myself is to what degree am I willing to blindfold myself to the past and re-invest in fractured relationships and understand that individual behavior is largely a function of the organizational culture?  A shift in the direction of an organization’s culture is an opportunity to begin again, focus on the students we serve and our role in assisting them in defining and reaching their personal, academic and career goals.

As you think about your work setting, what cultural aspects of the past must be left behind in order to move forward?  What responsibilities does university leadership have to set the create and implement cultural change and where do our responsibilities lie?

Many of us have had challenging supervisees.  Indeed, if everyone were at the top of their game and required no supervision, we’d need far fewer supervisors!  Lately, I’ve had some interesting dialogue with my leadership team about having the difficult conversations with people about the realities of how they are perceived.  Yes, I do mean with supervisees in the room with them!

I’m not talking about the feedback and evaluation cycle here.  You may know the saying about “no surprises” at evaluation time.  It really is a good practice not to blind-side someone in their evaluation with feedback they’ve never been given before.

What I’m talking about here is the non-evaluation type of feedback.  The kind of conversation where you actually find a way to tell someone, who is doing a pretty good job, that there is some poor practice, fatal flaw, or disastrous habit standing in the way of their success; the kind of things that people joke about behind their backs, but never address the foible owner about directly.

I have been working in an organizational culture in which not discussing someones Achilles heel with them has been the norm.  There are many reasons for this:  they do a good job “in spite of” their foible; we’ll have to face them in meetings for the next several years and that makes us squeamish; we think it’s their (unchangeable) personality; or we don’t want to hurt their feelings.

What I’ve seen in my experience is that people end up losing out on the opportunity to know the truth about their reputations. They don’t know that they are being talked about, worked around, or overlooked for more responsibilities and opportunities because of the “unsaid” factors.

I see this as a very delicate matter, indeed. I am not talking here about the “Tell it like it is! If they don’t like it, they can leave!” kind of mentality.  I’m talking about investing in our colleagues and supervisees in a caring way.  It is the idea that you’d care enough about someone’s career and personal development enough to sit them down and say, “You know, Ginger, I care about your success. I know that you are working hard and doing great things for students, but I’m wondering if you are aware of how your colleagues see you showing up in the workplace.”

I can tell you that when I have had this type of conversation with some folks who have worked in an organization for years and they look at you in a shocked way and tell you that they “had no idea.” It’s a real bummer.  People feel even more off-balance when they find out their previous supervisors or trusted colleagues in the same organization never talked with them about it either.  It is a very difficult thing to do, but I am challenging myself, and my staff, to not let folks go blindly forward in their careers without having the brave and honest conversations that need to be had.

The best part about having the guts to have these caring conversations is that then you can then be an ally in helping the person to process the new information.  You can help them find new perspectives about their performance or personality.  You can encourage them to ask others for some honest feedback and you can help them to figure out if the issue is changeable. Or, maybe they just aren’t meshing with the place after much effort and you can help them come to terms with the fact that sticking around for several more years waiting for a promotion isn’t the best idea.

Many of us do this well with our students.  We can critique their résumé, give them advice on their confrontation skills, and tell them that something they said was “inappropriate.” What prevents us from investing in the growth and development of our colleagues as well?

Hi all you fabulous readers out there!  My name is Susannah Turner and I am one of the associate directors of Residence Life here at Ohio State and I will be blogging this year about what it’s like to go through a time of transition in our department.

First of all, let me say that I NEVER thought that I would ever be blogging about anything, much less about things related to work. Let me give you some context. I didn’t use e-mail in grad school, much less undergrad.  When I arrived at Ohio State, as a hall director, in 1998, we still had e-mail that had green type and a black screen. I didn’t own a computer until my husband and I got married (in my mind they are still, technically, “his computers”). I am not what you would call technologically savvy, so needless to say, this blogging thing, makes me nervous.

Why nervous?  Well, I wonder if I have anything interesting to say. Other blogs I have read (which amounts to two) are written by people who are on adventures abroad, namely Semester at Sea.  They are interesting to me because it brings back memories from my own adventures. I also wonder what people will say about what I have to say. Yes, although a blog is my own experience about my work in transition, there will be people who will read this and judge me for better or for worse.  That makes me nervous.

I am a relatively private person in my everyday life, so putting myself out there on the World Wide Web, brings on a small case of the hives. But all my nerves aside, I am hoping that as I write and I read what others write about our same experiences, I will learn from their experiences. I also hope I will learn from what you, out there in what I consider outer space, have to say to me in response to this online journaling experiment. Yes, this is an experiment that we hope will bring our housing worlds together and help us find community in shared experiences.  So, I encourage you to continue reading, commenting, and being a part of this community.

So enough about my fears. Today, I really wanted to talk about feelings. As we have gained new leadership and begun what is an inevitable change when anything new comes around, one of the messages  we are beginning to implement is to leave how we “feel” about things out of business decisions. The phrase that we have thrown around is, “It’s just business.”

Now, I think that some folks have misapplied this phrase. To me, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a feeling about some decision or work-related thing, it just means that we aren’t going to shy away from doing the right thing or making the right decision, just because I don’t like it. And it means that I shouldn’t be afraid to talk to someone who isn’t doing okay or is affecting me negatively because of a fear of how it might make them feel. It holds us to a higher standard of professionalism, I think.

Now, for some folks that know me, they will wonder what alien came and invaded my body when they read this.  I am someone who can’t help but care about what other people are feeling, that’s how I show up in the world — Care first!  But, I also understand that it’s my responsibility to do what’s right and if I am upset or don’t like it, then it isn’t my department’s job to make it better for me.

But, I digress. When I say I want to talk about feeling, what I mean is the atmosphere, vibe, or energy in a room. Before we began planning for this academic year, as a department, there were times, when I thought that there was a large rain cloud hanging over us. People walked into the room and barely spoke to other colleagues. When someone presented a new idea, he or she was greeted by silence and blank stares. The feeling in the room was dark, dank, bored, lethargic, and even apathetic. It made me sad to be in that place. Now, with some new thoughts, new freedom, a new perspective on our work, the energy in the room is light, bright, energetic, and even enthusiastic.

When the people in the room want to be there, want to get to know each other, want to have a good time, everything changes. The feeling around me makes me smile. It makes me happy. I feel more willing to be risky and try new things. When a new idea is presented, instead of wondering what the point is, I wonder how it can be put into practice. I enjoy coming to work and thinking creatively.  As  paraprofessional training begins, it’s exciting to see the energy the hall staff have, which means that the RAs will be enthusiastic, which means that the students will be excited, and in the end it means that we will have begun in the best place possible, with possibility for the future (instead of fear of the unknown).

So, despite the fact that, yes, it’s a business, I hope that we continue to feel like a place where fun is good, where creativity and enthusiasm is the norm, and where we enjoy the work that we do because we know it makes a difference.

I’m curious… What do you think about how your department “feels?”  Should how a place “feels” even matter? Share with me in the comments section below. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings.

In many of our jobs we have to deal with a wide variety of people. Bosses, administrators, co-workers, the community, employees and students. While I always like to assume the best from most people, and take them at their word, it sometimes comes back to punish us for being naive.

How can you tell when an employee is really sick when calling in for a shift? What about when a student is late on their rent and seems to have one story after another, mostly believable but you have that nagging feeling that the truth lies somewhere in the middle?

Most of the time I find myself at work primarily dealing with people issues. I do some accounting spreadsheets, write some contracts, but the bulk of the time is spent talking and dealing with people. I wonder if I am a good judge of character, and can trust the people I’m helping and work with. I wonder if judging character is a skill that I can develop and work on to improve. I wonder, will I become tired and jaded after hearing the same excuse for the 100th time, or the 1,000th time?  And when that happens, as is human nature I suppose, will I treat the person with the old excuse differently than I treated the person the first time I heard the excuse? Will I even recognize that I’m treating the two people differently?

At some point, the younger less seasoned employees become wise old veterans. I hope that we don’t lose our enthusiasm and optimism while gaining life and work experiences during the transition. And I hope that the next student story I hear is original. Please, let it be original.

“Advice to a New Department Chair” in the Careers area of the Chronicle of Higher Education may at first not seem relevant, but there’s certain elements of the workplace, learning how to manage and be managed, that are true no matter your domain. The author offers some wise suggestions for being diplomatic and getting things done.