Personal Development

Social Capital: Part 2

For this component, I used the tools provided by Sander & Lowney (2006) and completed a trust table.  Specifically, I examined the possibility of building social capital between the Student Affairs division and the Athletic department at Westminster College.  Historically, there has been a lack of trust and tension between these two offices that gets in the way of our ability to serve students.  While social capital is important, this tool focuses more on building trust which I suggest is the root cause of our inability to work collaboratively.

As I completed Table 1, I was surprised to see the number of activities in which we are already engaged that can help build social capital and rebuild trust between the two divisions.  I can also see how fragile trust is and how the wrong people involved in each of these activities can set the division back in our effort.

Physically, Student Affairs and Athletics are located on opposite ends of campus which creates this symbolic polarization.  Additionally, we engage with students outside the classroom which creates competition for students’ time and energy.  These structural tensions were exacerbated by nearly thirty years of contentious leadership for both divisions.  Only one of those leaders has changed recently which will create barriers to my goal of regaining trust and social capital.  I’ve had success with other areas across campus, but this one remains my biggest challenge.

Relationships are so critical to building trust and I believe we can begin in small ways.  I have focused on cultivating rich relationships with key coaches – the assistant athletic director, the head soccer coach, and the head women’s basketball coach.  The identification of these three coaches was strategic and will be explained in the context of the categories in Table 1.  The relationship I built with the head soccer coach is individual and centered around a shared hobby in that two of my children play soccer.  My girls have attended his camps, know his players, and we share soccer circles outside Westminster.  This coach is respected in the department and my relationship with him has opened doors with other coaches.  The assistant athletic director has been a strong partner with the Student Affairs division through her support of major student organization events, such as VolleyRock and Greek Week.  Student organizations have recognized her with awards for her support as she helps them with facilities and event details.  I am currently partnering with her and Student Government Association (SGA) to examine how SGA may better represent the student athlete population across campus.  This relationship falls under the category ‘Do A Favor’ and involves ‘Small Groups’.  The head women’s basketball coach is a member of the CARE Team (Discuss Community Issue).  I have focused on nurturing this relationship by including her more in the work of the team and listening intently to her recommendations and guidance.  If I can earn her trust with CARE, the trust of other coaches will come.

Table 1 also includes a few aspirational items (italicized).  Student Affairs staff work many hours and find it hard to give more; however, supporting student athletes by showing up at games can go a long way to building trust with coaches.  In fact, showing up may be the most important gift one can give a colleague.  Showing up demonstrates support, sacrifice, and commitment which align with the building blocks of trust defined by Sander & Lowney (2006): repeated exposure, honest communication, follow through on commitments.  Finally, I am hoping to create key initiatives within Residence Life that will improve the support we offer student athletes, lessening the pressure on coaches to increase retention.  This initiative is within the category ‘Undertake a Joint Goal.’  I am keenly aware that the third component of building trust, follow through on commitments, is imperative for this to be successful.

In summary, this exercise allowed me to name the networks I have already begun creating and to visualize new opportunities as well.  Trust is fragile and based largely on showing up, cultivating relationships, and follow through.  With thirty years of history to amend, building social capital will take time, patience, and persistence; but our students rely on this relationship to help them find their own success.

Coaching for Performance: Part 3

Situational Leadership is a tool I have used frequently in my career, most commonly when training graduate hall directors to supervise resident assistants.  Since graduate hall directors have little supervision experience it is a helpful way to teach them to understand working with RAs at various developmental levels, but it was also a helpful way for me to gauge my supervision of them.  Staff who could fully grasp the supervision concept and perhaps had a year or two experience in the hall director position, may have needed a delegating supervision style.  On the other hand, many hall directors required a directing supervisor in August, but a coaching supervisor by the end of their first year.  What they needed from me became evident in the way they comprehended and operationalized the model during training.

For this exercise, I spent time reflecting on my current staff and identified each on the developmental continuum.  Of my six direct reports, I identified two staff as D1, two as D2, one D3, and one D4.  Prior to a series of supervision meetings, I planned for our discussion based on this assessment.  Here are the details of those meetings:

Jeter is in his second year at Westminster College and could aptly be described as an enthusiastic beginner.  His job responsibilities include coordination of housing assignments, which is work he had not done previously.  Additionally, he received almost no training to do this work and he lacks the technical skillset to work with data and spreadsheets, critical competencies in the housing field.  After a disastrous first year, we are entering housing assignment season and he needs a different kind of supervision if the second season is to be better than the first.  I worked in housing at Westminster, set up the current software, and wrote the housing procedure manual.  As such, I updated the housing procedure manual and have adapted our one-on-one meetings to include step-by-step instruction of these procedures.  I have established deadlines for his preparation and planning.  Each week, I am providing small sets of instructions to complete prior to our next meeting and we review his work together.  I expected him to resist or resent this kind of supervision, but he has welcomed it and is responding well.  He is grateful for the attention to detail and comes to meetings well prepared.  We both are gaining confidence in his ability to do the work.

Francesca is also in her second year.  Unlike Jeter, Francesca brought with her expertise and experience working with fraternity and sorority life, but has struggled to understand this work in the Westminster context.  An entry level professional, her confidence in working with more seasoned professionals, both in and out of the division, is weak.  Francesca is a disillusioned learner.  In our one-on-one meetings this semester, I have challenged her into uncomfortable settings where she must interact with other professionals in order to build her confidence.  We discussed leading regular meetings with fraternity and sorority advisors, presenting at an admission event, planning a campus-wide orientation event.  Each of these endeavors brings a new opportunity for her to hone communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills and gain confidence working with other professionals.  In preparation for each, we have discussed strategies for her to exercise unique to each setting.

Faith is a reluctant performer.  She has been with Westminster College for nearly 10 years and holds expertise in disability resources.  She also knows how to navigate campus culture; however, she had often questioned the placement of her department within Student Affairs as her most important partnerships are with academic offices.  She expresses the feeling of being the division’s stepchild.  This variable commitment is manifest in her lack of willingness to contribute in staff meetings and partner with other directors in the division.  For Faith, my supervision meetings have involved discussing ways she is valuable to the division and empowering her to make decisions or lead change.  For example, Faith should review requests for housing accommodations and should recommend placement to Jeter.  Based on previous experience with this, she is reluctant to intervene.  I worked with the two of them to revisit this relationship and she is now receiving accommodation requests and making those recommendations.  I have seen a change in Faith and her willingness to behave as an important member of the team.

Finally, Missy is the peak performer and my supervision style has been directed at opening doors for her to do her good work.  I created opportunities for her to present at a conference, provide training for faculty and staff, and to manage a grant from the Department of Justice.  Each of these are experiences that allow her to network and advance professionally.

The style that comes most naturally to me is coaching, as I have with Francesca.  Perhaps this is because I have worked mostly with student staff and student leaders over my career which often requires nudging their growth and development.  As students develop skills, I find myself encouraging their confidence as well and find this a very comfortable space as a supervisor.  Most challenging, however, is supervision of D1 (enthusiastic beginner).  It takes a good deal of energy to direct, requiring me to anticipate and plan for large amounts of detail related to someone else’s job.  It is true that this level of energy is not required long-term, but can be exhausting.

I found that intentionally identifying developmental levels for each staff was rather helpful and provided a framework for my supervision meetings.  I will continue to use this understanding to support and develop my team.

Dual-Mindedness in Leadership: Part 4

Heifetz et al. (2009) suggest leaders are in themselves systems and it is as important to diagnosis self as system as it is to diagnose the organization.  After all, the two will interplay with one another, each pushing and pulling.  To do this, they suggest, among other things, knowing your tuning.  “Your tuning derives from many different things: your childhood experiences, genetic predispositions, cultural background, gender, and loyal identifications with various current and historical groups” (Heifetz et al., p. 195).  Knowing your tuning requires reflection and introspection and a willingness to sit with yourself to discover.  There are countless assessment tools that provide some details about our tuning, including the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator.  A deeper, more transformative method of knowing oneself is the cultivation of a meditation practice.  Combing these two methods can have a powerful impact on leadership in organizations.

My Myers-Briggs type is E/INTJ, though my measurements fall near the mid-line for Intuition/Sensing and Thinking/Feeling.  I consider myself an Ambivert as I float back and forth between Extroversion and Introversion.  The one type where I demonstrate a strong preference is Judgement, a preference which meditation has softened over time.  Heifetz et al. (2009) advise leaders to broaden bandwidth – “your repertoire of techniques” (p. 205).  Over the last few weeks, I selected various meetings, interactions, and events to do just that by bringing awareness to my types, my default tendencies, and reflection on how the nuances of a situation call upon differing approaches.

Two events. Two days.  The first: Westminster College’s Emerging Leaders retreat which I facilitated.  The second: Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) training for Title IX Coordinators.  Both events are held in conference rooms with large groups of people.  I understand extroversion and introversion to be about where one gets their energy – from their environment or from within themselves, respectively.  As a skilled facilitator, in an environment I carefully created to achieve the goals of community and self-exploration, I showed up as an extrovert to the Emerging Leaders retreat.  Leading activities, observing student facilitators demonstrate a new competence, and listening to student participants make sense of their leadership fuels my enthusiasm and excitement.  I felt energized.  In contrast, being immersed in a room with 150 strangers learning complex material from experienced legal professionals was utterly energy-sapping.  Each day, I required quiet time to process my new learnings and to recharge.

With a preference for intuition, I love dreaming about possibilities and am currently doing this work as I look to restructure the Student Affairs division.  However, in order to get from here to there I needed to examine financial resources and write job descriptions.  Not my favorite work, I spent an afternoon gathering data, creating tables and charts, writing detailed job descriptions, preparing proposals complete with rationale and evidence.  Spending the afternoon in a sensing mode was fruitful and necessary.

Years ago, I received feedback from my graduate residence directors about my preference for thinking as I was known to send short, concise emails asking very specifically for what I needed from them.  My staff largely held a preference for feeling and took my communication personally and felt my directness meant I did not like them.  We worked together to change the tone of my communication and to include recognition for the good work they were doing.  This feedback was formative for me and I continue to craft emails and memos with this attention.  For this exercise, I tested my ability to empathize with a staff member who is nearing retirement and requested to be included in a voluntary separation program underway.  Because she is part-time, she does not qualify.  In my preference for thinking, I could simply acknowledge the rules and move on.  But, I sat with her, listened to her, and advocated for her.  It is likely she will be included in the program, an outcome that would not have occurred if I held to my thinking preference.

I have a strong preference for judgement which is extraordinarily helpful as a mother of three teenagers, full-time college administrator, and doctoral student.  However, my meditation practice has taught me that letting go of order fosters creativity which is also critical in each of these roles.  Perhaps no other role forces you into perception as brutally as parent.  My son, 16 years old, has become defiant and resistant.  He is skipping school, leaving the house at will, and is experimenting with drugs and alcohol.  There is nothing ordered about this.  In the last week, I have learned to sit with this chaos.  I have explored schooling and counseling options.  I have had to abandon direction as he responds and seek new ones.  This situation requires fluidity.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke offers words of comfort here:

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final

(Barrows & Macy, 2005)

My meditation practice helps cultivate awareness such that I can often see where my type preferences need shifting in order to have the impact I desire.  Heifetz et al. (2009) suggest we can get stuck in our tuning in ways that limit our capacity to lead change.  Dual-mindedness and meditation are both reflective habits that help us get unstuck and make us more effective leaders.

Summary Reflective Essay: Part 5

Leadership has been at the forefront of my attention since moving into the Vice President role.  Earlier this semester, I set two personal development goals to that end: strengthen leadership and supervision and built trust and confidence in the Student Affairs division.  Much work has been done in these areas and there is more work to do.

To begin this work, I crafted a division retreat with the aim of creating a sense of mattering for each member of the division.  The retreat was flush with community building activities and rich conversation about how we show ourselves, our team, and our students that they matter.  The theme of mattering was intentionally selected to lay the foundation for future vision work.  Team members fully engaged, opened themselves to one another, and shared gratitude for the experience.  Additionally, I witness regularly how staff members use the relationships they formed during the retreat to partner with each other as they develop new programs or work to solve problems.

Following the retreat, I engaged in the Coaching for Performance exercise continuing to model mattering in meetings with each team member.  I have found Situational Leadership useful as a tool to develop staff members.  Through the pandemic, I have learned to really value and depend on those staff who require coaching, supporting, and delegating leadership.  I have relied on peak performers (D4) to handle specific areas of the Student Affairs response and to keep me informed.  I have been able to support my reluctant performers (D3) by affirming their decisions and direction.  The pandemic has been a great confidence builder for my disillusioned learners (D2) as we are all navigating the unfamiliar.  Coaching them through this has looked like shaping the direction of a task or project and providing them the tools and resources to make it happen. 

At present, I am conflicted about my enthusiastic beginner (D1).  At the beginning of the semester, I commented that I had staff who were perhaps not the right members on the bus, borrowing from Collins (2005).  That staff member has benefitted from “directing” as a leadership style, but I question whether the improvements are sustainable.  This style of leading requires a lot of mental and emotional energy from me and I find myself growing impatient, especially as we navigate the coronavirus pandemic.  I find myself taking over projects as a result of the urgency the pandemic has created and the challenges presented in the work from home context.  The pandemic is making clear his competency deficits and lack of intrinsic motivation to improve or self-discipline.  Collins suggests the latter two are essential for staff in the social sector and my D1 staff person is not demonstrating either.

A third initiative I implemented was a vision retreat mid-semester.  At this retreat, I shared my vision for Student Affairs and invited feedback.  The vision has been informed by conversation from our opening retreat and interactions with individual staff members, along with my own aspirations.  Our current draft reads: Student Affairs will lead the institution in excellent student development and support delivered through a lens of inclusion and with a customer-service approach. We will do this through strong collaborative relationships within and outside our division.  This vision frames our definition of great which we will operationalize over the coming months (Collins, 2005).

The second personal development goal was to build trust and confidence in the Student Affairs division, specifically with Athletics.  To inform my work in this area, I engaged in the Social Capital exercise and discovered that I have been cultivating meaningful relationships with coaches for many years.  We have implemented two initiatives that I believe are rebuilding trust and confidence.  First, we instituted wellness coaching through our Wellness Center.  This coaching helps students who need extra guidance in executive function, goal setting, and time management.  Our counselors reached out to the head football coach who mandated wellness coaching for his first year players with low GPAs.  The communication and follow through between the two departments is commendable and is strengthening trust.  Secondly, my micro-change project highlighted awareness campaigns and outreach to coaches and we have found that they are more likely to make referrals now.  An even better benefit is that they are partnering with CARE allowing us to leverage their social capital with students to get those students connected to campus resources.

I have intentionally trying to exhibit Level 5 leadership in the face of the coronavirus pandemic (Collins, 205).  Our students may be mostly home, but they need us more than ever.  They are struggling with the transition to online learning, they are angry about having to do normal things in the face of everything abnormal, they are frightened, their home environments are not supportive, they are grieving tradition, ritual, campus celebrations, and friends.  I am wholly committed to this work.  I hope this is evidenced in the ongoing, consistent, and compassionate communication coming from me and my team.  I hope this is evidenced in the way Student Affairs is leading this response as one collective team.  I hope this is evidenced in the way we make ourselves available to each other and to students.  I know that faculty and coaches are watching our response. I can’t help but think of Schein’s (2017) assertion that leaders have the capacity to shift culture in the way they respond to crisis.  “When an organization faces crisis, the manner in which leaders and others deal with it reveals important underlying assumptions and often creates new norms, values, and working procedures” (Schein, p. 190).  I believe the underlying assumptions being revealed are:

• Collaboration is essential to our success

• Supporting students is paramount

• We can and will adapt to newly identified needs

• Student Affairs will lead this work

I would never wish a pandemic on any leader within the first six months on the job.  That said, I see this as an opportunity to build trust and confidence in my division and to develop my identity as a level 5 leader for my team.  This is a transformative moment in my leadership, the results of which are only beginning to manifest.