ResEdChat Ep 60: Dr. Amanda Knerr on Creating a Compelling Departmental Vision

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat Podcast. I’m your host, Dustin Ramsdell. This podcast series, if you’re new to it, features a variety of topics of interest to hired professionals who work in and with university housing. So, we cover a lot of different topics. This one today, I think, is a very unique one, because we’re recording this January 2024. I feel like it’s the right time of year to be talking about creating a vision. I’ve been a part of different organizations where sometimes you’re going without, and other times you maybe have a vision that maybe is not super helpful. It’s too vague or not really reinforced or utilized and stuff.
So, I think it’s really important for organizational culture to have a vision and to have a clear and concise and compelling vision that reinforce consistently and everything. So, that is what we’ll be talking about today and certainly how that really shows up specifically in the world of university housing, residential education, whatever your institution might call it. So, we’ll start as we always do. Amanda, if you want to introduce yourself and your professional background and how you got to be where you are today.

Amanda Knerr:
Sure, thank you. So, my name is Amanda Knerr and I have the pleasure of serving as the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and the Director of Housing and Residence Life at Ball State University. I’ve been here at Ball State for about two years now. Before that, I started as the Executive Director of Residential Life at Indiana State University and then I’ve also worked in housing at Penn State University and some of those campuses and at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska. So, I spent my entire career in housing and residence life and excited to be here today.

Dustin Ramsdell:
It’s always nice just talking about this and we’re starting a new season. I feel like I’m just reflective in general, but I got my start as I think many people do in residential education, worked professionally there for a couple of years as well. So, that’s the core and I think at least the maybe baseline or initial memories and things that I’m seeing in my mind’s eye about creating a vision where, like I said, you can have that spectrum of nothing or something that’s maybe middling and not super useful and other things that can be much more informative and relevant and useful for folks as they’re doing their work every day, but we’ll start with a very just broad question. Take it as you will. What does it mean to you to create a vision and why is this so important?

Amanda Knerr:
For many years, what I did for a vision statement is about every two years, I’d pull my leadership team together and we’d look at the website. What does our mission say? What does our vision say? Do we need to change any of the words? We might change a word here or phrase there and then we’d slap it back up on the website. We’d forget about it until two years later in the retreat or we’d bring it out for onboarding a new staff during training or during new student orientation when we’re talking to parents about housing, but that’s really lived on the website and it would be a conversation for a half hour or so at a planning retreat in June once every couple years. That was really frustrating.
So, then I said, “Well, we need to start doing strategic planning. If we do strategic planning, we’ll bring the vision to life.” So we do the same thing. We’d gather everybody together right after the hall’s closed. We do this retreat and we talk about, “What are our priorities? What are our goals? What does the university want us to focus on?” We’d create this map or this blueprint or this really pretty document that we might share to some campus partners. We might pull off our shelves every once in a while when a new initiative was starting, but it really just didn’t take a lot of life. What I noticed was my team didn’t really connect with it. They didn’t really align with it. It wasn’t something that guided our decision making.
It wasn’t something that really connected us to the work, but that was what I knew how to do. So, a couple years ago, my director for residential learning at Indiana State called me over winter break and he said, “Amanda, I need your address. I’m sending you this book and I need you to read this book before we come back at the end of break.” I was like, “What is this book?” He’s like, “It’s everything. You’re going to love it.” So he sent me the book, Vivid Vision. It changed my life and it changed my team’s life, because I learned how to craft something that was going to help my team know where I was trying to lead them that was going to inspire them to action. It was going to help them to see themselves as part of the story.
It was going to really guide every decision we made and every experience we had both together as a team, but every experience we put together for our students for the duration of the plan. Then it really inspired me to think critically about, “Where was I trying to lead my team? What was I trying to create? What legacy did I want to leave?” So happy to chat more about the book and how it changed how we did vivid visions.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s good. Just one core resource to give the opportunity. There’s other tertiary things that maybe have an impact here. Maybe anybody listening, if you don’t take away anything else, go check out that, because I think that would be the handbook to manifest a lot of things we’ll talk about here. But a couple of things stuck out from what you were saying, because I think that idea of the meandering middle of creating a vision. It’s maybe just too vague or not relevant. So, like you said, it’s just not utilized, it’s not implemented in any way or I guess that idea of another part of what I was thinking about of you put it on the website. It’s something you should be able to be held accountable to or all of that.
I guess just talk about that, I guess, of that place of the idea of creating a vision of what it means. From what you’re saying, it’s something that feels relevant, that feels useful, that feels like it is something that you share out with your colleagues, but also with others, I guess. Why is it so important, what the impact that you feel like it should be having? There’s a lot of things there where it’s like, “Oh, you were checking off some boxes of maybe we do a strategic plan or we do training. We bring it up.” So that’s the idea.
It was brought up, but maybe not enough or not in the right context or the phrasing of it was just not relevant or useful. Maybe it’s too vague or those things. So, I think just because we’ll move on to the resident education context, but say you’ve got a really clear, compelling, relevant vision. What’s the impact of that? Why is going through that effort to make one that’s really vivid and compelling, why is that effort worth it?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah, yeah. Let me, I guess, step back a little bit. I think for me, oftentimes when those vision statements are one or two sentences, they tend to be very aspirational, very big picture, very abstract and broad, right? Because you have to make sure that my custodial maintenance team can connect with that vision, that my students staff can connect with that vision, that my clients and my customers and my consumers can connect with that, that my leadership team, my business ops folks. So, it becomes so big and broad that people are like, “Well, how do I actualize it? How do I actually use it to make a decision? How do I live by it every day?” Because it’s so broad and fits everything.
I think that’s where I struggled is I had a team that was fantastic and they would’ve followed me anywhere and they would’ve been willing to do anything, but they weren’t sure where we were going. There wasn’t a clear path. There was this big broad “We want to be all things to all people,” but what does that look like when I’m cleaning a toilet? What does that look like when I’m doing an RE program? What does that look like when I’m making a decision about whether to assign two students to the same room or give them a single?
So that’s I think where we really got stuck was taking it from this big aspirational to really taking it to a place where my leadership team could look at it and say, “Yes, this is where we’re going and this is my specific role and what I need to specifically do to make sure that we get to where we want to be.” So for me, a vision has to be something that is very descriptive. As the leader, I need to help set the stage for what we’re trying to create.
So, what that looks like is when you walk into our office, what are you going to see? What are you going to hear? What are you going to smell? What are you going to talk about? When you are with our team and leadership meetings, what is that going to feel like? When you come into work in the morning, what is your excitement about being there? When we have a tough decision to make, what is going to set the criteria for us to make that decision? So we all feel good when we leave at the end of the day that we made the right one. To me, that really sets aside a vision statement that is useful and helpful and is productive and one that is aspirational and something that sits on a paper or collects dust on your desk.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I guess it’s what my mind was thinking of is the idea of the statement itself and how useful it is, but then how it’s implemented into the culture. Obviously, if it’s a very relevant one, it’s going to be easier, because it could be like, “Well, you have the best statement ever, the best vision statement ever.” But then if it’s not even on a website, it’s not anywhere to be found. It could be like, “Oh, actually, yeah, I forgot we did that.” We actually made a pretty good one if we actually tried to use that to inform our plan, our strategy, whatever.
So, I think those are the twofold things that I was thinking of and then just that idea of honestly presenting it in a way of we want to be held accountable to this, that it would be the way that you try to solicit feedback and say, “Are we living up to these things?” I guess I wonder too, because I think this is probably some people’s thinking about this is trying to distill it down. I don’t know if maybe the book mentions anything like this, but is there a good formula, structure to how these statements could be? Because I think you were getting at is the way that most people start. It’d be just super broad and vague. The idea is we want to be the best residential education program in the world. I was like, “What does best mean? Okay, well, then how do we get to that?”
And then you can start to interrogate each piece and everything. So, do you feel like there’s a shorthand formula guiding ideas of it’s got to have this general structure of… I guess I’m assuming maybe it’s an action and an outcome or something. Is there anything like that, I guess, that you feel like you could help people with that’s going on its journey?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Well, I would say it’s not even a sentence. I would say it’s a whole document. One of the things when I was introduced to the book that I used the Vivid Vision book, up until that point, I thought that the vision was something that I co-created with my team. One of the first shifts that I had to make was no, as the leader, I have to craft the vision and it’s my team’s responsibility then to implement the vision. If they don’t know what to implement, if they don’t know where we’re going, if they don’t know what the big picture is, they can’t do their job successfully. I have to be willing to step up and take responsibility for really crafting what we want to do, where we want to be, and then I need to empower them and step out of their way.
So, that they can really put into place the steps, the actions, the stages to accomplish that work. That was a shift for me, because I’d always been, okay, we’re going to have that one sentence statement up on the board. It’s got to be very aspirational. In the book, they talk about, no, this is a three to four-page document and really look at all the different areas of your business, your program, and dream big. So, they talked about mind map and really write down if money, if facilities, if a location, if none of that were a barrier, what would your program look like? What would it sound like? What would it feel like in technology, in customer service, in staffing, in hiring, in training?
So I just had this huge document and just wrote all over it, all this mind mapping and words and phrases and all these things. It took me two full days of just on my own thinking about this. Then I thought, “Gosh, how do I put all this in a sentence?” Well, you don’t. When I got down and started free-writing it, I ended up with almost 10 pages of written document and I took it to my director and said, “Here, read this. What do you think?” He said, “It’s a lot.” He’s like, “It’s great description. I see where you’re going. I see where we’re trying to go and I’m getting really excited, but there’s so much here. Let’s tap it back.” So just rethinking and recrafting until I had basically a story and it was a story of where we were and where we were going to go.
It was really creating a word picture of what that would look like. When I finished really wrapping that up and really fine-tuning that, I also realized that as I was writing and a lot of times I said, “Our campus partners will say this about housing and residence life. Our students will say this about their experience with residence life.” Then I had to pause and say, that isn’t a vision, because I don’t have any power or control or agency on how they’re going to describe us, but I do have agency on what we’re going to collectively do within our unit.
If we do those things, then I believe that the perceptions that I’m writing about are what the students are going to experience, what our campus partners are going to say, but I’ve got to stop describing what our campus’s partners are going to do, what our students are going to do. I got to really start crafting a picture of what we want to do. Then when I finished writing that document, I took it to my leadership team and I actually read it out loud to them, because I wanted them to hear it. I wanted them to close their eyes and experience and see themselves and see our team in that space three years from now.
I talked about wanting to be the premier residential life program in the country, because our students deserve to have the very, very best, to have the most talent, to have the best programs, the best facilities to really get all of that. So, when I started talking about what that would look like, being a premier housing program, all of a sudden, I had directors saying, “Oh, my gosh. If we want to be the premier program, these are the steps that I need my team to take in business operations, that our students have a seamless process housing contracting.”
My training person said, “Oh, my gosh. These are all the things that I can do in training to make sure that we’re delivering a prestigious national program.” That’s when I realized that that is what the vision is supposed to do. We need to create the description to tell the story to help people see themselves in that space. Because when they can do that, then they start to think about all the steps and all the actions that they can take to make that happen. That’s what was missing in the past.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Really challenging the preconceived notions. I will admit yeah, going in is like, “Oh, yeah, it’s just like a sentence. You got to make a really good sentence, and we’re trying to just make a better sentence.” It’s like, “Nope, just blow that whole paradigm up and that idea of at least version 1.0 has to be coming out of your brain as the leader of the division, the department, whatever.” I think those are two really good takeaways for folks, but then even just parts of what you’re saying of certainly, yeah, you wrote 10 pages and it’s like, “Well, it’s got to be as long as possible, all the detail, all the things.” It’s like try to find a little bit of brevity is your friend, specificity.
To belabor the point, it should be compelling in that regard, but how you read it too, I think, is a really powerful cultural thing. This did come from you, even though it might’ve iterated over time. Having it be read in your voice I think is just a really powerful thing as the leader of a team and inspiring. Yeah, I mean, I think just moving into the residential education context specifically, to build off that idea of okay, this is going to be a multipage document, because nowadays, the work that is happening is very complex and it’s going to have a lot of moving pieces.
So, you could never hope to have something that would be utilized readily and relevant and all that if it was just this sentence where it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to just dilute it out of any relevance, because it’s just one sentence or whatever.” So the idea that you could really honor and respect and include the housing operations people, the facilities people and all that, and be calling them all out specifically. So, I guess just, yeah, I’ll present that to you. I guess, how have you seen this specifically applying in the residential education context when you’re creating a vision? Again, there’s usually a lot of specific areas in your department, but then also the other collaborators and stakeholders and stuff, I’d imagine.

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. So, gosh, I mean there’s all sorts of ways for the ResEd team and just creating that culture. As the director of a unit, I wrote the Vivid Vision for our team. But then I would also encourage, if you are a hall director or a residential learning coordinator, as we call them here, and you’re running your building, you are the leader of your building. So, how are you describing for your student staff, for your RAs, for your APMs, the way in which you want that building to operate, the way in which you want to engage with your students staff, the way you want your students staff to engage with the residents on the floor? What do you want students to feel when they enter your space?
So even in the residential education context, yes, you have this overarching departmental or divisional vision, but then take that and craft your own document on how that fits into what you’re trying to do within your department. Then I think the other piece of that is you’re making decisions, whether it be about programs or events or learning initiatives or learning outcomes. How does that relate back to that document? How does that advance the work? How does that help you take a step closer to that overarching vision? If it doesn’t, how do we put that aside? I think one of the things we do in housing and resident a lot is we look around us and we see a gap and we say, “It’s our responsibility to fill that gap.” Students are struggling with sleep.
Okay, we’ve got to do stuff around sleep. Students are struggling with alcohol use. So, now we’re the experts on alcohol education. We’re the experts on crisis response, on conflict resolution, all these different things. We just keep adding more and more and more onto our plates. When we’re doing everything, there’s no way we can work towards division. When we’re taking on everything ourselves, we’re not able to advance what’s most important to us. So, I think the other way that it applies to residential education is really taking a step back in the work that we do and saying, “What are the core components? What is essential for us to do in order for our students to have a great experience, to learn what we want them to do, and for us to accomplish that vision?”
If it isn’t core, if it isn’t essential, then we need to be okay to sunset it. We need to be okay to say, “I’m going to leave that for this particular campus partner that’s an expert in this,” or “I know this is important, but this isn’t important right now. So, I’m going to put this aside.” Doing that frees us up to do the work that really is the most essential, the most core, and then allows us to advance to our vision. So, I think that’s also another way where we can help prioritize in a field and in an environment in which we’re doing a lot all the time.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I guess what I’m hearing there, and it’s like this interesting juxtaposition, is creating a vision, it feels very broad and aspirational. It is, but it is setting a boundary. It’s creating that sandbox you’re going to play in, and it does allow people to focus, and like you said, focus on the right things and all that. Because I think I had this question on here and I feel like we’ve been addressing it. So, I’ll just integrate it in here, but that idea of if you don’t have a clear vision, everybody’s just working independently. They might be doing amazing things, but there’s no tie that binds or any reinforcing point or just no structure, I guess, and no consistency and all that. I guess I’ll change this question a little bit, I guess, too.
The idea of if you’re working with stakeholders or trying to maybe show the impact you’re having to higher ups or just anyone else or something, it feels like it really is conducive to that effort as well, because you can always just start to draw a line of, okay, summary, vision statement here goes all the way to the program happening in the halls and the learning outcomes.
This one checks us off, which connects back to providing good service, which is a core foundational principle of vision statement, whatever. It just makes this structure that you could be like, “Hey, look at all the awesome stuff that we’re doing that’s doing all the things that we said we’re going to do that serves maybe the university’s whole strategic plan or something.” You can start to just start connecting these blocks and connective pieces. So, I guess, could you speak to that, I guess, of that idea of this is something that gives structure and the right structure and is conducive, I guess, to giving that focus?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think the other piece that’s so important is not only do we have structure and know what we’re about and what we’re going to do and how to make decisions, but it helps us to set boundaries for other people. Because if we don’t know where we’re going and we don’t know what’s important to us, it allows other people to come in and tell us what’s going to be important to us, to tell us what we should be doing. I would much rather set the agenda for our team and for the work that we’re doing myself than to have outside agencies or outside partners who may not be experts in what we’re doing, trying to tell us what our work should be.
So, that has been huge too, to really be able to share to the campus partners, “No, thank you. It isn’t my RA’s job to hand out your paperwork every week. It’s not my RA’s job to take students to your program because that’s easier than you having to do the work to get students excited about coming.” It frees us to do the work that’s important instead of what others are telling us, but I do think that’s true too, in that it helps us really tell that story of what we’re doing. It helps us to really tell the story of where we’re going in a way that’s meaningful, in a way that provides value and context.
When we’ve appropriately matched our work and our vision with institutional goals, with institutional values, then we are very well poised to tell that story and to be able to share all the way up this is how housing and residence life impacts student success. This is how what we’re doing really matters. An example of my own current campus is my senior associate director for years has been involved in living learning programs here on my campus. He really built that from scratch and really pushed to have maker spaces built, to develop APM, academic peer mentor programs. Over time, that work and setting that example and knowing where we are trying to get allowed him to build some really strong partnerships with campus partners.
That allowed him then to track data with student success and then he was able to share that data around student success with the deans he’s building relationships with. Then the deans started to take notice of, “Wow, these students are staying at a higher rate, they’re doing better academically, they have a higher sense of belonging.” So the next thing we know, because we were aligned with institutional values, because we were really capturing that data, we knew what we were trying to get, and he knew where he was trying to go, now, all of a sudden, it’s in our strategic plan as an institution. It’s being reported on regularly at board of trustee meetings. People are looking to us and saying, “Well, housing and living learning communities.”
So all those things are happening, but then also from the recruitment end, most campuses we have students saying, “Oh, my goodness. I didn’t get my roommate. What are you doing during placement?” We’re getting, “I don’t care if I get moved from my roommate. I have to be in my living learning community. This is really important.” I think that is probably, for me, one of the best examples of when we do work that aligns with institutional goals and when we know where we’re trying to go within that, we can really capture the data, capture the stories that are going to connect the dots that’s going to result in others seeing the value of the work that we’re doing and being more successful for our students, but then our students also being able to make those connections.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. What it’s making me think of is, again, just the lack of structure and all this stuff of not having a clear vision. So, the impact of having it, again, the focus I think would manifest in that idea of… Obviously, like you’re saying, retention and just folks staying in the halls and all that stuff, but then just if you’re sending out a feedback survey, it would give you the language to say… Not just like, “Hey, are you satisfied? Yup.” It’d really be like, “Well, tell me more. Why are you satisfied?” They could say any number of reasons. You can maybe start to ask questions in a way as, “Do you feel as though your residence hall experience is doing this, that, the other thing?”
I think that’s sometimes the tragedy is departments are yearning for the idea of I need evidence to show that we’re having an impact. Students are having a good experience. It might be like, “Yeah, they rate it highly,” and you’d be like, “But why?” Well, we’re just getting all these random answers or no answers or whatever. It’s just asking really focused, clear questions to say, “Are we hitting in the areas that we said that we were aiming for? Are we hitting right on the bullseye gear, asking those residents those questions and that thing?” I feel like that’s what I’m almost even thinking about as well. It’s just obviously having this structure is conducive in so many ways to be able to show your work and tell that story like you’re saying.
Because I feel like anecdotes can be a bad thing if it’s just like, “That’s how we’re building our whole strategy.” Just completely anecdotal thoughts and experiences and everything. But if through a survey, you are asking a question to get a good response, it’s like, “Here are quotes. Here are anecdotes that say, ‘I believe my residence hall experience is helping me to be a better community member or whatever,’ that thing,” versus just like, “It’s fun. I have fun and all that.” That’s great, but I don’t know, maybe not as compelling of a way to justify living learning communities or something. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah.

Amanda Knerr:
Absolutely. I think it gives a common language for your team. So, when you’re talking about common language, it allows you to share stories that have rich description in them that are really aligned that where you’re really talking about the same concept. So, I think you’re right. I like to share it around, it’s like a photo album, like an old-fashioned, here’s my photo album of everything I did this year, a yearbook, if you will. You can really take those snapshots of different learning and then put them into a week of vacation and/or a month and/or here’s the growing and the learning and the growth that’s happened over the years.
So, it really allows you to not only take those individual snapshots, but to tell that story over time and to tell those stories in ways that are interconnected. To me, that is a much more powerful story to tell to folks who are decision makers or to folks who need to know that than just little individual random anecdotes.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we wind down, I know Vivid Vision book absolutely be the primary source here to refer folks to, but any other resources that you found helpful on this topic?

Amanda Knerr:
Sure, yeah. I think Essentialism is another book by Greg McKeown that really helps you think about what’s core to who you are, what’s core to the work that you’re trying to do, which I think can help you create your vision. Then Simon Sinek’s Start with Why or any of the videos that he does that talks about understanding what your why is as a department, as an institution, but as you personally, what is your why? Because when you know that, people don’t buy what you’re selling, they buy why you’re doing it.
So, if you know your why and you can live that out, that’s going to attract people too. That’s going to attract as you’re recruiting students, as you’re recruiting team members, that will draw them in. Everybody’s doing housing, but why is what you’re doing special? Why is your particular campus, your particular program the place to be? So when you can articulate and describe that, that’s what’s going to draw people to you.

Dustin Ramsdell:
So much I feel like of this whole conversation, there’s a lot of the emotions, the feelings, and all that stuff. So, I feel like the idea that somebody would say, “Oh, I know why somebody would work here or live in the halls and that thing.” It’s like our rooms are great, they’re big, and we’ve got a lot of amenities and all that. It’s like that’s just the transactional side of it. It’s very logical. So, yes, that is helpful, but I think so much of this is that emotional piece, the feelings, and everything.

Amanda Knerr:
For sure, that sense of belonging and that I have a place to contribute to and I can take something away from it.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Well, then I’ll give you the final word here. Any just parting bits of advice that we’d give to other ResEd pros right now? It could be on this topic, just generally, whatever way you want to take it, but just any final bits of advice that you’d want to give?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah, I think as you’re starting to think about your vision, whether it be in your building or in an area of campus or a department or as an institutional leader, spending some time just reflecting on that, dream big, so big that those dreams are scaring you and really map it out and draw a picture in your head of what that will look like, feel like, and be like. Even if that’s the only step that a person takes right now, having that picture in your head helps you to start making decisions that’s going to get momentum to move towards that space. So, I think at the beginning of the year, it’s always great to take a few minutes, reflect, write a story, think about where you want to go, and then make a plan to get there.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. Maybe we’ll have to reshare this episode of the beginning of the upcoming academic year as well, but yeah, this is new year, new vibes, new goals and resolutions and all that good stuff. So, hopefully, this does serve as good inspiration for folks and a lot of great advice and resources and things for folks to check out. Just appreciate you taking some time to talk all about it for the show here.

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.