When I entered my third year as a Resident Director, I itched for the days when I finally had a seat at the leadership table – making actual contributions to departmental decisions, dedicating most of my time to long-term departmental planning, processes – vowing that when I was in a position of leadership, I would do things differently. After four years of sitting at that table, I sometimes find myself yearning for the nostalgic days of living in the halls, thinking about the things I wish someone would have shared as I moved into these positions. If you’re thinking about staying in Residence Life for the long haul, here is a somewhat unsolicited retrospective of some of the things I wish I would’ve known as a Resident Director about what was ahead.
You’ll never have more agency over your schedule than you do right now – enjoy the freedom. The beautiful thing about live-in hall director roles is that even when you work with supervisors that are incredibly hands-on, the resident director role is one that is highly independent. While you are often pulled in a lot of different directions and have to balance a number of priorities – standing meetings, programming, committee work, on-call duty, crisis and student care management, facilities, staff supervision – the list goes on, the hall director role also gives you immense freedom to structure your time and week. As you ascend, your role becomes more about contributing to meetings that you don’t set, and as a supervisor, you’re more inclined to build your schedule so that you can accommodate the needs of your team and supervisees. As a result, while you still have some agency over your day to day, your daily cadence is more dictated by the schedules of others – often larger groups of people – that you exist in decision-making spaces with.
Leadership is less about execution and more about influence. As a Resident Director, I got incredibly used to doing and making things happen – running departmental processes, creating resources, presentations, templates, rubrics, and helping student staff with programming. And, as someone who loves getting things done, I fed off the high that comes with checking things off a list, or getting things done for my department. As I’ve navigated moving into leadership positions, I’ve realized that my role is less about executing tasks, and more about empowering others to make things happen. I’ve had to become comfortable with not being in student staff recruitment, training, and residential education committee meetings, and trusting my team to work through the planning of our departmental processes. Instead, I’ve shifted my time to meet with professional staff to go over high-level needs and logistics, when they get stuck – leaning on me more as a resource, and not the person that leads these endeavors. I’ve realized what I need to hang on to so that our department doesn’t go off into the deep end, and what to let go of. This shift in priorities has allowed me to represent the needs of our team in spaces they are not in, spend time building relationships with academic partners, dreaming up position descriptions, making processes more efficient, and give my time to assist with higher level campus concerns like advising Title IX cases. Essentially, my team needs me as a sounding board and devil’s advocate, and not an executor.
You will miss students and become less relatable (and it might sting). As a Resident Director, I loved that my student staff found me to be someone who they could relate to, and that they would come to with joys, problems, and life milestones. And, when I moved into leadership roles, I thought that relatability would automatically translate because who I was hadn’t changed – I was keen on being a beloved member of leadership in the same way that my staff knew me as a hall director. As I moved into leadership roles, I became a member of the elusive “leadership team,” meaning that if a decision was made, or student leaders were upset about something, they sometimes blamed it on me, or this group I was suddenly a part of, even if I had nothing to do with a directive that had come down from several paygrades above me. I’ve had to become comfortable with being someone who students are not always happy with, which is sometimes deserved, and sometimes completely unwarranted. I’ve realized that while I still come to work for students, I show up for my professional staff so that they can give their best selves to our students, and that’s just as important as being a person that students can rely on.
Filtering feedback is a superpower. When I entered my first departmental leadership role as an Assistant Director, I recall a conversation with a supervisor where I was distraught about a piece of feedback I had received from a supervisee. I had taken the feedback personally and was convinced that I must completely change the way I supervised this person, and several others. My supervisor told me it was important to listen to feedback, but that I also had a responsibility to filter feedback, especially now that I was in a position of leadership. She shared that in this role, I was going to start getting more feedback and that some of it would be worthwhile and true, and some would be misguided and off-base. In this case, I had a supervisor that shared that this specific piece of feedback was inaccurate and not something I needed to focus on. As a leader, listening to feedback is important, but deciding what to change or adjust because of said feedback is imperative. Just because someone gives feedback doesn’t mean that you have to do anything with it.
Finding a community at work will look different. While everyone’s experiences in Housing and Residence Life departments vary, Resident Directors are unique in the sense that they exist a lot like cohorts, and often are tight-knit. Often, hall directors hang out with each other both at work and in their free time – this is sometimes due to proximity, and in part, it’s due to the shared understanding of the sheer uniqueness and breadth of their roles. When you move into leadership roles in our functional area, the position bottleneck is real. You go from having 6-10 (sometimes more) colleagues to hang out with, to sometimes being the only person that understands your job or scope of responsibility, and you’re privy to information you often can’t talk about. Part of navigating the leadership transition is being ready to say goodbye to having a cohort of support and being willing to work a little harder to find confidantes at work.
Having a seat at the leadership table is an immense privilege and one that I wouldn’t give up if given the option. But because Residence Life doesn’t hand out unofficial manuals with our room keys, I hope this retrospective feels a little like someone leaving the light on for you.
