You arrive with a plan. You have emails to answer, a staff meeting to prepare for, a conduct follow-up you’ve been putting off. Then over lunch you get an email, maybe a phone call. A student is locked out. An RA needs help with a roommate conflict. Facilities reports a flood, a fire, or maybe both. Your supervisor needs something by 2 o’clock. A parent is calling. Your staff member is upset. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, you realize you forgot about the flyers you had to pick up from the printer.
Welcome to residence life. The hall director role requires us to change gears, mindsets, and approaches at breakneck speed. One minute, you’re a supervisor. The next, you’re a problem solver. Then a crisis responder, counselor, administrator, mediator, or, occasionally, the person standing in the hallway wondering why there is a shopping cart in the elevator.
The difficult part isn’t necessarily any one of these tasks. It’s the gear shifting, the change of the skill set or mentality needed for the situation. Residence life rarely gives us the luxury of finishing one thing before moving on to the next. We can spend an hour helping an RA think through a difficult conversation, walk back to our office, answer an email about a work order, and then suddenly find ourselves responding to an emergency. Each situation asks something different of us. A student in crisis needs presence. An RA looking for guidance needs coaching. A facilities issue needs coordination. A parent may need reassurance and information. The work requires us to change gears, and most times change gears quickly. The problem is that we don’t always get to choose when the gear shift happens. And when the gear shifts happen often enough, something starts to happen to us. We can become reactive instead of responsive. The exhaustion isn’t always the workload; it’s the cognitive and emotional whiplash. The goal isn’t to stop changing gears. That’s nearly impossible in this work. The goal is to recognize what constant gear shifting costs us and build practices that help us shift without grinding the gears.
Not every meeting needs to happen in your office. Some of the best conversations happen while walking around the building, checking in with staff, walking across campus, or grabbing a coffee. It gets us out of our chairs, away from our screens, and sometimes out of the mindset that every interaction needs to feel like another appointment on the calendar. There is also something valuable about seeing the community while you are talking about the community. You notice the bulletin board that needs attention. You run into a student. You see an RA working in the lobby. You notice something that wouldn’t have appeared in your inbox. Not every meeting can, or should, be mobile. But when you can walk, walk. Sometimes changing your physical environment is enough to help change gears mentally and have a brief moment of idleness
There is also something to be said for the humble, sweet treat. A cookie. A donut. A piece of candy sitting on your desk. Ice cream after a long staff meeting. A surprise coffee for your team. It is easy to dismiss these things as small. They are small. That’s exactly why they work.
Residence life can become very serious very quickly. Conduct meetings, crises, staffing concerns, student emergencies, policy questions, and difficult conversations are all important parts of the work. But people cannot live in a constant state of seriousness. Sometimes your team needs a conversation about performance. Sometimes they need coaching. And sometimes they need a cookie. A sweet treat isn’t going to solve burnout. It isn’t a substitute for good supervision, reasonable workloads, or organizational support. But small moments of joy matter. They remind us that the community isn’t built only through programming, meetings, and learning outcomes. Sometimes, community looks like someone walking into your office and saying, “I brought you one too.” Take the cookie. Share the cookies. And, when appropriate, be the person who brings them.
Perhaps the most important gear shift is the one at the end of the day. Hall Directors can be particularly good at staying connected. We have work phones. Email follows us home. Slack or Teams notifications appear on our personal devices. The residence hall is often quite literally outside our office door. And because we care about our students and our staff, it can feel responsible to remain available. But there is a difference between being committed to your work and allowing your work to occupy every available space in your life. When you’re off, be off when you can be. Turn off the notifications. Put the laptop away. Don’t send the “quick email” at 9:47 p.m. simply because you happened to think of it. Let tomorrow have some of today’s problems.
This doesn’t mean ignoring emergencies or failing to meet the responsibilities of the role. It means recognizing that not everything is an emergency, and not everything needs to be solved tonight. Your staff need to see this, too. If we tell our RAs that they should take care of themselves while sending them messages at midnight, our actions are teaching a very different lesson.
Sometimes the most powerful thing a supervisor can say is: “You don’t need to answer that tonight.”
There will always be unexpected calls, strange situations, changing priorities, and days when the plan you spent hours developing becomes irrelevant before lunch. We can learn when to step in and when to step back. We can give ourselves permission to change gears, slow down, and occasionally pull over. Because sustainable leadership isn’t about keeping the engine running at maximum speed all the time. It’s knowing how to change gears without burning out the engine or the person driving it.
