Questions by Crystal Lay and Greg Thompson
For many who lead housing and residence life units, the journey to becoming a director is both exhilarating and challenging. In this article, the Talking Stick engaged in candid conversations with six directors of housing and residence life at different points on their career paths. They share their collective wisdom, hard-earned lessons, and reflections on challenges and opportunities that illuminate the path for those taking on this new role. For those who are a new director or an aspiring leader, this conversation offers a glimpse of the directors’ world as they delve into the heart of leadership: exploring the art of balancing vision with pragmatism, fostering inclusive communities, and nurturing the next generation of housing professionals. They share experiences from their own journeys so that others may see where challenges become stepping stones and opportunities await those who dare to lead.
Joining in this conversation are Colleen Bunn, who has been the director of residential life and community standards for three years at Hartwick College; Herb Jones, who is concluding his second year as the director of residential life for university housing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Matt Nelson, who is in his third year as director of residence life at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Tanya Massey, who is finishing her second year in the role of senior managing director at Texas Tech University; Jacque McKenna, who is in her fifth year as director of housing services at the University of Kansas; and Shannon Mulqueen, who has been director of residence life for three years at Butler University.
What do you wish someone had told you about being a director before you took the job?
Jacque McKenna: You are going to make a lot of decisions. Decision fatigue can set in, making simple decisions like what to have for lunch difficult. I started in my role in the summer of 2019, and COVID-19 hit a few short months later. On a normal day, there is so much to consider and decide, but during that time it was exponentially higher. To combat fatigue, I create consistency, and I work to eliminate the need for every detail of life to be a decision. I surround myself with talented professionals and empower them to make decisions that align with our departmental values and have consistent communication with them so that we all stay informed. I also reflect on decisions and learn from their impact, but I don’t dwell on them and spend unnecessary time and energy second-guessing others or myself.
Colleen Bunn: It's lonely at the top! I struggled to make connections and friends outside of my role, especially in my first director job. Luckily, in my second one, I had more opportunities for cross collaboration with other directors and found more folks outside of my role that I connected with. I also found that, as a director, the buck stops with you. If a staff member makes a mistake, you are taking on that accountability, even if you are holding that staff member accountable on the back end. I learned that it is really important to build an environment where people feel safe to make mistakes and communicate with you.
Matt Nelson: I wish someone had shared more specifics about how a director is less of a do-er, and more of an advocate, representative, and vision caster. Often, it seems like we promote do-ers, so folks end up in a director role because they have achieved success by doing well in other positions in a department. That was me. I am great at doing, and it was hard for me when I first started this role to not do. In fact, I’m still learning this balance. I remember when, on one of the first days in the job, a Monday, right as I got to the office it was busy. My office may as well have had a revolving door on it. I’ll admit, I was a little grumpy. I had an agenda, a plan for what I was going to use that time for, and I hadn’t had my coffee yet. As I reflected later, I realized that this is the job. This is how it is, and this is what the team needs from me.
Herb Jones: In my previous roles, I’ve always thought that we have too many meetings to attend. In my role as a director, I spend what seems like 85% of my time in meetings, which makes me wonder what time there is to accomplish the various tasks. I don’t think I fully understood how much of my time would be spent dealing with human resources and staffing issues, which, in most cases, are not resolved in a short time.
What do you believe are the most important qualities or skills for a successful director in today's higher education environment?
Shannon Mulqueen: There are several important qualities, or at least qualities that I appreciate most in others and find myself exercising, that I believe create an environment for being a successful director. First is the ability and desire to identify concerns and then actually address them without becoming overwhelmed. Things are supposed to change and shift and improve, and there is often no shortage of change in a higher education working environment. Being able to navigate and thrive in change is a necessity in this role, especially as it relates to working with teams that you supervise. I also believe that a strong sense of calm is crucial. Remaining calm and patient allows me to more fully understand and respond to the needs of others or to a situation, and it helps ground me when things are stressful. I realize these are both rather intangible qualities, so in terms of very specific skills, I also believe a functional understanding of Excel paired with a healthy level of determination will go a long way.
Bunn: Flexibility. Needing to pivot on a daily basis is so important. There are days when I am in my office with my head down, trying to get through email or working on reports, and other days where I am going from meeting to meeting. Keeping a sense of humor is vital as well. Crazy things happen in our job, and if you take everything seriously, you'll burn out. Keeping up to date on trends happening with our students is also key. I hate YikYak, but I know it is part of their everyday experience, so I address things with this knowledge in hand.
Nelson: We need thoughtful leaders serving as directors. Leaders should care about their students and staff and be willing to roll up their sleeves to help the team, the students, and communities. They should act with humility, emotional intelligence, and an innate drive to improve the organization. Thoughtful leadership must also extend into how we spend our time. This includes understanding where you should be and why and where you need to leverage the talents and skills of your team. Another piece is that a director needs a thick skin. You will hear the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. Oftentimes, you hear about the things that went wrong, the dissatisfaction, and how you or your team are to blame. Seeing these moments as opportunities and not as a catastrophe is important for directors.
McKenna: Adaptability: Change is constant, and higher education is no exception. The needs of our students and our institutions evolve, and to be relevant we must also evolve. Whether it is changing staffing models, adapting business practices, or utilizing new methods to engage and serve students, we must be open to new possibilities and be a catalyst for growth.
Jones: As I approach being in this current role for almost two years, I’m realizing that the following are important qualities: (1) Effective communication up and down the chain is crucial. This involves tailoring the same message so that the different audiences understand. (2) In this current time of supervising multigenerational staff, the systems and structures that have worked in the past may not necessarily work in the current environment. (3) Being an active and engaged listener is important when individuals expect that you are in the know about everything that is occurring. (4) Recognizing the impact of my perspective and voice when speaking has helped me realize that when I make an observation or speak to a policy or procedure, individuals take what I’ve shared as the policy or the direction for what should take place.
How did you cultivate your sense of agency and confidence in your role as director?
Tanya Massey: A lot of this role is learning from what you have observed, both good and bad. Moving into the director’s seat requires you to learn a new institution, supervisor, and team, but at the root of the position, you must rely on the skills you have honed up to this point to guide you. For me, stepping into this role required me to spend some time in self-reflection about where I wanted to lead. I didn’t make any major changes the first six months, but I did a lot of observation and listening. I also asked a lot of questions to understand the context of our current setup. I also strongly encourage new directors to seek out their peers and utilize their insight. I talk almost daily with a group of other directors whom I trust to help guide me. Those peer relationships are valued both professionally and personally.
Jones: It was important for me to understand the needs of my unit and empower them to be part of the decision making. Additionally, transparency in actions and decisions is an important part of my leadership style. This shows up differently for different staff.
McKenna: Build partnerships, listen to the needs and concerns of the students, staff, and campus partners, and find opportunities to make a difference. By listening to the perspectives of others and engaging in partnerships across campus, we can anticipate future needs so we can be prepared and responsive. This also allows us to make an impact on the student experience outside of the so-called typical housing operation.
Nelson: Myth busting here – directors do not know everything. (Gasp!) When I started in my role, I felt like I had a good baseline understanding of most areas of the department, but there were some areas that were new to me. In such instances, the humility to ask questions and seek understanding was imperative. I suppose this was how I developed agency and confidence as a director. I became more confident in my role when I felt like I understood most every element of the department. Now, some would argue that this exercise put me too far into the weeds, and they might be right. But I needed a very clear understanding of our student and staff experience in order to talk with certainty to staff, campus partners, and external stakeholders and to truly advocate for our team and our students.
What are the big questions or challenges you're wrestling with regarding the support of students and staff living and working on campus?
Nelson: Our department recently expanded to include our housing assignments area, in addition to traditional residence life, in-hall, educational initiatives. My big questions are now much more full circle than in the past. On the front end: What makes a student want to attend this institution and stay on campus? As we welcome new students to campus, how do we scaffold experiences in the halls to help our Gen Z students feel a sense of belonging? What experiences, services, and amenities do we want to provide – and how do we provide them in a developmentally thoughtful manner? How do we cultivate a community in such a way that students desire to be engaged, ask questions, and seek help? As a student moves out and onward, what is the result of their experience living on campus? Do they have a greater sense of affinity towards the institution? At what rates do we see them succeed from both a retention and graduation standpoint? And considering all of this, how do we motivate a staff team to build strong communities and truly dig in and address these particulars in a developmental, caring, and student-centered way?
Jones: How do we meet and reconcile the increasing needs of our students with the evolving work expectations of the changing workforce? Recruiting individuals who do not have a traditional student affairs background requires us to revisit and perhaps adjust our training program.
Who are the folks on your campus that you turn to more than you thought you might?
Mulqueen: This is a really good question. I work at a small and highly relational campus, and I am the primary contact for most areas outside of student affairs. I often turn to director counterparts in other functional areas outside of the division to discuss my understanding of a campus concern and establish a benchmark for how this is impacting other areas or deciding whether or not the issue is more isolated. I think this type of insight is very valuable and keeps me from becoming stuck in a housing bubble.
McKenna: The general counsel’s office, human resources, enrollment management, facility services—it’s a long list. We work regularly with all of these departments, and the people in them provide a perspective, expertise, and experience that I greatly benefit from.
Jones: In regard to gaining further knowledge and context for our department, I tend to rely on a few members of the housing leadership team whose perspective I’ve come to trust. As for other people I turn to, I reach out to individuals at other institutions and ask them to be a sounding board.
Nelson: In residence life, you are accustomed to working with all kinds of folks on campus to support students. So I was not surprised that I have close partnerships with many across campus; however, the folks I turn to more than I knew I would are human resources and finance professionals. Oftentimes, they are unseen partners to those in director roles. In order to accomplish cultural and procedural-based change, directors must know how these structural and policy pieces play into things. These partners have been key to the success in our department, helping us to innovate, restructure, update, be nimble, and modernize.
Bunn: As a director, there are plenty of folks who are no-brainers to connect with, such as those in student accounts, facilities, campus safety, and the Title IX office. The surprising ones have been across the aisle in academic affairs. Whether that is conversations about support for a student, ensuring that we have a space for a visiting artist, or working through disruptive behavior in a classroom, those relationships have been fostered in surprising and fulfilling ways.
Massey: I invest a significant amount of time with our friends in enrollment management. Our success as a department is very dependent on their success, and I want our timelines, messaging, and expectations to be in lockstep as we venture across the state to talk to students and families at roadshows, recruitment events, campus tours, and orientation. I also want to keep a close eye on their numbers and their yield, as we have reached overflow status the past three years and had to purchase contracts from local students and returners, but we have been able to minimize those disruptions as much as possible.
What ACUHO-I competencies have been the most relevant in your journey as a director?
Massey: I can see value in all of them, but human resources and occupancy are the two that can make a real difference moving forward. The needs of our students are ever-changing, and our entry-level staff have a significantly different view of work than we did 20 years ago. Instead of lamenting the changes, we have to think strategically about how to predict hiring and job needs in order to meet the needs of our students. On the occupancy front, we have to think about the enrollment cliff, the target demographic our school focuses on, and trends we see to keep a steady revenue flow as we operate year to year. For us, that means looking into opportunities in the development of the off-campus student housing office within our department and partnering with state entities to provide guaranteed housing for students who identify themselves as former foster youth coming to Texas Tech.
McKenna: Occupancy management, fiscal resources and control, and strategic planning within the evaluation and planning competency are the most relevant to me. As a professional earlier in my career, I utilized the skill set that I developed in my educational background to develop my experiences and confidence. I knew that in order to keep progressing in my career, especially if I wanted to stay at the same institution, I would need to have experience and proficiency in other areas. So, I learned about budgets. And not just how to manage them: I attended strategic and master planning meetings to learn not only about what the institution was doing, but also about the data that informed the decision and why we determined the outcome the way we did.
Jones: Evaluation and planning, leadership, and equity and inclusion.
What aspects of social identity come up for you most often in your director role?
Mulqueen: In my professional role as a director, I believe that age and gender are my most salient identities. I am younger than several of my peers, and I look young. This helps me connect with students in a unique way but often causes dissonance when working with my colleagues, especially outside of the division. Personally, I think my identity as a queer woman informs a significant portion of my work and how I structure certain aspects of residence life. I work in a red state, and I regularly find myself in the position of being the first queer adult that students interact with. Generally, the identity that comes up the most is very dependent on who I am interacting with.
Jones: As I provide leadership for my unit, I tend to think of my identity as a Black male and how others may perceive my actions and the decisions made.
Massey: Personally, I rely on my ability as a woman and as a mom. Throughout my career, my staff have connected with me when they need a campus mom to help them navigate challenges, whether it is to ask for advice or learn how to sew on a button or how to cook. I think the same characteristics are helpful when I work to make a lot of decisions and to lead. I base this on the framework that, while we see our students as adults, to their parents they are still their children. We know parents have a larger role in their student’s campus experience than ever before, and I like to harness that connection to best serve our students. Talking to them, parent to parent, helps build those relationships of trust and helps me think about how to improve our day-to-day operations and interactions. Making decisions from a place of care and relationships helps me understand that my role is ultimately to care for the 8,200 children who live on campus each year. While those social identities are not essential to my leadership role, they do create a great sense of community with parents and a certain amount of empathy in working with students who are similar in age to my own kiddos.
What are some strategies or practices you use to prioritize self-care and well-being, especially during busy or challenging times in your leadership role?
Mulqueen: I believe that developing strategies for personal balance and self-care is integral for long-term success in a role. I have several strategies that I apply year round, and especially during busy times. It’s important to me to build tolerance for positive stress and have an outlet, so I regularly run after and around work. I am a distance runner and typically run a fall marathon, which gives me a schedule that needs to coexist with my work life. I am also very particular about the spaces in which I work. For example, I only do work tasks on my work computer and try to never do anything beyond answering emails on my couch. It's important that each person develops a sense of what harmony, balance, or blend works for them and the important others in their lives. The strategies I use when feeling stress are tools that complement a general mindset and approach toward work. I find value in my role, but it’s not the only thing I find value in. It’s important to know what matters to me and to others and to ground myself in that.
Bunn: This past year, I got involved in theatre again. It was an itch I occasionally got to scratch once a year doing V-Day (The Vagina Monologues), but the dive into community theatre has given me a way to fill my cup outside of my job. I'm currently the lead in a show, and I treasure the time in rehearsal when I am just my character and not director, mom, wife, etc. I also ensure that I'm taking time during the day to walk down the hall and talk to colleagues, check in with my staff, and practice boundaries by leaving at 5 p.m. and not answering emails unless they are an emergency.
Jones: Taking time off and disconnecting: It's important to me to take breaks during our busy times. Once I leave work, I don’t check email.
Massey: There is a meme floating around stating “Adulthood is saying, ‘But after this week things will slow down a bit’ over and over until you die.” There is some truth to that, but there is also the ability to focus on your circle of control. Working parents know that the busiest week at work is also the week your child has multiple dress-up days, a project due, and two games during the evening, and inevitably some appliance decides to die that same week. Learning to manage your calendar, your expectations, and your priorities is a skill that I think we have to constantly work on. Getting the systems in place takes time, but the systems give me breathing space to work and focus on the future. I use the 1-2-3 method. The ones are things I need to do to keep my department and home life moving forward. The twos are things I want to do, and the threes are things that others want from me but don’t necessarily improve my work or home goals. The ones are scheduled and required. The twos are scheduled but can be moved around as things come up. The threes are for those rare days when your to-do list is complete and the day is not over. I believe it is okay to say no, or to know that you may not be the best person for the task, despite your title. There have been times I have been asked to sit on a committee, but I know I have a team member who would be able to provide more contributions and learn more from the experience. Promoting them to that opportunity and letting them lead serves both my department and the institution better.
I also like to try to get out of my office and walk my spaces as much as possible. This can look like scheduling meetings in buildings outside of our main office, hosting walking one-on-ones when appropriate, or only scheduling meetings for 45 minutes to get a few extra steps in that hour. If I sit all day, I can tell it affects my energy levels and my mood.
Nelson: I will admit, this is an area I need to work on more. Honestly, I need to do more to be a better role model for self-care and well-being. Sometimes, the reality is that you will be scheduled in some form of meeting nearly the entire work week. I’ve learned I need to be very thoughtful in time management. If I’m not, then my work/life integration and well-being suffers. I’ve found success with being more open and honest with folks about these realities. They are often very understanding and receptive. I also try to hard-code things into my calendar. For example, I help coach my son’s soccer team. On certain days, the team knows I leave early to get to practice. I also carpool to work, which helps ensure that I exit work at a normal time, because otherwise I don’t have a ride home. As someone who struggles with this, the non-negotiable nature of commitments outside of work has helped me exercise work/life integration and well-being in my role.
McKenna: I carve out focused time. There is a lot going on in life and in work, so I section off my time (not always equally), and I commit to being present and focused during that time for the designated task or activity. If I am scheduled for a staff meeting, I am at the staff meeting. I intentionally pause the calls and incoming emails and get to them after that meeting. While there are always exceptions and emergencies, the impact of making the choice to be fully present helps my colleagues feel valued and heard, and it helps me be efficient and effective.
Respecting boundaries for others and for yourself is also important. I was great at respecting the boundaries of my colleagues, but I didn’t respect my own. Life events and time helped me to check my ego and realize I can’t be all things to all people, and (more importantly) people don’t want or need me to be all things. Have a plan. Be strategic and create resources, support, and contingencies for colleagues and yourself, and then use them. Surround yourself with talented people and trust them to do their job.
Crystal Lay is the director for campus living community staffing at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Greg Thompson is the director of residence education at The University of Iowa in Iowa City.
