Over a month ago, I wrote this post and promised to be back in a few days with a thoughtful response to Peter Weddle’s blog entry.    A month and a half later….sorry, I took a bit longer than expected.

One sentence from Peter’s blog seemed to spark some conversation in the comments–and Peter even stopped by to comment!  That sentence is: “concentrate on building up the capability, flexibility, utility and visibility of your talent — your DNA of excellence.” That’s a great sounding sentence, but what does it mean?  Here’s my interpretation.

Capability. Do you know the stuff you’re supposed to know?  Accomplish this by staying current on research and best practices in your functional area and/or specialty.  If you’re feeling less than confident about your skills, seek out additional training, whether formal or informal.  Make an effort to communicate regularly with leaders and practitioners in your field so you’re exposed to a variety of opinions and experiences.

Flexibility. Are your skills transferable?   Expand your skill set so it can be applied to other functional areas on campus, or even other industries.  Explore alternate delivery methods–your career counseling skills may be stellar when a student is in your office, but are you comfortable counseling on the telephone, skype, or using social media?  Another important aspect of flexibility is the types of stakeholders you’re comfortable working with.  Hopefully everyone reading this works well with students, but other groups to consider are: parents, faculty, support staff, community members, private sector employees, and people much older or younger than you.

Utility. Are you spending your time developing expertise in an area that is truly useful to the profession?  It’s important to recognize if your focus has jumped the shark­.  Assuming your knowledge-base is relevant, can you clearly and concisely explain why what you do is useful and worthwhile?  Everyone’s heard of an elevator speech.  Imagine you are in the elevator with a senior administrator at your institution.  When he/she asks “what have you been up to?” are you able to provide a 10-15 second answer that showcases your skills and value as an employee?  Is your answer so good that he/she would stop outside the elevator to ask you more about it?

Visibility. Are you recognized as a leader in your field?  There are lots of ways to accomplish this:

• Present at conferences
• Submit articles for publication
• Utilize social media to connect with others
• Actively participate in professional association committees

Local visibility is important too.  When your department or area of interest is mentioned on campus, does your name come up?  Some options to increase your campus visibility include:

• Join committees and actually contribute
• Reach out to others when you need their expertise; they’ll likely return the favor at a later date
• Attend campus social events (for staff as well as students)
• If your campus maintains an “experts list,” find out what you need to do to be included on it.

All of this contributes to your DNA of excellence…and it will be much easier to develop it if you truly believe that you are excellent at what you do.  If that’s not how you view yourself, focus more on the “capability” aspect and you’ll improve quickly.  Have a conversation about this with your supervisor – what boss doesn’t want their employees to learn new things in order to become a better professional?

Be patient.  I’ve been in my position for 5 years, and only recently have I begun to think about myself and my career in this manner.  Does this resonate with anyone?  Is there a dimension of the DNA of excellence that is missing?  What strategies have you used to develop your DNA of excellence?

My department has a twitter account (@uwmreshalls) and I’m sure may of yours do as well.  Ed Cabellon has provided some great recommendations to use twitter to connect with students.  I faithfully practice one of his recommendations: searching your institution name on Twitter.

Running that search everyday can get a little time consuming, and if your institution gets a lot of press you’ll see a lot of tweets from non-students.  I’ve solved that problem by importing the RSS feed for each twitter search I monitor into my Google Reader account.  This has made everything so much easier!  Not only can I mark tweets as read, I can search the tweets for key words such as “apply,” “accepted” or “housing.”

Using Google Reader allows me to monitor more searches than I normally would, so I can search twitter for the words students use to refer to our services.  This means searching for “dorm” even though we consider that a dirty word (we’re residence halls!), searching for each of our buildings, the name of our institution, etc.  I’ve even started a search for “campus” with geographic limitations to see what comes up.

Do you have unique strategies for managing your department’s twitter activities?

When I finished my masters program in May 2009, I declared to everyone, “I’m done with school forever.”  Fast forward a few months, and I found myself considering applying to a doctoral program.  When I spoke with the program chair on the phone, a portion of our conversation sounded a lot like this:

Me:  “What are you looking for in an applicant?”

Chair:  “Well, we want someone with leadership experience in higher education who is experiencing the itch to go back to school.”

Me:  “The itch?”

Chair:  “Yes, the itch.  We don’t want someone that’s applying just because they feel it’s the next step.  This is a time-intensive program, and we expect you to complete your dissertation in 3.5 – 5 years.  In order to do that, you need to be chomping at the bit to get back to school.”

That phone call was in November.  I knew I wanted to do research on social media and student engagement, and I had a lot of time on my hands now that I was no longer in class.  I started my admissions essay in December, and then let it sit on the back burner.  I was amazed when I picked it up again yesterday and found myself enjoying writing.  I even took the time to look up 6th edition APA changes and didn’t cringe.  Even more than research and reading, I enjoy writing.  I suppose that will come in handy if I need to write a dissertation in a few years.

The application isn’t even in the mail yet, and I don’t know if I’ll get in.  What I know is the process has rejuvenated me professionally.  I guess I’m one of those perpetual learners who isn’t content to sit and twiddle her thumbs after finishing school.  I need to keep looking for challenges through work or school to stay motivated.  One thing’s for sure, if everything pans out I won’t be short on challenges for the next few years.

Have you thought about taking the next step in your education, either through a degree program, training institute, or other form of learning?  What entices you to do so, or what has hindered you?