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Something that I’ve come to appreciate during my time in higher ed is the value of face recognition. Whether it’s someone you’ve seen a dozen or more times or someone you just happen to randomly bump into 5 years ago in a stop and shop parking lot. Remembering the times and places we’ve met individuals along the road of life can be a hugely beneficial tool when we find ourselves diving headfirst into large national conventions.

My problem is, names. I have one of the best image memories of anyone I know, but when it comes to connecting that face to an actual name, title, etc. I am more often than not at a loss. Why won’t my brain just store everything nice and neatly in a filing cabinet format so I can connect these important details?

I know this is an area of weakness of mine. So recently I tested things out to see how I may still be able to take full utilization of my memories of interactions, and the product thus far has been quite fruitful. As I interact with folks either on campus, at small conferences, or at enormous conventions, there are 3 things I do.

1. The business card / self email. Usually folks in the field have business cards. As many folks have learned, trading cards and writing the information of your conversation on the back for a refresher later on is very useful. I’ve also gotten in the habit of actually writing down the specific place, time, interaction, and any unique things that happened in that contact moment. It’s not even that I look back at all of the cards for reference, rather, I’ve found that simply writing it down increases the percentage of retained memory by an amazing sum. Unfortunately, at many of the larger conventions, lots of the attendees are grad students and new professionals who may not have cards yet to dole out. (Although the trend is changing thankfully!) To cover my bases there, I’ve actually been a digital nerd and will systematically send myself an email with all the persons info, our interaction, and a brief physical description, so that when I return home, I can still look back and make a mental recording for future interactions.
2. Connect soon thereafter. I’ve been notorious for not connecting for months after conferences and institutes. As soon as my feet hit campus again I get thrown into the melee and the momentum to keep connected quickly dissipates. Its normally not until I’m cleaning out my car a few months later and I find the collection of business cards that I remember to reach out! This is a bad habit and I highly suggest you do not do the same. Rather, now I have found much better use for my time in airports and rest stops en route to the home turf. Instead of checking facebook or doing office triage from a distance, I take those minutes and hours and reach out almost immediately. In an ideal world my face and persona will be memorable for at least a couple days post meeting me, so that may just be the best time to engage in an initial follow-up dialogue. It’s been great creating and maintaining those relationships better.
3. Find folks EVERYWHERE! LinkedIn is great, but with the way technology is, it’s actually incredibly easy to (in a healthy way) stalk those you’ve met on other platforms as well. Linking on LinkedIn is a good start, but then see if that individual has a facebook where you can become more of a pro-social acquaintance or friend. The other big one is Twitter. I seek and follow as many folks as I can that I meet in person at various places and events. Tweeting in many ways has become my new texting, and as such, it’s much easier to stay in touch leading up to the next possible opportunity to see each other, and also have great convos on things like #SAChat. Finally, using this time to find any blogs that those folks might author can be huge, as you are now able to create a mutually beneficial resource relationship.

Although it’s only been a few short months now, taking these actions have really advanced my ability to retain a face AND name connection with folks I’ve met. As we leap into our various conferences and conventions in the coming weeks and months, my hope is that the masses of folks I encounter will become new colleagues, connections and friends. For all of you, I wish the same! Figure out what works best for you to make connections that last both mentally and physically, and you will surely win big

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Thanks to everyone who participated in our #SAchat focused on Making the Most of Conference Networking. This week’s topic produced over 500 tweets from several student affairs professionals, graduate students and undergraduates interested or working in the Student Affairs field!

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What are some other topics you would like to see us cover? Please let us know your ideas and feedback to keep #sachat growing strong. Until next week, (if you haven’t already done so) please make sure to LIKE our Facebook Page. Thanks for your continued support!

We’ve noticed an increased interest in sharing resources and offering opportunities for professional development that can be done outside of the conference setting. Enter #SAReads. (AKA: the best book club you’ve ever imagined.) We’ll have a monthly common reading that will cover personal and/or professional development, with an on going discussion happening in the #SAReads group on GoodReads and on Twitter using the #SAReads hashtag. We’ll use Google Hangouts from time to time to discuss the common readings, too. #SAReads is led by Kristen Abell.

For our first book, we will be reading Five Seconds at a Time by Denis Shackel. Plan to finish your book by March 13th, 2013!

Find the GoodReads group here.

Have questions or comments? Let us know below! Interested in helping out with the book club? Email us at thesablog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our #SAchat focused on Reading for Professional Development. This week’s topic produced 532 tweets from several student affairs professionals, graduate students and undergraduates interested or working in the Student Affairs field!

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What are some other topics you would like to see us cover? Please let us know your ideas and feedback to keep #sachat growing strong. Until next week, (if you haven’t already done so) please make sure to LIKE our Facebook Page. Thanks for your continued support!

It’s time to put away the swim floaties and water guns and head back to school. As many of our friends are gearing up for their first day of classes, we are excited to announce that #SAChat will be back with you this week as well! Join us as we get the peer learning conversation going this Thursday at 12 noon CST. If you need a refresher on participating in the chat, or want to help some folks in your office get involved, check out our handy informational guide. Have and idea for a topic? Tweet us @the_sa_blog to let us know.

See you Thursday!

The absolute worst presentation I have ever attended was… my own. Hands down. No question. Nobody will ever be able to argue this point with me.

A few years ago, when I was just starting in my first professional role, a friend offered me the opportunity to present on a topic that I knew little about at a NASPA drive-in conference hosted by her institution. I was excited by the topic from a distance, but had very little direct experience with it and should be have been transparent about that from the outset.

I decided to take the offer because I was looking for professional development opportunities. I am an ambitious person and I felt that with enough research and preparation I could essentially work my way through the presentation despite having never lived the experiences I was going to be presenting on. I relied on hastily read theory alone and this was a huge mistake.

A huge mistake.

The presentation was the professional development equivalent of stepping on a rake and getting hit in the nose by its wooden handle – only to turn around and have it happen in the other direction with another rake. After 20 minutes of talking, I ran out of material. I tried desperately to save the presentation by having the room split up into small groups and talk amongst themselves. People looked annoyed by my obvious tactic. At one point I even thought about faking illness. It was that bad.

At the end of the presentation, the bulk of my review sheets were marked with painfully low scores and comments that made me want to crawl under the podium and disappear with a party-sized bag of M&Ms. Two gracious people approached me afterwards and told me I did a great job with the tone of reassurance one would typically reserve for a kid who forgot all of his lines in the middle of a holiday play. I appreciated it.

I got in my car within five minutes of the presentation ending and decided to abandon the duration of the conference. I was hurt, I was disappointed, and I needed to sulk.

The good news (besides the fact that this session was not live-tweeted) is that I took some pearls of wisdom from the experience that I will never forget. Those are:

1) Avoid professional development opportunities when you are not prepared for them. This should seem fairly obvious, but it can be easy to forget. Some of us get so excited by the prospect of presenting (or writing articles, or whatever) that we put ourselves in situations like mine above and it is neither fair to the people who will be seeing our work nor ourselves. Challenging yourself to grow is an essential component in good professional development, but make sure it is done in ways that are realistic.

2) Make sure that you have enough material if you are going to write about or present on a topic – and then accumulate some more. In my opinion, having too much material to cover is better than having too little, because at least with too much you can prioritize what needs to be addressed while any excess can wait until future opportunities.

3) Practice, practice, practice! Not all professional development opportunities require you to perform, but many do. For those, you have an audience that wants to be both educated and amused, and you owe it to them (and to yourself) to give them a good presentation. If it’s a presentation, running through it before will give you an idea of what weak points need to be addressed beforehand. If it’s an article, don’t rush it. Take your time, get feedback, and revisit as much as possible.

4) Be selective when it comes to professional development. We are all working in a competitive economy and probably most of us perpetually feel like we need professional development to get ahead in the field. And we are right. But this experience taught me that quality professional development is better than embarrassing ourselves in front of our colleagues with sub-par work that does not make us proud. Student affairs is a small field, right? What we do matters.

A few weeks ago, I posted my reflection on innovation, being radical, and remaining authentic in my student affairs work.  Since then, I’ve read Drive by Daniel Pink for the #sachat book club.  Drive seems to capture (for me at least) exactly the problem innovators are running into within student affairs – and it sounds like it’s happening in lots of other fields as well.

For example, here’s a great quote from the recent Harvard Business Review blog network on “Declaring Your Radicalness” by Umair Haque (who gets extra points for orienting his manifesto like a tree, which pinpoints my philosophy exactly):

“We need better ways to live, work, and play: institutions and ideas that are radically better than the ones we’ve got now; rules that make human interaction not just lead to minor-league baby steps in efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness — but quantum leaps in real human prosperity.”

The problem?  The system isn’t designed to reward innovation; the system’s design (Motivation 2.0) actually decreases innovation.

For reference, Pink defines three different versions of motivational operating systems – 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0:

The motivational operating systems, or sets of assumptions and protocols about how the world works and how humans behave, that run beneath our laws, economic arrangements, and business practices.  Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling for survival.  Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments in their environment.  Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a third drive – to learn, to create, and to better the world. (Pink, page 225)

The #sachat on Drive was fantastic, and there are lots of great questions and thoughts that came out of the discussion.

Gotta admit, it’s painful to read Drive when you work in a 2.0 environment. #SAchat

— Leah Wescott (@LeahWescott) July 19, 2012

I agree, wholeheartedly.  The innovation and radical work we’ve been talking about, stirring the pot and bringing new ideas to life can be really challenging if you work in a Motivation 2.0 environment – because it’s not designed to foster that kind of engagement.  Instead, we are expected to do certain work for certain rewards, with punishments designed if we don’t follow the rules.  Yet over and over again, Pink points out study after study showing that the Motivation 2.0 environment actually decreases results – whereas Motivation 3.0 increases them, along with employee satisfaction.

Student Affairs folks have some routine parts of their jobs, but a lot of what we do is non-routine – meaning that most of our work requires us to put in cognitive thought process, critical thinking, and problem solving.  We are seeking purpose, whether that is changing the lives of students, contributing to our world, or pursuing life-long learning.  If our environments can reflect more of the Motivation 3.0 environment, not only will we be fostering innovation and the radical ideas that will improve our profession, but will allow us to become more engaged, motivated, and satisfied employees.

Q1 Very clear though in my job interviews that I excel in environments that foster innovation, not management.#sachat

— Becca Obergefell (@OberBecca) July 19, 2012

All of this is great in an idealist world where we can make changes with the snap of our fingers – but most of us don’t.  What then?  How do we implement the strategies from Drive to create an environment that fosters autonomy, innovation, and satisfaction?  Obviously, this will be different based on our institutions, our current positions, the culture of our departments, and our relationships.

Lucky for us, we can all do something to create an impact, to innovate, and to examine our own motivation.  A recent article from Forbes.com by Naveen Jain gets at the heart of this:

I believe that people who will come up with creativesolutions to solve the world’s biggest problems —  ecological devastation, global warming, the global debt crisis and distribution of dwindling natural resources, to name a few — will NOT be experts in their fields. The real disruptors will be those individuals who are not steeped in one industry of choice, with those coveted 10,000 hours of experience, but instead, individuals who approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities.

And while experts will have a part to play in solving today’s looming crises where incremental evolution is needed, I believe that non-expert individuals will drive disruptive innovation.

We can all be innovators, even in a 2.0 environment. Here are some ideas to get you started.

MOD – Q4: How do you increase motivation for your employees? What strategies do you use to create a more autonomous environment? #SAchat

— Student Affairs Blog (@The_SA_Blog) July 19, 2012

Q4: I ask them a lot about where they want to challenge themselves, how we can make their jobs better, & give them LOTS of autonomy #sachat

— Kristen Abell (@kristendom) July 19, 2012

Q4: Mutually set clear/high expectations and back it up with support. Leave space for autonomy and challenge. #sachat

— Craig Z (@cz2day) July 19, 2012

Q4: By constantly self-evaluating on whether I walk the walk AND talk the talk about giving autonomy. #sachat

— Cindy Watkins Kane (@cindykane) July 19, 2012

Q4: we reflect & set goals together then I let them work as they wish. I offer support & hold them accountable during meetings. #sachat

— Krissy Petersen (@Ms_Krissy) July 19, 2012

Q4 #Strength-based tasks as much as possible– find tasks to fit the talents. Share the routine tasks too. #sachat

— Becca Obergefell (@OberBecca) July 19, 2012

Q4 Ask for input in creating a new process or program, ask for feedback, own mistakes & failures #sachat

— Ashley N. Robinson(@AshleyNRobinson) July 19, 2012

Q4: Encourage students to draw parallels between job related skills they develop, and diverse applications outside current positions #sachat

— Christopher Toutain (@christoutain) July 19, 2012

Q4: I check my own ego. I encourage my staff to operate w/in their style & strengths, not mine. #sachat

— Ben Newhouse (@BenJNewhouse) July 19, 2012

Q4 If staff doesn’t enjoy their work, no carrot or incentive is going to fix it. Sometimes we need to accept/recognize a bad fit too #sachat

— Becca Obergefell (@OberBecca) July 19, 2012

Pink offers an entire chapter on putting the strategies from Drive to work.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Carve out time for “non-commissioned” work – time employees to work on any project they choose
• Start small – if 20% time (for that innovative project work) is hard to sell, start with 10% – training wheels
• Instead of hosting another off site retreat, use that day as a FedEx Day (one day bursts of autonomy allowing employees to tackle any problem they want – then showing the results to the rest of the company after 24 hours; why FedEx, you ask? – because you have to deliver something overnight
• Conduct an Autonomy Audit – to find out if your employees really have autonomy (this is scary – people might not want to hear the answer – BUT, you can sell it with data that says people with more autonomy perform better)
• DIY Performance Reviews – give them to yourself, often – set goals at the beginning of the month and then call yourself to your office to see if you met them
• Take 3 steps toward giving up control (and offering more autonomy):
  • Involve people in goal-setting (you’d rather set your own goals, right – they want to, too)
  • Use noncontrolling language (must & should turn into think about & consider)
  • Hold office hours (let them come to you)
• Design for the 85% – our policies are often designed for the 15% of people who will break the rules, a system that assumes bad faith from folks and will foster the behavior we want to deter – so instead, create rules that imply trust
• Persuade your boss by starting small
  • Ask the right question – don’t ask to change everything, but figure out what small thing can make things a little bit better
  • Be strategically subversive – try something quietly, then if it works – tell others about it
  • Emphasize results – tell your boss about what works, then bring up strategies – don’t lead with “I want to be autonomous and work more towards mastery”

Tell us – how are you putting the strategies from Drive to work?  Share your ideas so that others can try them, too!

There are some great folks who have blogged about Drive already (see below for two of them) - feel free to add your book review to our comments as well!

Becca Obergefell (bonus: Becca’s post includes a great 10 minute video synopsis of the book!)

Ashley Robinson

Recently, I’ve been contemplating a term: change. I started a new position, in a new city and state, at a new institution, moved into my significant other and my first “real” (not the residence hall) apartment, and got a dog from the mother-in-law. Well, I got three dogs; two were his and the third is “ours.” Long story short: lots of change in a short period of time.

A new job, at a new institution, came with a wildly different standards of protocols and procedures (both written and understood), thoughts of “that’s the way it’s been, why change?”,  and growth opportunities balanced with rigid challenges. All of these twisted and mixed together have been overwhelming and somewhat discouraging.

More so, I’ve noticed not only from me, but from the community-at-large, stepping on someone’s toes has happened more than once. I’ve become quickly discouraged at moments and questioning my transition because change is warranted and people are upset with questions and decisions.ed a mindset that I’ve decided to change today: a bad attitude. This attitude has been expressed by not only me but the campus community.

Recently, I was browsing social media and found a quote that hit home on my newsfeed.

How do others deal with the “that’s the way it has always been” mentality when you can see it is time it is time to press forward? How do you strengthen the allies that want change, and foster it within your area?

Several years ago I was introduced to the podcasts over at Manager Tools.  Full disclosure I gain in absolutely no way from endorsing Manager Tools.  But we all collectively gain when our field is full of good, efficient and effective managers.

The folks at Manager Tools stress one tool more than any other: One-on-one meetings.  Sure – you may think – I talk to my team all the time.  This is a little different.  This is a structured, regularly scheduled (weekly is ideal) meeting with each one of your direct reports.

I have been performing structured one-on-one meetings as described by Manager Tools for 4-5 years and the time is well invested in the relationship with your direct reports.  On Thursday I asked my twitter stream “Interested in hearing from folks that have regularly scheduled 1on1s with their direct reports. Worth the time? Benefits?”  I got some great replies.

The first reply was from Gavin Henning, Senior Research Analyst in the Office of Institutional Research at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, U.S.  Gavin indicated that one-one-ones are absolutely worth the time and said the meetings are a great opportunity to give updates and get direction from your supervisor.  He also indicated how important it is to have a consistent time to connect and the importance of both direct and supervisor contributing agenda items.

I was very grateful to get replies from hall directors to vice-president student affairs.  Although I can’t share all the comments I received via twitter the overwhelming majority where in support of one-on-ones.  Rachel Barreca, a Canadian higher education professional who has for several years worked in the United Kingdom.  Rachel indicated that the one-on-one meetings were a great way to know your direct reports better and check-in with them personally.  Rachel also described one-on-one meetings as an opportunity to solve problems, discuss professional development opportunities as well as a provide feedback and direction.

You may be thinking to yourself – I have SO many staff.  I can’t possibly meet with all of them weekly.  Why not?  As a manager or supervisor it is your job to ensure your team performs.  If you work 35, 45, or even 55 hours per week – 30 minutes with each direct report is not very much time.  Think of it like this: 10 direct reports x 30 minutes would only be 5 hours.  Only 12% of a 40 hour work week.  If you don’t currently supervise full-time staff and you have a big team of part-time staff this may be more challenging.  It may make sense to meet bi-weekly or less frequently with part-timers.  However if you have 5-8 or less full-time staff you should have no trouble finding the time if you schedule it consistently from now till forever in your calendar.

I suggest you head on over to Manager Tools to the listen to their podcast on one-on-ones.

A little one-on-one summary

Absolutely worth the time invested!

Purpose: To develop and strengthen a professional relationship with your direct reports.

Format: 10 minutes for them, 10 minutes for you, 10 minutes for the future (coaching, professional development, growth, etc)

What are your thoughts on one-on-ones?  If you have tricks and tips for one-on-ones please leave them in the comments.

 Chad Nuttall is Manager, Student Housing Services (CHO) at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.