Sure, "see beyond the clouds and find the silver linings..." blah blah blah.  Easy to say but hard to believe when you are pulling your hair out trying to manage some kind of staffing crisis. While things may seem bleak when something like this is going on, I want to tell you about what we gained through our most recent round of staffing changes and some true "silver linings" that emerged.

Focus, focus...

After these painful exercises in "what do we need to stop doing," we can now say for sure that we are "lean and mean."  We have gone through the process of analyzing all of our areas and can be sure that our college's leadership agrees that we are putting our energies in the right areas.  Now that we are so focused, we can make more strategic decisions on new programs, departmental goals, and advocate for growth appropriately because of a solid foundation.  All of that hard work helped me to see a clearer picture of who we are and why we do what we do.  I also was reminded through that process that although my remaining staff was pushed to the limit with an already full workload, they were talented and patient enough to know that through teamwork and creative thinking we could not only survive but THRIVE amidst chaos. (they may read this post, so I won't go too far in shameless plugs for them!)

Silver Linings

Our silver lining in our most recent round of staffing issues was discovered through a meeting with my VP.  We were lamenting over the fact that two administrative staffing vacancies out of a total of four administrative positions would force us to scale back our operations to a painful degree.  With spring semester looming, we were worried that our orientation planning responsibilities would have to put everything else on the back burner with only two administrators here to keep things going.  My comment to our VP was "if only we had a separate funding source that could help us to add a new position."  She then suggested we investigate our fee-based account as a potential funding source and we were overjoyed to find that our current fee structure could support a new position for at least the next three years.  We also discussed the fact that we were aware of a great potential candidate from another department on campus who had expressed a goal of job searching in the coming semester for a position in student affairs.  So, in one meeting, we found a potential funding source, identified a great potential candidate right here on campus and then wrote a proposal about how this new position would advance the college's strategic goals of continual improvement to the first year student experience.  From there, a plan was born, a proposal was accepted, a search was started and our new Assistant Director for New Student Programs joined our team!

Is this the move for you?

If you are considering reshuffling responsibilities in your area there are a few questions you will need to ask yourself:

• Responsibilities were allocated this way for a reason.  Does that reason still exist? What things have changed?
• Is the allocation of responsibilities to a less experienced professional a help or a hinderance?
• Will you be able to appropriately challenge as well as support the new person in the new role?

If all of this reflection points you toward making the change, then go for it.  In my case, it meant that I would need to give up my responsibility for managing the orientation programs that I have directly implemented for the past few years.  The major benefit would be new energy and new life to the program.  The staff member who we ended up hiring was someone who had worked with our program in a more limited role for a few years in the past, so she was familiar enough with our operation to be enthusiastic and ready to hit the ground running to run her own show.  With the two staffing vacancies on our plate for the semester, it seemed like making this change was the only way we were going to squeak by in one piece!  So, we went for it!

My own outlook

My own outlook on my job had to change during this process.  I mentioned in previous posts that we rarely get the opportunity to "direct" when we are directors of campus activities offices and my reality of my job was that I was going to need to be a greek advisor, an international student advisor and a director during Spring semester and that some of my "director-ish" things would need to be on hold. However, I knew it would only be short term and that the shuffling of the orientation roles was what was going to get me through until the summer.

Now that we are knee deep in the orientation season, I can tell you that the transfer of responsibilities isn't all that easy.  You can plan for it and talk about it, but until it is upon you you don't know how things will work. You can pass along every document in your files but until you can figure out how to download experience, it might not be the complete picture.

My involvement in our orientation programs has been very strategic as I have chosen the points where I get myself very involved in what is happening and sometimes intentionally make myself absent so that my very talented staff can handle things without me.  I have to be really conscious of the fact that my presence may or may not be welcomed and may actually enable problems to happen if our OL's see a more direct route to an answer to a question my asking me instead of the person running the show.

Let's put it in perspective... it's not like I'm taking vacation or anything crazy like that and I'm only a Nextel "chirp" away. The "letting go" process was definitely one that had to happen intentionally. I will confess to cyberland that I am really missing some of the direct interactions with the orientation leaders (as we all know this is a highlight of a program like orientation!) and the other "highs" of a program so intense. However, I am definitely not missing the food service headaches, the challenges of developing the perfect OL work schedule, and having to address the five hundredth orientation leader complaint when they figure out how little money they make per hour of service.  It's all a trade off, I guess!

In summary

Long story short, we grew our department during all of our chaos!  We now ended up "plus one" in the staffing tally thanks to the need to manage our crisis in the short-term.  I really think the "emergency" forced all of us to pay closer attention to thinking carefully about some creative strategies and it paid off in the end.  I'm celebrating a new opportunity for my department, my administrative staff, and my personal outlook on my own life to start some new challenges thanks to this rearrangement of roles.

I'm really lucky that things are starting to get back into whatever definition of "normal" we use in this field.  The last piece of this puzzle will fall into place on Monday, as we will welcome our new Associate Director to our team.  I'll talk in my next post about preparing for her arrival!  I can't wait for her to get here!!

Cindy