In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, host Paul sits down with Roompact Fellow, Erin Simpson, to discuss how residence life departments can find a secure footing when external forces can make it feel like they’re being asked to make hard pivot. Paul and Erin also discuss how departments can find solutions that borrow from others while contextualizing them to the unique needs of their students.
Guest: Dr. Erin Simpson (she/her/hers) serves the Division of Student Affairs at the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Vice President and Assistant Dean of Students. She has the good fortune to work with a wide array of departments that serve students through advocacy and education, community connections and student engagement, and orientation programs. Erin also supervises the Student Affairs curriculum and assessment of divisional efforts. She frequently consults with institutions across the country to bring scalable, equity minded practices to divisions of Student Affairs. Her work is dedicated to creating spaces for all students to feel welcomed and affirmed.
Host: Paul Brown
Listen to the Podcast:
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Show Notes:
In an effort to expand our support of schools, Roompact developed the Fellows program. Roompact Fellows act as scholars-in-residence to provide support to Roompact schools. They will be contributing to our blog, podcast, and webinar series throughout the year. They’ll also be available and present at our R2 conference!
Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Paul Brown:
Welcome back to Roompact’s Res Ed Chat Podcast, our podcast for residence life and education professionals. My name is Paul Brown. I’m your host today, and I’m really excited with our guest, someone that I have known for quite a while and am just good friends with as well. Someone that I rely on for good professional thinking, but also to have a good time. That could be a whole separate podcast as our food adventures and other things.
But it’s Erin Simpson from the University of Oklahoma here today. Erin’s serving as one of our Roompact fellows. And if you’re not familiar with that program, it’s a group of folks that are acting as basically kind of our scholars in residents for the year. So they’re going to help in putting out content much like this podcast, but also in blog form, webinar. And they’ll be available at the R2 Roompact and Residence Life Conference in October.
All of that information for that conference, if you’re interested, is available online right on our main page. So make sure that you register or propose a program. That’s coming up in June. So take a look at that. But back to Erin, Erin and I have crossed paths numerous times, mostly through our work with ACPA. I think that was really the introduction back at the time that they had entities called standing committees. And we were both involved in those, but we’ve also done a lot in terms of the Institute on the Curricular Approach or Residential Curriculum Institute.
And that’s usually, as one of my professional muses, Erin kind of helps me think through things in different ways. And I think we challenge each other and come to better products at the end. So I’m really excited to kind of chat with you, Erin, and have some of those insights maybe today that can help other people in their work too.
Erin Simpson:
I’m excited to be here. I may put professional muse on my business card and/or my email signature. I’ll send you.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean, you do. I mean, I think we all have this little grouping of people that are people that just, I don’t know, you get on a good level, they’re our creative thinkers, and they just push you in all the best ways.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. Well, because I may have a great idea, but Paul Brown, I’ve never met anybody like you that can systematize it, and be like, “Well, what if? What if?”
Paul Brown:
Well, if we’re going down that path-
Erin Simpson:
The next thing you know, Roompact drops a feature that changes lives. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool.
Paul Brown:
Well, that’s what I love about my job is I get to do a little bit of both. Well, why don’t you give us the more formal kind of bits, like your jobs and things like that, because you’ve worked in residence life. You’re not currently in a residence life role, but you certainly interact with the residence life people frequently.
Erin Simpson:
Absolutely. Yeah. I grew up in residence life in the field, like so many of the greats do, but I worked for residence life here at the University of Oklahoma for 12 years. So everything from a graduate hall director to a hall coordinator, an area coordinator, an associate director of residential education. Worked my way through all of those spaces. And then I transferred at OU also, and I worked in what then our gender and equality center. And now I get to be an assistant vice president for student affairs and assistant dean of students.
And my portfolio includes a lot of the pieces that I learned working in predominantly first year spaces in residence life. So I have new student programs, which is our orientation programs, our office of advocacy and education, so gender-based violence prevention and response, and then all of the training work that we do around that. And student life, which for us is campus activities, Greek life, all kinds of pieces, campus traditions rolled up into one.
And then I get to work with the amazing Dr. Quan Phan at the University of Oklahoma on assessment and planning. So I have all the data too. So it’s all the pieces of my nerd heart all come together to figure out what’s the best thing for our students, what’s the best thing for our staff, what are the ways that we can actually achieve our goals, and then keep sustaining that work?
Paul Brown:
Yeah. No, that’s great. I mean, Quan has been on our podcast before as well.
Erin Simpson:
Oh, I know.
Paul Brown:
As well as if folks have ever gotten cards from us or other things, Quan is also an expert designer, artist, and has kind of done some things for us because we always know he produces good work.
Erin Simpson:
It’s truly wild to have both sides of his brain work. I can’t access things like that. And he’s just, I feel like firing on a full 80% on both sides. It’s kind of unfair.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. He’s good people. He’s good people.
Erin Simpson:
He is good people.
Paul Brown:
In the lead up to this episode, I said, “What do you want to talk about?” And we started chatting. And there’s something that you kind of hit on that I was like, “Ooh, this speaks to me.” Because I’ve been thinking about it, maybe not exactly the same angle, but you talked about sometimes in the field, there’s these pendulum swings.
And one of the things that I wrote about when we produced the 3C book is that I had early on in my career been in a department, and they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to do this new thing.” And I mentioned that the administrative assistant who had been there longer than anyone else is just listening in, taking notes. And kind of had a face and we’re like, “What’s going on?” And she’s like, “Well, we did that five years ago before we started doing this, and we did it 10 years ago before that,” and things like that.
And I noticed this kind of cycling in our practice, or even when we were talking about it, you mentioned pendulum swinging, that sometimes in the way that we were originally talking about it, there’s kind of this pendulum swing of like, oh, let’s get really good at focusing on practice and theory to practice and how do we build that. And then we get busy, or there’s external factors that kind of push us and go, we’re treading water. We’re just doing the practice. We’re going to give up on those things or stuff like that.
And it resonated me because, I mean, COVID’s a great example of like, oh gosh, got to focus on practice. I think I’ve seen some bits with folks saying, “Oh, we need to focus on community,” maybe even an outgrowth of COVID. And we can’t do the learning stuff or we can’t do the development stuff. We need to just make sure that they’re making connections. Or even the political environment that we’re in today, like, oh, this is now out of vogue, or someone’s telling me I can’t do that or we can’t do it the way… And there’s these kind of like… What is going on there and how do we break out of these? Answer that question. Solve it for me.
Erin Simpson:
Sure. Just real quick. Just real quick.
Paul Brown:
One minute. I’ll watch the time.
Erin Simpson:
Go ahead and solve the central conundrum of our field just right here. Well, I think it absolutely is a pendulum because you can see by kind of trace what gets taught, you can trace what gets published, you can trace what is being presented at all of our national conferences. There’s absolutely a swing around are we doing theory to practice right now or are we focused on the institutional ROI, or do we have a sexy new strategic plan that the KPIs and the OKRs say we need to do all of these things?
What it all boils down to though is we can’t seem to plant our feet and find an identity in a lot of ways in a lot of our spaces because, well, higher education is a football that’s getting tossed around right now. It’s no longer sort of the tower on a hill that people are like, “Oh, things are happening over there.” We’re under an enormous amount of scrutiny. People are trying to figure out what is the thing that we can say or do that will take the lasers off of us, if you will.
But I think the answer is actually implanting our feet a little bit more. I think the answer is in saying, well, no, at the central core of the mission that we’re doing here is student centered, it’s learning and engagement. It’s whatever your institution has defined, but I would suspect that, for most of us, it’s oriented around student success, and then we’re just defining that in really context specific ways.
But similar to when I think about building residential curriculums, most of us are thinking about wellbeing, safety, engagement. We’re all thinking about development in different ways, whether or not we’re attaching an actual developmental theory to that or not. We’re all thinking about it. I think that the answer to quite a lot of this is saying, no, this is our identity. The piece that you are trying to figure out every time how to improve or how to do better, that’s the practice part. And we can talk about that all the time because students are changing, we’re changing, technology is changing, right? The technologies of being able to do some of these things are incredible. Things that we can do today with data I would’ve fallen over for 10 years ago in housing.
And so I think it’s important that we do though keep sort of this central mission always in sight. Right now, everyone is talking about career readiness. Everyone across the country is talking about career readiness, and we all think we’re special because all of a sudden we’re going to focus on career readiness. Or we’re focusing on career readiness because all of our funding is about to be tied to workforce development.
And that’s not really ever been the mission of public education or higher education, liberal arts for public good. We’ve always talked about jobs, but we’ve never thought about ourselves as workforce development. But now we’re all talking about career readiness. Well, that’s not any different than when we were talking about them being successful as lifelong learners, or that’s not really any different than talking about how do they define success? Now we are just talking about it in different language because it’s the language frankly that’s being ascribed to us.
But if we just keep remembering or thinking about like, this isn’t new. This is still keeping a student at the center, this is still thinking about their development. This is still thinking about how we get a student from point A to point Z over the course of four, maybe five, but please, please, please by six years. It’s still that. And I just think people, we fret a lot about the sort of window dressing of it all.
But if we just really planted our feet on this is still student success work, other people might be calling it different things, and we may be required to produce different types of reporting or different types of strategies to get them here. It is at the core of it still serving our central mission. And so I just don’t understand. Sometimes I don’t understand the pendulum, the panicky part about the pendulum, because it can still be central to what we’ve always done.
Paul Brown:
Is it leadership? Is it consistency in leadership and saying, “Here’s who we are, and these things tweak, but it’s not like you completely threw out the whole thing.” And also, I mean, you’ve been relatively consistent at being at the University of Oklahoma for a while. So you grew up in that space, you know it cold. You have a good sense of what that institution is and should be and has always has been and wants to be and things like that.
But a lot of departments will go through kind of a musical chairs of people in different leadership roles that like new director comes in, we’re going to go over here now. Or new another director goes, “We’re going to go on the… ” Is it leadership? Is it consistency in leadership? What are some of the things that I think challenge that?
Erin Simpson:
Well, I do think it’s leadership. I mean, it’s impossible to ignore external pressures. It’s impossible to ignore the politicization of higher education right now. It’s impossible to ignore that student support took on this weird like parts of it feel illegal now. It’s not. Yes, we have to pay attention to our words. We have to pay attention to open to all, we have to pay attention to access. But at the core of what we do, it’s still student support. So even when we’re afraid of those things for good reason, for good reason, the core of it is still central. I think it is true that it’s leadership and it’s that people want to come in and say, “I have this idea or I have this vision.” And I think there’s always a tyranny of a better idea out there. I think about when curriculum was sort of sweeping the country for a minute. And everyone was like, “Oh my gosh.”
Paul Brown:
We’ve got to do it.
Erin Simpson:
We’ve got to do it. It’s this brand new thing. Well, first of all, it wasn’t particularly new, which everyone would say. Everyone who was well versed in curriculum would say, “It’s not that new. It’s just we haven’t been doing it this way.”
Paul Brown:
Packaged and put together in a different-
Erin Simpson:
In a new way.
Paul Brown:
… kind of way, but borrows on a lot of foundational concepts that have existed for a long time.
Erin Simpson:
It borrows on a ton of foundational work. I have a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. Do you know how embarrassing it was the first time I sat in a curriculum institute, and was like, oh man, I already know how to do this. Wow. That’s wild.
So there’s a tyranny of the next good idea. And then we all have to look at, well, what are your peer institutions doing? And so that forces us into this posture of really constantly looking around rather than looking within that I talk about a lot at OU. Because I’m not interested in being a second rate anything else. I’m not interested in that. We’re going to be the first rate Oklahoma. And that matters. That means something. We are the flagship institution of a state that has really been through it. We’re going to be the best of this version.
And that, every time I say that it is sort of publicly on a stage or anything like that, the way that people just sort of melt at the idea that we don’t have to look around and see what everyone else is doing better than we are, we have to do what we’re very good at. We have to do it even better. We have to take those things to the next level. That’s not me calling anybody out and saying we shouldn’t look around and be like, “What other great ideas exist?”
But we have a copy and paste culture across education broadly, I would argue that’s across K-20, that doesn’t always work. Things grow up contextually, and really specifically. Ideas mature in ways that fit your own institution. And when we have to do things because other people are doing them, it’s never going to be the best suited for our institution or our students or our context. So I think about that a ton. Stuff that works at OU can’t just automatically work elsewhere and vice versa.
And we have to be really brave sort of in asserting that when people in leadership, our legislators, our boards of trustees and regents, when they’re sort of like, “Why can’t we be like…” Well, the answer is because we’re us. And so what about that do you like? What’s the outcome that you like? And then let me, us, these people that you have hired here, to make it make sense here, let us design a system that does that for you. But it doesn’t make any sense to go out elsewhere.
And I think about that a lot when I’m thinking about how this pendulum is swinging. Because who everybody wants to be right now versus who everybody already is versus your own identity as an institution or as a professional, I think those are incredibly important. And we haven’t maybe given as much credence to that as a field as I would like for us to.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean, copy and paste culture resonates with me hardcore because I think as I’ve been thinking about this, one of the behaviors that always stuck with me is, when looking at our software, I include some example templates. So, hey, you’re going to track an intentional conversation. Here’s an example template to get you started. It’s got examples of things. And I think when I first designed it, I was like, “Well, you might want to ask questions around specific outcomes.” So as an example, I chose an outcome like wellness or something like that, and built it around that. And my assumption was you would replace my outcome with whatever yours was. And what I found was there was a good chunk of schools that I worked with that used it verbatim. I don’t think it’s because they said, “Oh, wellness is also our outcome. This is really good.” They’re just like, “Oh, here it is. And we’ll just copy and paste that,” without stepping back and thinking about it.
And so for me, I’ve noticed that a lot. And when I’m trying to approach our work with schools is how can I introduce the fact that there’s a range of practices that all work, and you need to find where you fit in that range. Do you need a highly complex curricular approach? Maybe. Are there different pieces? Does your curriculum need to look like this other school’s curriculum? No. You can exist in this range. And I think sometimes with the copy and pasting, you copy and paste the wrong one, and then don’t modify it or move it on the range to fit where you need to being.
Erin Simpson:
There was a whole series of years where people thought that you had to have intentional interactions to have a curriculum. And I was like, nope. No, it’s just one of the strategies. I mean, you should be talking to students. I would argue that that one, yes.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. The core of that is true.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. At its base function, sure. But you don’t actually have to use this strategy, or you don’t have to track it this way, or you don’t have to think about it this… What would make more sense for your institution and do that? And if you come to the conclusion after a spirited debate that it is an intentional interaction, great. But that doesn’t mean that you should just be like, “Okay, well, whose form is best?”
Now there’s some tricks we can all share. We can all share like, hey, if you’re going to have to look through 4,000 of them, make sure you include some Likert scales or some stuff. We can all share those kinds of things. I certainly am not interested in ever being understood as saying I don’t think we should share good practices or things that have worked really well for us that make it easier to do our work, but I do think that it is incumbent upon us to really interrogate them and figure out which ones would work really well here, which ones are the best solution for us and for our staff capacity. Because everyone who works in student affairs has been handed something that worked really well somewhere else, and they’ve tried to fit that square peg into their round institution, and been like, I don’t know why anyone thinks this is a good idea. Everyone has done this or they haven’t realized it’s bad until they’re in the middle of trying to theme and code 4,000 intentional interactions. Everybody’s been there.
So I think there’s so much value in borrowing good solid practices from each other, or, hey, I had this cool idea. I mean, you and I do that all the time. We talked about it in the intro. We had this great idea and then growing it at home in your own context is the part that makes it actually really work. How many times have you and I said, “Hey, we had that conversation a year ago and I did this with it.” And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, well, I did this with it.” And we went completely different directions.
Paul Brown:
Directions.
Erin Simpson:
But we made something that made a ton of sense for the thing that we were working on.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. How do folks that are on the front lines, the entry level people, what’s the word I want to… I was going to say deal with this-
Erin Simpson:
Because it’s awesome.
Paul Brown:
… because we had talked about leadership. And I think leadership is not just the director, the associate directors, although that is part of it. Hopefully the culture in the department is that everyone’s leading and everyone’s on the same page, they’re just doing the work in different capacities.
But I feel like a lot of our entry level folks, and this is a criticism student affairs people have gotten, just feel like they’re getting banged around. You need to do this, or we’re moving over in this direction now. And they’re just like, WTF, I’m just trying to do my job and now I don’t have a good grasp on what it is I’m supposed to be focusing on or doing.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. So I was at, we do a series of onboarding lunches for our new staff in our division, not from any area, the whole divisional’s new staff, they come together. And it’s kind of cool. They come in like a cohort. They could have all kinds of different sort of ranks or jobs, but they still get to understand that they’re all kind of new in this space together. But I likened it to, this is not going to resonate with some people, but if you ever grew up in old school roller rinks and you do the whip.
Paul Brown:
The whip?
Erin Simpson:
Do you know what I’m talking about?
Paul Brown:
Is that where you like-
Erin Simpson:
This is not even resonating with you?
Paul Brown:
… go around, like hold each other’s hands.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah, yeah. And the people at the center, they’re just slowly turning, and then the people at the edge are flying around that. That’s I think what it feels like to be an entry level staff person in student affairs. Because the closer to the center, the more stability you feel, the more you are understanding what’s happening with the mechanics of the whole thing, the less you’re actually moving around. But if you are a brand new hall director, you are a brand new campus activities person, Lord help you, you’re a brand new Greek life person, you are flying around that rink with no breaks. All gas, no breaks. And it does not feel particularly safe.
And so for me, a lot of it is really trying to jealously protect time. I spend a lot of time being like, “Hey, what is our capacity level right here?” I’m looking at overtime reports like it’s, well, it is my job, but I’m looking at them. I am scouring, trying to be like, who are we overloading? Who are we unintentionally harming right now? Because they are whipping around with not a lot of security.
And so we spend a ton of time talking about capacity. Again, that has to be a leadership thing. But I spend a lot of time also encouraging folks to create community in those onboarding lunches. Yes, we have these structured spaces for you to get together, but where are you all getting together, and being like, “Do you understand what’s going on? What are we confused about as a group?”
We’ve really taught, and I would argue that this is true of almost any field, I’m not laying this only at the feet of student affairs, but we’ve really taught new professionals that their vulnerability is something that they should be really worried about or something that they should really try to hide, particularly from leadership because they want to be seen as capable and competent.
Paul Brown:
On top of it.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. How many times have we heard the praise of like, “I just give them a task and they just achieve it. They don’t need me.” And that is coming from a ton of people who are exhausted by supervision, which is an entirely different conversation.
Paul Brown:
Totally different episode.
Erin Simpson:
Totally different episode. Because supervision’s hard. It should be hard. If you’re doing it really well, it’s hard. So we had to unlearn that, and spend some time being like, “Hey, it’s totally reasonable that, once you showed me that I actually did not give you any structure to that, of course you’re confused about what’s going on.” So there’s a ton of, I think, unlearning to do about the idea of competency. That you are not a plug and play person in these plug and play jobs. You’re not a widget. You’re a fully autonomous person who has feelings, lived experiences, beliefs, and values that are going to influence the way you do this work.
And students are also never, because remember our entry level folks probably have the absolute most contact with students, students are also not ever going to be widgets that function as monoliths. They do all kinds of stuff we can’t anticipate. So I feel really passionately about our new folks, our entry level folks, our first time supervisors, our folks who are entering the field right now, particularly in the time of waning grad prep programs. I think about how many people aren’t necessarily getting a two-year master’s degree before they start this work, which leaves them even sort of less anticipatory for what’s about to happen.
And so I just feel really strongly about making sure that there’s a lot of support for understanding the why. You come to OU right now to work in student affairs and there’s already a curriculum built. There’s already a strategic plan in place and in motion. And a lot of the things that we do are circling those two documents. But if you don’t know why or how, then this is just a lot of like, this is just more stuff that you understand that this institution is weird about that we have to do. You don’t understand, you don’t see it from a…
So we’ll have a curriculum onboarding, we’ll have an onboarding with assessment data, we’ll have an onboarding with it so we can show you why some of these decisions got made. I don’t think we’re doing this revolutionarily or particularly head and shoulders above the rest. I just was trying to solve a, nobody understood why some of this stuff was happening, and I realized it was because I didn’t tell them. How could I possibly expect them to know that stuff?
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, it’s making those documents like living and breathing. It’s making that something that, even though I wasn’t part of the conversation where they are developed, it’s the institution, it’s the supervisor, whatever’s, responsibility to help bring you to that place, even though you were not in the room to understand where it came from. Because if you don’t feel that, you don’t live it, breathe it, get it at a level that you do things with purpose, not just as a checkbox of like, oh, this fits into that, but I don’t really know what’s going on in that document.
Erin Simpson:
But people are often, because their capacity is frayed, their time capacity, we are chronically understaffed for the things that we say we can do as a field. It also makes sense to me why people are like, “I just need you to know what to do on a Tuesday.” And frankly, at the beginning, that’s what they want. They’re like, “I am not… Thank you so much for this-
Paul Brown:
Just tell them. Just be clear.
Erin Simpson:
… philosophical conversation.” So I also stopped doing it in the first six weeks of onboarding. I would do after. I’ve started doing those kinds of things after they’ve been working for us for a while and being like, “Okay. Hi.”
Paul Brown:
I feel like that’s the art of it. There’s no simple formula, there’s no copy and paste, do the orientation this way, three weeks later, go back to the philosophy. And there’s nothing… It’s part of the art of supervision, of the art of leadership, of the art of student affairs work, to figure out where that is.
I think also too, you mentioned jealously guarding staff time. I thought of that actually quite a bit as a way of tempering excesses of student affairs. So I mean things like-
Erin Simpson:
Preach.
Paul Brown:
… early on, especially when I did some curriculum work, I’m like, I’m a nerd, so I want to go deep and I want to go really into the nitty-gritty, which not everyone does. And if you’re allowed to go too far down that rabbit hole, you can just lose everyone else along the way. Oh, we need to do all these things. And then it adds in all this time and then people take shortcuts. And then you wonder why it’s not working the way that you think it should be working. It’s because people are taking shortcuts, but it’s not a failing of them. It’s because you’re overloading them with stuff that they have to.
Erin Simpson:
Deeply overdesigned a system.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. I think overdesign is also one of our biggest issues in general in student affairs is a tendency to copy and paste and a tendency to overdesign are two impulses that work to our detriment.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. Sometimes when I go consult, and someone will hand me a facilitation guide and it’s 27 pages long. And I’m like, what? Okay. How do they do this? But it’s so much good thinking so I can completely understand how we arrived here.
Paul Brown:
Then you’re probably in good place.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
But that see, you put out that 27-page document and then someone comes in-
Erin Simpson:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… and goes, “What the heck?” And so then we take the pendulum and we bring it all the way to not having any document. And you’re like, well, that’s not the solution either.
Erin Simpson:
That wasn’t it, besties.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean, there’s that pendulum.
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. And you can see it playing out in real time. I think that people sometimes expect student affairs staff to be out of the box, like Barbie and Kens ready to run an icebreaker with no problems. And that’s just not a reasonable way for us to think about preparation or think about people, managing people. And the sooner we can find what your own institutional middle is, and then where your bumpers are for that pendulum. Oh, we went a little far, but we weren’t going all the way or all the way. We stayed in the middle.
If in a department you can do that, if in a division you can do that, then I just think that all of a sudden everything works a lot better. The scary part of student affairs or higher education right now stops feeling quite so scary or quite so threatening. The parts about not feeling like maybe you’re actually doing good theory to practice start to feel less true because you do have a solid north star guiding line. So you understand where you are, your feet are planted.
It starts to feel a little bit less when somebody comes to you and says, “Here’s a list of words you’re legally not allowed to use.” You can say, “Okay, I still understand how to keep students at the center.” You can reasonably be very angry about this. Let me be very clear. I’m not saying that we should just be thrilled about that part. But you also still know how to support students even without being able to use the words that we fought to use for a really long time. You can do all of those things if you can just keep your own sort of student affairs pendulum from going haywire.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess that kind of leads me to a final question maybe to leave folks with, how do you, you, Erin Simpson, personally, keep your pendulum from swinging too wildly? I’m sure we all have little, like I mentioned, I get really nerdy and then I end up overdesigning and I end up losing… That is my tendency. And there’s strategies I can use to keep that a little bit in check for myself. What are some of your personal strategies that maybe other people might find useful?
Erin Simpson:
So the first one that I think is the most effective in almost all things is a strong community. I have good thinking partners at work. And I have good thinking partners across the country. So my best thinking partner is probably Dr. Quan Phan, who we’ve already nerded out over here. But he will regularly look at me and be like, “Okay.” In this very Quan way that he does, that if you know him, he’s going to be mad at this episode, you know he’s thinking, girl, you’ve lost it. Or I have a great vice president who is regularly maybe a little slower. Because my tendency is I have big eyes and big thoughts, and I’m like, “We could do this by summer.” And he’s like, “Well, we can’t.”
So I have great thinking partners. And then I have great thinking partners across the country who I can call and be like, “Hey, I’m thinking about this, and from knowing me and having heard me talk about OU or Oklahoma or whatever, what do you think?” You’re one of those people. And that helps. That helps bring me back down to life. It can also help me realize that maybe my pendulum’s not out of whack. Maybe I’m right on target, and it just feels a little scary because it’s a new idea or something.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. And you need someone to say, “Go, go, go, go. Do it, do it, do it.”
Erin Simpson:
Yeah. You also need somebody who’s really excited about it. So I am the most energized when someone provides some structure to my ideas because I’m woefully inadequate at the detailed thinking. And so I’m most energized by finding people who are jazzed about listening to me talk about some big idea, and then be like, “Well, we could do it this way.” Those are the people you need to find. These people don’t have to be here, but these are your thinking partners.
And we are not as good at that as a field. Everybody’s really worried about, like literal surveys are asking us, Gallup surveys are literally asking us, “Do you have a best friend at work?” And I say yes because I have great thinking partners. But that’s what we need to be cultivating is people you can sit in a space with and be really vulnerable in your idea generation and be okay when they tell you that, “I don’t think so, or maybe a part of that, but not all of what you just said. All of what you just said is actually crazy.” So you need those people. So I need that.
And then the other thing that I need is I have had to start being really strict about everyone’s time, but that has to include my own. Ooh. So here’s where we get bad at it. We start to get really stand on soapboxes about the people that we may be lucky enough to work with or to supervise in some ways about their time, but then we only ever model constant working. And so I can talk out of my mouth all that I want about you should take time for yourself. My entire philosophy is that you should not set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. You have to do these things.
But when they look back at me and say, “And you?” I have to be prepared to say, “You are right.” And that’s honestly been really hard for me because I have a particular gear I hit sometimes at work or a particular motor and it’s hard. I’m like, “I’m good.” But if I’m only ever modeling to them that my expectation is that they take time off but that I don’t, or that they think about capacity but I don’t, or that I’m quadruple booked when they really do need my time and attention, that will serve no one.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Those are some great strategies. I resonate actually a little bit with those. I would add my pacing, sometimes I like to move very fast sometimes-
Erin Simpson:
You do.
Paul Brown:
… and I get frustrated-
Erin Simpson:
Me too.
Paul Brown:
… when people aren’t moving as fast as I want. I’m able to move and want to move. Keep that in check. Well, thank you for joining us, Erin. Always a fun conversation to have with you about anything. I mean, I could talk with you about anything at any point in time.
Erin Simpson:
It’s been the best time. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me as a Roompact fellow.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. We’re excited to have you at the conference in October, and hope all the listeners and watchers out there will be able to join us as well. So thanks, Erin. Thanks for being on the episode. And to our listeners and watchers, we’ll see you on the next episode.
