Abstract
This webinar introduces supervisors of student and professional staff teams in residential life to participatory processes as a foundation for effective team leadership. We’ll cover practical tools for inclusive decision-making, active listening, and co-creating community norms and agreements with your team. You’ll also learn how to use circles as a structure for building connection and navigating difficult conversations, alongside frameworks for approaching conflict and accountability in your residential community.
Outcomes
- Facilitate participatory decision-making that builds shared ownership
- Use active listening to strengthen team relationships
- Develop community norms and agreements collaboratively
- Introduce circle practices into your supervisory toolkit
Presenter (*Roompact Fellow)
- Kaleigh Mrowka (she/her) is a restorative practice scholar, trainer, consultant, and leader with over a decade of experience in restorative facilitation in college and university environments. Her work considers the ways that dialogue and restorative practice can be used to co-create healthier and more community-centered organizations, and she has worked with dozens of colleges and universities seeking to build more relational and restorative campus organizational cultures. Kaleigh began her career in residential life and is passionate about the ways that students learn from both their curricular and co-curricular college experiences. She holds a B.A. In Speech Communication from Ithaca College, a M.S. in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration from SUNY Buffalo State and a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In her current role, Kaleigh serves as the Director of Campus Culture Transformation at the Constructive Dialogue Institute where she collaborates with campus leadership to build healthier campus cultures where dialogue across differences can thrive.
Date Of Recording: 7/15/26
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Transcript:
Amanda Knerr:
So with that being said, I am now really excited to introduce today’s featured speaker, Kaleigh Mrowka, a Roompact fellow with us this year. She’s going to be leading today’s session Building Together: Participatory Practices for Residential Life Supervisors. This webinar is going to introduce supervisors of student and professional staff teams and residential life to participatory processes as a foundation for effective team leadership. We’re going to cover practical tools for inclusive decision-making, active listening, and co-creating community norms and agreements with your team. You’re also going to learn how to use circles as a structure for building connections and navigating those difficult conversations in our work alongside frameworks for approaching conflict and accountability in your community.
Kaleigh, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise with the Roompact community. The floor is all yours. Thanks.
Kaleigh Mrowka:
Thanks, Amanda. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. We have a lot to cover after that description, I guess, so I’m going to share my screen, and we’ll get started. Amanda introduced me a little bit, but my name’s Kaleigh Mrowka. I’ve been in higher education for quite a while now, spent a few decades in… a decade in residence life… A few decades, that would be a lot… but also case management and conduct in high-impact practices work and honors programs in student affairs specifically. And then on the side have been a restorative practices and restorative justice facilitator and also a scholar. So a lot of my work and a lot of the frameworks that we’ll talk about today come out of a philosophy of restorative practices, community-based impact work. I have always sort of just been interested in the ways that restorative processes, the way we think about community can help us to improve our relationships, our community, our supervision practices in higher education, and so we’ll talk a little bit about that together today.
For folks that are here, I know a lot of folks are going to get the recording, but if you are here and are willing, I would love if folks would just introduce themselves in the chat to figure out a little bit of where you’re coming from, what institutions. So maybe just your name, your institution, and anything that you’re really hoping, a question you have or if there’s something that you really want to get out of today, go ahead and drop that in the chat. I’ll keep an eye on it, and that way I can make sure we can get to that as we go.
I’ll also stop a few times throughout the presentation for questions, but also if folks have stories or examples they want to share, I know speaking up in a webinar can be scary, but if you are willing or want to or want to drop something in the chat for me to shout out, I’ll give those moments too.
Amanda mentioned the Roompact and Residence Life Conference. If you want to come hang out with me and the rest of the Roompact fellows, information about that is on the screen, and I’m sure folks will share more about that as we come.
Okay. So today this is sort of what I’m thinking we want to get through. And so today my goal is really to share some ways of deepening and thinking more strategically about staff teams. It can be students, it can be professional staffs, it can be all of the folks that we’re working with in our environments, but really thinking about our intentionality around… We’re about to enter a new year. We have some opportunities and trainings and orientation and ways to build new teams, that we’re able to come back to square one, really think intentionally about how we want to build and structure that team. And so some of this will be probably familiar. It could be things that you’re already integrating. And my goal is to help us think differently or just think a little bit in a new way about the why behind those things that we do and help us to hone those practices so that we’re being more intentional with our teams.
So what we’ll talk about today, we’ll spend a little bit of time talking about why this is important, why this matters, and then we’ll spend some time talking about setting community agreements and collective accountability within our teams. It’s a great time to be thinking about it as we’re coming up on a new year. And so polishing up and thinking really intentionally about how we’re building that collective accountability with our team is really important. We’ll spend a little bit of time talking about decision-making and some time thinking about the way that we can be good communicators of information to our teams even when we’re not the decision-maker, because I feel like that happens to a lot of us is we’re supervisors, people make decisions, and we go into our staff meetings or our one-on-ones with a lot of tasks or things to share about decisions that have been made that maybe we weren’t even a part of, so thinking about decision-making in general and how we can either make decisions ourselves or be good advocates and communicators to our teams around decisions.
And then we’ll talk about some tips and tricks. Hopefully if other folks are wanting to share some best practices that you have that you’re like, “Oh, this really works. This is my favorite thing to do with my team,” be thinking about that now or as we’re having our conversation so you can also share that at the end.
Seeing a lot of great introductions. Good to see all of you. Excited to dive in.
Okay. So you may have heard this quote before. This is sort of a widespread business statement that has come around. Mark Fields from Ford popularized it a while ago. There’s really no official origin quote of this, where it came from. But it says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And oftentimes when I do this live, I’ll ask people what they think that means. But the truth is that culture is oftentimes the reality that determines whether our day-to-day operations, our tasks, our opportunities thrive or crumble, especially when there’s things that happen, when change happens, when there’s issues or events on campus, which of course never happens in res life, student affairs, or higher ed. Never anything comes out of left field for us. That’s a joke. It happens all the time. So the more and the more solid foundation of culture that we can build for our team, the more likely we’re going to be to be able to approach those spaces and move through those changes and incidents smoothly.
Of course, not all of that is within our control, right? We don’t have full ownership of department decisions. We can’t determine or necessarily we’re all part of, but can’t determine our department culture, our university culture, even pieces sometimes like who’s in the room, what the environmental circumstances look like. But what we can do is be intentional and build in the spaces that we have the decision-making power or the influence like our communities and our spaces and our staff teams. We can build intentionality into what we do so that we can hopefully avoid just putting out fires all the time.
I do a lot of consulting work, and one of the things I hear from a lot of folks that work in res life is that we spend a lot of time having to deal with crises and issues, and that is a natural part of the work and the job. And also in restorative practices, we have this idea that an ideal split of our time would be doing things proactively 80% of the time so that we’ve built the foundation of how to move forward together for the 20% of the time when things go wrong. Now I might argue, especially if you’re in res life, that’s never really going to be at an 80/20, but the goal is to do better work in building the team and setting processes and building community accountability so that that 20% or 30% or whatever that looks like for you maybe is a little bit easier to get through, or we don’t even get there because we’ve gotten around that staff conflict because we have set expectations together. So that’s what we’re going to move forward with in this conversation.
Some things to think about and also why this is important. The first thing I wanted to show is this chart. This comes out of research by Dr. Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and trust. This chart itself is from a consulting firm called the Snow Academy that is building on her research. And this is a tool that I think is really helpful to help us think about why spending the time doing this work and building the proactive community is important. This is true of our staff teams. This is also true of our floor team, our floor environments and communities, so I think you can also apply it there.
But if you’re looking at this chart, there’s one axis about being between two people versus a whole group, and the other is between this idea that you’ll be treated benevolently, which is affiliated with a willingness to take risks and to be your whole self and to show up as a whole person. And so how this works is that trust, which we’re all probably familiar with as a concept and term, is really that shared agreement between two people that it’s okay to be myself to take risks because I know if something goes wrong that I’ll be treated benevolently.
Psychological safety is the term that we use in groups for that same sense on a team. And the reason I like to show this chart is because I think it’s worth thinking about what happens when we don’t do this well. We all want to seek to build that trust in psychological safety, but on a Tuesday when we have 19 reports to write and things get really hard, sometimes hard to remember that that is just as much of a priority as that report that’s due, as the assessment that we have to do, as the conduct meetings that have to get scheduled. Because the opposite of trust is a guarded relationship, and I feel like that’s really intuitive. We know that. If we don’t have that shared sense of trust with someone on our team, that relationship is going to feel guarded. But I think what’s more interesting is this idea that when we don’t have psychological safety, that’s one of the causes of toxic politics.
And when I think about team conflicts that I’ve seen and I’ve consulted with in res life and other areas, we can move through conflict, but when it starts to become into that space of toxicity, it becomes a lot harder to manage and can completely tank the experience of your team or the spaces that you’re in. So it’s very important that we’re thinking about, how are we building spaces that feel psychologically safe for our students, for our staff teams? And so some of the tools that we’ll talk about today, plus a whole bunch of others that I’m sure you know about, do this and help us to do this in the ways that we build our teams. I just think it’s important for us to sometimes zoom out and remember that that stuff really is critical and important for the success of our teams.
The second thing that I wanted to share that’s high-level as the why and something to think about, this chart comes from a lot of restorative practices work. This specific one comes from work out of the International Institute for Restorative Practices. This is called a whole bunch of different things. If you’ve done restorative practices work, social discipline window, restorative matrix, relationship matrix. It’s been renamed a million times. But the whole idea of this chart is to help us think about the way that we orient ourselves in relationships. Particularly, I think it’s helpful for when I am in a place of leadership where I have authority, particularly over a team.
So what you’ll see if you’re looking at your screen is that there’s an axis of accountability from high to low and an axis of support from high to low. And the idea behind this chart is that we want to show up with people in a way that is both high accountability and high support. And we can think about that in a few different ways. So if you think about showing up with a high level of accountability and a high level of low support, you’ll be in that top-left column. We think of that as doing things to people. And we can think about that as… And I’m sure you can think about a leader in your life that you can think about that led with a high level of accountability and potential, a little bit lower support. And some of us might even go to that when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, and have a million tasks on our plate. Let’s get the boxes checked. Let’s make sure that people are getting done what they need to get done. It doesn’t matter how they get there, I just need my deadlines met. And it’s not always a bad thing and not always a bad place to be, but when we’re thinking about our overall supervision strategy, we want to think about what that sort of does to a team.
On the other corner, when you think about low accountability and high support, we talk about that as sort of a for orientation; we’re doing things for people. And in that space, oftentimes we are wanting… Okay, so I’ll just tell you all a story. So when I first started supervising in residence life, I found myself with a super big team, and I was maybe just four or five years senior of that student team, and I really wanted to be the supervisor that everybody was like, “Wow, Kaleigh’s a great supervisor.” And so part of what that did for me is that it meant that I wanted to provide a very, very high level of support for my students, which I carried throughout my career and would continue to do. However, because I wanted to be liked, sometimes I would make decisions where I would lower the accountability for students. I didn’t want to hold them accountable for a missed deadline. I didn’t want to hold them accountable for that thing that they said that made someone else in the team uncomfortable. Or if I did, I wanted to do that in a way that would make sure to maintain that relationship, which is important.
But what ended up happening is that when I lowered the amount of accountability that I was showing, that was unfair to the person on my team that never missed the deadline. And that person or that group of people ended up feeling a little bit resentful because they were like, “Why am I always meeting my deadlines if other people on the team don’t have to?” So it ended up causing some community issues and some team problems. So we think about in restorative practices that top-right box as being a space that we can aspire to be in, not every single time we have to be working with students, and we call that sort of the with box; we do things with people, not to or for them. And we define that as finding a high balance of accountability and a high balance of support.
Now why this is important, consistency is critical in our supervision, probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard that, and when we move through this model… I use this as a reflection tool for my leadership style to this day. When I have to make a difficult decision about a hard conversation, when I think about the way that I’m showing up with the team that I work with, I’m thinking oftentimes about, how am I maintaining both a high level of accountability for the team and matching that with a high level of support so they feel challenged, but also they feel supported and cared for? And so this is a super simple way that you can think about your supervision approach to working with your team, whether that’s students or staff.
This is also a really great tool for communication. So I actually used to put this in front of the staff that I was supervising at the beginning of the year as a way of giving a shared language of feedback for us. So instead of a student coming and saying, “I’m not feeling great about that conversation that we had,” they’re able to say, “I feel like there’s a high level of accountability right now for how much we have to do, but I’m not receiving the amount of support that I need to feel like I can get that done.” So it creates a shared language in a way for you to have more productive conversations with your staff team. So this can be a really powerful tool, which I will make sure when we get these materials sent over, or Amanda, I’ll make sure we get the references out, that you have the link for this so if it’s something that you want to use with your team, you can.
So those are just, again, two frameworks or ways of thinking about why this is important and ways that you can think about framing the way that you want to start building your team from a bigger picture.
So I’ll pause there before we move on to some practical things and just say, are there any questions? Are there things that are coming up or things that you don’t understand, applications that you might want to hear about or ways that you see this work in the space that you’re in, that you’ve seen it work well that you’d want to talk about? Feel free to drop it in the chat. I’ll give it a second. Or you can raise your hand or unmute as well. Okay, I’ll pause if anyone does put anything in, but we’ll keep it moving.
So the first thing we’re going to talk about is this idea of setting community or team agreements. Now there are a lot of ways to do this, and a lot of institutions and res life departments have built this into the way that they’re building their floor meeting plans with communities, using it with the teams that they’re building, and it’s definitely a best practice for how we work together with our teams. Having done this for a really long time, I will say there are some ways of doing this work that are more effective than others or will help to really lean into the community accountability. So that’s what I want to talk about and how I want to lean into this conversation.
Community agreements or team agreements or how we do things here as a team, whatever you want to call them, are most meaningful when they’re genuine and co-created. So they’re not a list that you’re going to steal from this presentation when I give you examples and put in front of your team and say, “This is how we’re going to show up together.” It’s something that is meaningful and is something that has been collectively come together with your entire team that everybody feels they can buy into. So it’s real. It’s not just performative. It’s not just something that you’re saying is going to happen. It’s something that together you have come together and thought about collaboratively.
It can include elements of supervisor expectations. I’ve seen that done really well, so bringing your set of expectations as a supervisors into the conversation to maybe ask the question, “These are sort of my expectations. What do we need to build into these community agreements that will make sure that people are getting the amount of support that they need to meet these expectations?” That can be a really great way to integrate it into the conversation. But it shouldn’t just be a list that you as a leader of a team are putting in front of your team and then calling them community agreements. We want that to really be something that people can hold onto and be a part of.
We should revisit them regularly. This is probably the thing that I see most. We’re busy. We have five million things to talk about in every staff meeting. And so we maybe do community agreements at the beginning of the semester, and then maybe they sit on the wall, maybe they don’t even sit on the wall, and we never really talk about them again. These agreements are most helpful when we actually use the language from them in our supervision practices as supervisors and we revisit them regularly to check in about how we’re doing to see what people feel like we’re doing well and what we might need to improve on and if anything’s missing. And so making sure that you’re rebuilding time into your agendas, into your one-on-ones, into your conversations, to come back to these conversations regularly and make sure that people are actually buying into them is really critical. And that’s true of a staff team community agreement. It’s also true of a floor community agreement. It can be really helpful.
And it requires a shift into shared accountability. So this is a list… And this has to do a little bit with how you frame, so I’ll give you some example questions for this. But the idea of community agreements is that this is something that we have built together that we’re going to do. And the expectation with that is that not only are you going to hold the team accountable for that as a supervisor, but the rest of the team is going to hold each other accountable for that.
Now, if you can find a way to make that switch on your team, that’s when the team environment starts really feeling like it’s going from a good team environment to a super great one. So when your students or staff feel like they can say, “Hey, I have a question. I feel like we’re not attending to this community agreement where we said that we would really try to value each other’s time and be here in a timely way for staff meetings. That doesn’t seem to be happening, so what do we need to do as a team to get there,” and finding a way to use that as a way to give feedback to their teammates using these community agreements as a way to do that, finding a way to ask questions of each other that allow for that accountability to not feel like you’re just the supervisor having to tell people what to do and set the boundaries all the time.
And lastly, this can be done over time. I’ve seen some folks work this into a curricular plan or a staff meeting plan to be like, “Okay, the very first thing we’re going to do when we meet up with each other is we’re going to set community agreements.” Now, I don’t know about you, and think about every team that you’ve ever been a part of, on day one, you might not be ready to have that conversation. That may be a day two, day three, end of training conversation once you’ve gotten to know some of the people, you’re sort of vibing it out and feeling the conversation, or it could be something that you start on the first day and then maybe come back to in a few days. Maybe the first day is just a conversation about what people need in a team, and then you’re actually setting those agreements at a later date once people have had more time together.
There’s lots of ways that you can do it. But again, the idea is that you want your community agreement process to feel real and to feel like it’s going to be something that is usable for your team, which means that it doesn’t have to be done in a time block, it doesn’t have to be done with a certain set of questions, and it doesn’t have to have a finalized version that looks the same as every other team. You don’t need five things that we do. I’ve seen some people say, “Okay, what are the five things that we’re going to do together? What are the five expectations?” It can look however you want it to look, and you can hold each other accountable for that, however works for your team. And you can work together, we’ll talk about it in the decision-making section, you can work together to figure out what that process looks like and is going to be best for your team.
So if you’re doing community agreements, we’ll talk a little bit more about this, but I’m going to really encourage you to think about how you’re doing that, what you really want the result of that process to look like, how are they usable, how are they something that your team can actually come back to, and thinking about, how do I build this process to be more effective for the team that I’m leading? And again, here are some things that you can think about. So building them together, doing that co-creation sort of approach, revisiting agreements regularly. I write them into my meeting agendas every three weeks. Every three weeks we always come back and say, “Everybody’s going to share one that they think we’re doing really well on, and everybody’s going to share one thing that they think we can do better or that I can do better and I can commit to doing better on.” And then we talk about it, and we talk about whether those need to change or not, and it really makes it feel like a living document and something that we’re doing together.
Also, embedding it in one-on-ones. This is great language to seek feedback from students in a way that you’re giving them the language that they can actually give that feedback in modeling that in a respectful way. So instead of being like, “I’m really struggling with this person because of this thing that happened,” they can say, “Remember as a team, we agreed that we were going to use I statements. I’m really struggling in conversations with this person because I feel like that person isn’t doing that. I really feel like I’m struggling to have good conversations with that person. It makes me feel disrespected because of that.” And so using these as a way of getting feedback from students in one-on-ones and giving them space to talk about how that team experience going for them, and maybe putting that on a shared one-on-one agenda as a regular check-in item or an option for them to check in, which we’ll talk about in a little bit as well. And then, again, embedding in staff meetings regularly can also be really helpful.
Here’s some example questions that I’ve used. You don’t have to use all of them. When I’ve done these with a team of about eight, these questions in themselves can take 40 minutes or so, and I’ll share a little bit more about how I usually do it. But it doesn’t have to be just directly, like, “Let’s come up with community agreements together.” You can use this as a way of really building a community and building a team and getting people to be vulnerable and learn about each other. So think of a team environment where you felt productive, heard, and connected. What’s something that comes to mind? How did that feel? Getting people to start centering and thinking about, what would it feel, look, and be like to be on a team that was working at its ideal? What is their hope for what the team can look like?
Imagine an ideal environment for our team. What would describe that? Put them in pairs, have them dream and think about what the ideal team environment is going to look like for them, what that community would look like for your staff team. And then thinking about the practicality of it. What behaviors do we need to engage in to reach that place? In order to feel like we’re all on the same page and really dedicated and connected, what needs to happen to get there? And then what do you need from others to get there? And that could be from each other and also from you as their supervisor. So getting them to actually think and talk through that question and listing those needs can be great. And then turning it into action. So looking at this list of needs that you’re hearing from your community members or your team members, what’s one thing that you can personally commit to in order to make sure that we’re getting there? And that’s something that could serve the foundation for a community agreement session.
Now, you’ll see this says session one because you’re not going to necessarily have a polished version of community agreements after this conversation. What you’re going to have is a sort of shared understanding of what people are really hoping a community will look like. You’ll have sort of a north star and some ideas about how you as a team might get there or what people are going to need in order to get there. You can then spend time either in the second part of the session or you can come back to it at another time when people know each other a little bit better to actually come back to those pieces and build something together about what those agreements could look like. So looking at our behaviors and commitments from last session, what are the three agreements for our team that you would suggest? You could do that in pairs or small groups and then come back to the group and build a list together.
And then thinking about accountability, so how are we going to use this? This conversation was helpful for us to understand each other better, to learn a little bit, to set some collective agreements. How are we going to use it? What does it actually look like to hold each other accountable? I’ve seen supervisors do a really great job with maybe having some case studies. So let’s imagine that this is happening, how might we use our community agreements to work through that together, and actually workshopping that team time with them on how we do that.
And lastly, actually asking them what routines can we set for ourselves in team meetings and one-on-ones? One of the best I’ve seen, I was working with a team a few weeks ago, and they added a question… They ended their meetings with kudos every week, which I think is pretty great and pretty typical. And then the last question that they asked in a circle, which we’ll talk about, was what’s one thing from the community agreements that you want to commit to this week, or one thing in our list of things that we have to do that you want the rest of this community to know that is something that you’re focusing on? And so what are you committing to in order to move forward? So that it was making it real for them that it was important for them to also show up in that way. And I thought that was a great suggestion that that student team came up with as a way of holding this together and moving forward as a team.
So there’s lots of different ways you can do this, lots of different ways you can think about community agreements. And I encourage you to maybe add a question to the session the way that you already do this or to think about how you can make your agreements as a team feel less like a, “This is the way that things need to happen as your supervisor,” and more of a, again, high accountability, high support, “How do we do this with each other and build a good experience for all of us where we’re going to excel, get things done, but also enjoy ourselves and enjoy being on a team together?”
I always do community agreements in a circle. And this is a restorative practices technique that we don’t have enough time to dig into the full experience of what a circle looks like, but I did want to show this to you in the realm of community agreements and encourage you to think about how this could be helpful for your staff teams in general. So circle practice is a structured, participatory approach to dialogue that helps to foster safety, connection, and shared voice. I will also just name that a lot of our students did circle practice at this point in K-12 education, so this is something that feels normal to them and feels like something that builds community for them already.
You can use a talking piece. I’ve seen some teams get really fun about this, like having a mascot. I saw someone, they have a talking piece that it was some sort of stuffed animal or box, and everybody added a sticker or something that was important to them to the box to create their custom talking piece. It can be a great way to build routine and tradition on your team. It’s also not required. If it doesn’t feel like it works for you, there’s no need to use a talking piece with circle work. You can just go around in a circle.
In a circle practice, so generally if you’re sitting in a circle, one person would start and you just go around that circle in that order so that everybody has a chance to answer that prompt. So if you look back to these questions, you might say to folks, “What’s one thing that you personally can commit to,” everybody would have 30 seconds to a minute to think about that, and then you would go around the circle so that everybody had a chance to answer.
They can choose to pass so nobody feels pressured to share. You can encourage people for some topics to say, “This is something that I’d really love everybody to share on, but it’s okay if not.” And what that does is it creates a space that’s an opt-out culture instead of an opt-in culture. And I like to say why that matters is that we’ve all been on teams or in classes where there’s one or two people that always are the ones to raise their hand or always the ones to have the question or the answer. And if you were like me, I was never the first person to raise my hand because I was a processor and I was a little bit shy when I was in college. So having a process that allowed me to get used to the idea that my voice mattered and that I had a space to do that, I didn’t need to put myself in front of someone else to do that, was really transformative for my learning.
So when you use these types of processes, you’re allowing people to say, “I know you want to hear my voice, but I don’t have anything to share this time,” rather than just waiting for the folks that feel like they do have something to say and they’re willing to jump out in front of everyone else to say it to opt in. So it helps to create that environment where every voice is valued. This helps with sense of belonging, this helps with that trust and psychological safety. And you can use it in these community agreement formats. You can also use it in check-ins throughout your staff meetings, like “Does anybody have any questions? Let’s do a quick go-around,” so people can say, “No, no questions,” or they can say, “Yeah, I actually have a question,” and jump in and share what that question is.
So this can be a really good tradition to build with your teams. It doesn’t have to be super formal. It can just kind of be how you run meetings and have conversations. And I think probably for a lot of folks, even if you’re not doing a formal circle practice, you might already do something like this if you do something like roses and thorns or clouds and silver linings. There’s all of them. The great thing that’s happening and the challenge that’s happening at the beginning of a meeting, that’s a circle practice. So we can just take that idea and that way of doing things and apply it to other conversations that we’re having. So I’d encourage you to think about how you use that in your meetings.
I’ll also just say, if you notice in this picture, there’s no table, so I’d encourage you to think about the environmental setup of your space. Do you always need a table with a laptop and people to be able to take notes for the whole meeting? So I’ve seen some people set up… They do a circle at the beginning and then they come over to a table, or when they’re doing a circle, they move everything to the side on the table so that they can actually see and talk to each other. So you can really think about and actually build that into your community agreements, what you want that space to feel like in your conversations.
Okay. So here are some examples that I’ve seen teams put together for community agreements. It’s everything from how we talk to each other, so things like take space, make space, be aware of how much space you’re taking up in a conversation essentially, speaking from an I perspectives, all the way down to… Remember we’re part of a larger system, so getting our part done matters to the team, and that was specifically about reports and things that didn’t feel day-to-day as important to some folks on the team, recognizing that not getting things done or not getting things done on time or not getting that programming assessment in, we’re actually holding back the success of the community in some ways. So that was a way of them holding each other accountable for making sure they were getting through things.
I’m curious if folks do community agreements, if you have any that you’ve seen come up in your team or that you would suggest for a team that are really, really effective, go ahead and drop those in the chat. I’d be curious to see if you have anything or any language that has really worked for you in talking to your team about expectations and agreements. I’m also curious, if you do have questions or stories or anything else that you want to add for the community agreements conversation, feel free to raise your hand or drop those in the chat as well. And I will just pause for a second to see if anyone has anything to add.
Okay. I’m just continuing to move along on time, so if you’re typing something or you have something to add, send it and I’ll pause and come back to it. But I’m going to keep moving.
Okay, let’s talk about decision-making. So decision-making is probably one of the most critical pieces of leadership work that I think isn’t taught well sometimes. I teach an entire class about this in our community leadership program, thinking intentionally and critically about how we make decisions, how we communicate decisions, how we move forward as teams and communities about decisions. We make countless decisions every day as leaders and oftentimes are in spaces where we are communicating or enforcing decisions that have been made as a larger team or maybe even above our heads that we had absolutely nothing to do with, things that came down from the school, things that came down from the department level, training requirements that we have to share with our staff and our students that we did not have a chance to make a decision in. So there’s lots of different levels of incorporation into a decision-making process that we can land within within our roles as leaders.
And there are three principles to decision-making that I think are really helpful. These come from the fair process model. The citation’s on the screen, the original model for that, where it came from. And I just think that these principles are so helpful for language to think about decisions. And I mean that in a lot of different ways. So one, it helps me think through my decision-making process when I’m the decision-maker. It helps me think through how to communicate and work through decisions when I’m not the decision-maker, but maybe I’m a middle body or a middle manager in the process communicating that to my student team or my staff team.
And so these three pillars, the first is engagement, so thinking about… The question there really is, who’s going to be impacted by this decision, and do we have all the information we need to make that decision? The idea behind that is that we want to, when possible, involve people in decisions that impact them in order to create trust and psychological safety, inviting their input, obviously actively listening when we can, demonstrating perspectives, et cetera. And this is a great part in the decision-making process if you are the one making the decision to use those circle processes, to really hear what people want and engage them in that decision-making process. You can do this about really high-risk, high-level topics. You can also do this about how we want to decorate our homecoming float in order to create some good decisions among your team.
In this model, after the engagement, you ask who’s going to be impacted by this decision, I’ve heard input, there’s a decision-maker. So that might be you as a supervisor, that might be someone on your team that you’ve delegated to make the decision, maybe a lead staff member or a committee leader. Someone makes the decision. And then there’s a whole half of the decision-making process that happens after the decision is made. And sometimes I think this is where we get into hot water when things are moving really quick.
The first is explanation, so communicating when possible, obviously there will be things that we can’t share the whole story, but communicating as much as possible about the reasoning behind decisions. And what research shows is that even if that’s not what you wanted to move forward, if you felt like you were engaged in the process, and in the explanation you feel like your perspective was heard, you’re more likely to be like, “Okay, I can go along with that.” So the process of engaging people matters in the decision-making process. And so explanation is a critical part, how are we explaining those decisions when we can?
And then the last thing is expectation clarity, so what does that mean for me? And I feel like oftentimes when I was in residence life, this was the one that I was oftentimes trying to fill gaps on. So decisions would get made, they would tell us to announce it at a staff meeting, maybe I didn’t understand the full expectation clarity to communicate that to my staff team about what happened next, what that meant for them, what that training change was going to mean for their experience and for their time. And so what having these three pillars does or three principals does for me is it allows me to think critically about how I can both be a partner in that decision-making and how I can communicate that decision and be a partner to communicate it.
So some ways that I mean and that you can think about that, when you’re the decision-maker, you can think about these three principles and build a process that’s going to have all three. When you’re maybe not the decision-maker, but you are in spaces where you can ask more questions, you can advocate or ask more questions to try to get at these things, asking the question, “Okay, so you want me to communicate this change to our staff team? Can you tell me a little bit more about what I can communicate them about why that decision was made and what needs to happen for them so that they feel like they know what needs to happen next,” so you can advocate for that information. And as the person communicating that decision, you can just think through all three of these components in the way that you’re sharing updates with your teams. Knowing that if you are just sharing decisions that have been made, changes and updates, but you’re not in any way touching on explanation and expectation clarity, that that can create uncertainty for the team.
So as much as possible, when you are as a leader demonstrating these three steps, what that can do is it can create that trust in psychological safety because there’s a predictable way of decisions getting made or you communicating those decisions. And then what happens is in those situations where it wasn’t your decision or something that you didn’t have influence or control over, people are more likely to not attribute that decision to you as a supervisor because they understand that generally you are going to engage them when possible in making a decision.
And so as you think through the way that you’re making decisions with your team, think about, how can you use all three of these principles? As you’re thinking about all of those updates you got to communicate to your team and all of those changes, think about, how can I talk about how all three principles of this process happened and use it to craft my message around decisions and things that people need to know? And what that will do is start to create a little bit more of a bubble of trust for decisions. I actually usually tell people when I do consulting projects with them to actually just share this language with their team, say, “Hey, this is three ways of thinking, three principles and three steps for making a decision that I think are really important. This is how I’m going to try to do it.” So when we’re talking about a decision that needs to be made on an agenda, I said homecoming float earlier, it’s kind of a silly example, but let’s have a conversation. Let’s engage around getting everyone’s perspective on what we should do. And then someone’s going to make a decision and explain why, and then we’re going to talk about what we need to do to make that the best thing we possibly can. And so actually walking people through that language and process can be really helpful.
Secondly, it gives people a language to give you feedback when decisions don’t feel good. So when the thing comes down that you have to tell your team, instead of them just getting upset and frustrated and angry, instead what you start to see happening is you start to see people say, “Okay, I hear that. I don’t feel like I fully get the explanation. Is that something that you can’t share or something that we just don’t know?” or, “Okay, I understand why we made that decision, but I don’t have expectation clarity. I don’t know how I need to change the programming that I’m planning on doing next month. Can you give me a little bit more context about what that means for me?” And so that shared language can lead to better conversations and better feedback on your team and allow you to hold each other better accountable in those moments.
That’s what I wanted to share about decision-making. So if there’s any questions or things about that, please feel free to drop them in the chat. And otherwise, I’m going to move on to just some general tips and tricks that will pull these pieces together, and then we’ll have some time for questions at the end if people have them. Otherwise, we will wrap up.
So the first is for one-on-ones, and some of this you might be doing. And so, again, if you’re doing it, check it off. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. If it’s something that you think you could improve or integrate, please feel free to take with you what is helpful. Helpful to have an agenda, to build routine and structure. It’s not just about making sure you’re checking off all the things on the list, but it’s helpful for staff members to know what’s going to happen in that meeting, to have some consistency in that, and to know their part in it. So if you’re using an agenda or a typical structure for your one-on-ones, maybe you build that together in your one-on-one or with your team, that can be really helpful to make those meetings feel less overwhelming and more regular. They don’t have to be super complicated. First, we just do a general personal check-in, and then we talk about the process on different projects, and then we have some time to talk about feedback and bigger-picture things, and then we wrap up. It doesn’t have to be line-by-line agenda, check the bucket, but you can create an arc of the conversation. That can be consistent.
Create time to ask questions so that you’re listening deeply and understanding your team, and build time on the agenda for that. I feel like you can either use the same questions or, as I’ll talk about in a second, you can have a bunch of different questions that you could use. The fourth bullet point down, maintaining a question bank for varied conversation starters, I’ve seen some people use that really successfully. So they have a list of questions that during the feedback part, students or their staff teams can pick a question and just say, “This is a question that I want to lean into today. What’s feedback that you have for me as a manager? Do you have any blockages, anything that I can help get out of your way in order to get your job done better? What’s one way that you want to grow or learn or do more in this role to help your future career?” You just have a bank of questions. You don’t have to push a certain question.
Maybe you just let them pick one or two from the list on that week, but depending on what they want to talk about in order to drive the conversation beyond just updates and back-and-forth, one-on-one conversations and direction.
Obviously collect feedback consistently and act on it. One of the things I do in all of my one-on-one conversations is that when we talk about feedback, when someone shares feedback, I try to circle back to that feedback that they gave me in the last session in their next one-on-one to make sure that I’m reflecting that I heard them. And if I’ve done anything or taken any steps in that direction, I try to fill those in there and have a conversation about whether there’s more that need to be done or share a little bit more about how I’m moving that forward. So I think if you can find ways to develop not just feedback opportunities back and forth, but feedback loops where you’re showing that you’re listening and following up on feedback, that can be really helpful, and one-on-ones are a great place for that.
Return to the agreements one-on-one with people. Some folks might not be willing to jump up in a group and be like, “We are being really bad at listening to each other in staff meetings,” and that’s one of our community agreements. So giving space in your meetings to say, “How are we doing with the agreements we set? The agreements that we set for me as a supervisor and you set for the rest of your team, how are those going?” and have space in that meeting to talk about that.
And lastly, and folks know this, creating space for professional and personal check-ins. Those are great developmental opportunities where you’re modeling how to have good supervision conversations with folks that in their future might be supervisors, might be leaders, might be in their student roles or in their future careers having to lead these conversations. So a lot can happen in there in order to make sure that that community experience going well.
For staff meetings, establish routines and rituals. Talked about the roses and thorns; that’s a great example of something that is a ritual or a routine that you can use in a tradition for your team that you use. Those make people feel connected. They make people feel like they’re part of a community. Use circle practices, which we talked about, ending meetings with kudos. I shared the sharing one commitment for the week that can be about the community agreements. It could just be one thing that you want the rest of the team to help you… one thing that’s on your mind that’s a priority for you that you want other people to support you through. Obviously building your shared team culture intentionally and taking time to really think about these pieces, integrate them into your planning. Centering the agreements, as we talked about, considering those decision-making communication pieces.
And then just monitor and be open about how you’re using your time. If your staff meetings are becoming a slog of, “We have to do this and we have to do this and we have to do this,” taking a step back and being like, “These meetings are a slog. What can we do in order to get everything done that we need to get done and not make this time feel so heavy or so hard?” So really monitoring the things that are happening and the way that that staff meeting time is landing and get feedback about that from folks and be willing to make changes.
And lastly, I think the ultimate trick, if I could go back to myself in an entry-level position or even in my mid-career and give myself one piece of advice as a supervisor, it would be to be more explicit with my language. I would share that matrix that I showed you of high accountability, high support, and the idea of being in the with space with people with my supervisees earlier so that when I wasn’t doing something well, they could use that language to give me feedback and they would understand what I was trying to do. If that’s not the framework you use for supervision, share the framework that you do use with them. Be explicit about it so that you’re able to get that feedback directly and talk to them about it. I would use decision-making and fair process language more explicitly so that, as we talked about earlier, people would have the ability to feel communicated with and respected in those decisions. We would have some shared language to talk through those things and those moments of tension when they happened.
The how matters as much as the what. So being explicit with things like community agreements, how staff meetings are feeling, how feedback loops are happening, thinking about processes as much as I was just thinking about what happened and the outcome I think can be really, really critical. People will notice and value that intentionality and how much work you’re putting into leading in a way that highlights the participatory nature and the co-creative nature of the team.
And lastly, invite folks into the process. It takes a little bit of strategic vulnerability as a supervisor to say, “We’re going to build this team together. It’s not just going to be my vision for the team, it’s going to be our vision for the team.” But have enough trust in the team that you’re leading to do some co-creation with them, to really think about, what does it look like when we all put our unique expertise together to make something happen?
That’s all I had. So if you do have any questions, feel free to raise your hand, unmute. If you want to drop a question in the chat, feel free. And while you think about that, I’ll also say I have my contact info on the screen, so if it’s helpful for you to follow up with an email asking about a resource or something that you need or a question that you didn’t want to ask, or if you just want to stay connected, feel free to find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email. I would be happy to connect.
Thanks, Katie and Zachary. I appreciate the comments, and I hope that some of the thoughts are helpful. Amanda, I’ll pass back to you.
Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Kaleigh. I appreciate the time and energy today to be our featured speaker and providing some additional context for awesome strategies to use with our RAs and our professional staff teams. Thank you so much for your time.
I want to thank all of you for joining us again today. We’re so glad that you are able to be part of the conversation with us this afternoon. You will be receiving a follow-up information in the next few days with access to the recording of today’s session so you can revisit it or share it with a colleague on your campus. Before you go, I hope that you’ll take a couple of minutes to fill out the survey. Just put the form in the chat, so if you would take a second to fill that out, it really helps us build out our calendar for future sessions.
A couple announcements for you. We are going to be taking a bit of time off from our monthly webinar series. We know you are gearing up for July summer/fall training and getting ready to open our buildings. And so please know that we are coming back, but we’re going to give you a little bit of space to get that done. Our plan is around September 24th to host the Myth of Buy-In: Designing Work People Actually Do, which is another Roompact fellow presentation. We hope that you’ll join us for that session.
And just as one last reminder, Kaleigh, if you enjoyed Kaleigh today or any of our other Roompact fellows, they are all available to do a one-hour virtual consultation with you as part of their Roompact fellow role. If you’re interested in learning more about that or if you want to try to book Kaleigh for that one-hour consultation, please reach out to Paul at paul@roompact.com and he will work to get that set up with you and with Kaleigh.
And again, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. Good to see you all, and we hope to see you in September. Take care.
