Here is a deep, dark, dirty secret: higher ed/student affairs is a notoriously challenging field to maintain good boundaries* and also sometimes** this comes from our own personal tendencies and if we don’t get those in check after we pivot we will find ourselves in a different job with the same bad boundaries.
*To be clear, this is a feedback loop; anyone who spends many years in a field with bad boundaries will pick up some bad habits and will then have to do some work to shake them. This is not a reflection on you. It is just a fact: you spend time in the mud, you get a bit dirty. Then you take a shower. All is well.
**To be clear, part 2: This “sometimes” is truly a “sometimes”; some people’s boundaries, the entire time, are above reproach. I am personally an example of someone who came into the field without great boundaries and then mostly just practiced maintaining poor boundaries. In contrast, I have worked with many colleagues throughout the years who came in with much better boundaries than I did, immediately recognized the poor boundaries surrounding us, and refused to cave. These folks, after pivoting, did not have to take a metaphorical shower to rinse off many years of night-time & weekend emailing (among other things), but I did.
Here is another deep, dark, dirty secret: I have spent a lot of years absolutely hating the “trust the process” saying. Mostly my objections come from the fact that I think it’s messed up to 1) acknowledge that we live in a world fundamentally driven by preserving an inequitable capitalistic status quo and then in the same breath 2) insist that we trust the process. So, wait, I’m supposed to challenge processes right up until the moment my institution owns them at which point I’m supposed to relax and close my eyes and trust them? Pass.
What a charmingly fun way to spend four paragraphs opening up a post about a vacation!
This past week, I took a week-long vacation for the first time since hanging up my own shingle as a consulting project manager at the end of 2020. When I say “vacation” I mean “super fun week learning how absolutely exhausting my stay-at-home-husband’s life is managing our 8-month-old, who has recently learned to slap and bite and pull hair really really hard, sometimes all at the same time”, so don’t misunderstand with visions of palm trees and beachside mocktails. BUT it meant leaving my clients all alone, to fend completely for themselves, for a week.
And it’s now Friday, and though the day is young, I can tell you: I have received zero outreach from any of them. I told them I was leaving, and that I’d set up what they needed to live without me for a week, and then they just… lived without me, for a week. In fact, I’d forgotten until sometime yesterday that they WERE living without me. It hadn’t even occurred to me to check on them. I just figured that if they really, really needed me, they’d text me – and they didn’t. ?????
And then, the lightbulb
So I guess this is trusting the process: understanding that my clients and I have built something together that we can stand on, and that will deliver what we need it to.
Which is a good reminder: as project managers, we own the process. Obviously we’re not responsible for the external, weight-of-the-world factors, and we do operate within them. We are also typically strategy-accepters, not strategy setters (though there are times that our work can help shape strategy).
But in our own teams, we are influencers and tone-setters. We get to decide what communication norms look like (which then inform boundaries). We get to build the systems that keep the trains going for a week without us (and then we get to come back the next week to set them up all over again). This is a gift that we give both to ourselves and to everyone else who works with us and takes their own weeks off without checking their phones while the trains keep moving without them. This is how it’s supposed to be. I’ve never thought that at work before.
This is also a good reminder that — although we never get to leave the aforementioned inequitable capitalistic status quo — we do, in fact, get to find ourselves in organizations where the internal status quo feels very different — and that the “trust the process” line lands differently when we do.
Leave a Reply