Higher Education: a Football Team

This afternoon, after hitting what felt like a brick wall that came out of nowhere, I went home to nap off a year-end cold that seems to be spreading throughout our office.  In the midst of my much-needed and glorious nap, I was abruptly awoken by the sound of my door bell ringing.  Groggy, I walked to the bathroom window, where I have a clear view of the driveway, and was annoyed to find a sales person going door to door.  My immediate thought was that I would be so frustrated if I had a sleeping baby at home - shout out to all my Mom friends and colleagues out there!  My next thought was that I was so disappointed to have been awoken from such an exhilarating dream.  Ironically, it was a dream about my position as a football player on my professional team.  I'm not sure if this dream was sparked by the sudden focus that I have placed on my role as a team member lately, having recently read The Five Dysfunctions of Team and thinking ahead to our upcoming professional staff hiring days, or if it was a result of the cold medication I took before hopping into bed. Either way, it inspired me to think about my role in student affairs, and the larger institution as a whole, as I made instant connections to the work I do every day in my department and on my campus for the  good of our students.  In reflecting on my six years as a higher ed. professional, both live-in and live-out, I feel like I can best connect the lessons I have learned along the way to football.  And, if you don't already know, I am a huge football fan - go Pats!  

Sometimes The Play Doesn't Work
​One of the biggest lessons that I have learned throughout my career is that sometimes, the play doesn't always go as planned.  

Have you ever watched a football game, where the play looks rushed or someone doesn't run to where the QB throws the ball? You sit on the couch wondering what the heck happened, especially because you know they probably just spent the last four days practicing that drill 50+ times.  Well, that is a reality in student affairs and higher education as well. Sometimes, despite our best efforts to try programs, approaches, collaboration, or ideas that seem to be in the best interest of students and are grounded in literature, it just doesn't work.   

I experienced this as a live-in professional several times, especially in facilitating programming to encourage student learning.  What seems like the coolest program to you, ends up being the worst attended or demonstrates the least learning value.  I have also experienced as a live-out professional, planning a training session for staff that seems to meet their needs and is grounded in the feedback they provided in the past, yet on the day of, it's a total flop.

As an admitted Type A personality, it can be a struggle to feel like you planned, prepared, and devoted so much time to something that looks like a failure.  Some people are very good at recognizing something did not work, learning from it, and moving on, but I personally struggle with that.  I want to know why it didn't work, how I let that happen, and where I dropped the ball.  Well, as I have learned through watching football, sometimes despite your best efforts and preparation, it just doesn't work.  However, what I have also learned is that you get the ball back on another down or possession, and very rarely does the same mistake happen again.  Sometimes that means you call a completely different play from your book, and sometimes it means you re-evaluate, communicate in the huddle, and try again.  If I could go back and tell my new professional self to think about our roles - student crisis response, conduct, assessment, programming, supervising, etc. - as a playbook, I think I would have felt a lot less disappointment and seen a lot more opportunity for learning.

I also try to remember that these are opportunities to ask yourself who you could have gotten more involved to make it successful.  A successful quarter back does not only target the same wide receiver over and over; they move the ball around, finding the slot receivers, utilizing the tight ends, and making the most of their run game too.  One of the common issues I hear on post-secondary campuses is that there is too much siloing, and I don't disagree, but staff and faculty are the only people that can change that.  So, instead of throwing the ball to our favourite receiver all of the time, how can we involve more departments, staff, faculty and students in our success? How can we utilize the experts on our larger team to help ensure we spread around the ball and try new routes?  If student success and persistence is ultimately the Super Bowl, then how do we all recognize we play different positions but need everyone to win the game? Even if we thought about it as offence (faculty), defense (staff) and special teams (students), football is a team game that requires all three phases to play for 60 minutes to be successful.  We can't win the Super Bowl without a meaningful contribution from everyone, and I don't imagine we'll see a quarter back playing all positions - defense and special teams - anytime soon, and nor should they. They are at their best when they can focus on their craft and lead their offense down the field, and rely on their defense and special teams to do their job as well.  So why aren't we talking about how our campuses are set up that way - allowing faculty to teach and create academic learning environments, cheer on our staff for supporting students and offering meaningful co-curricular learning spaces, and including our students in conversations that directly impact them?

Continuously Be Improving
When you think about some of the best NFL players of all time - Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Walter Payton, Lawrence Taylor, Jerry Rice- what they all have in common is their desire and drive to always be better.  They didn't spend hours in weight rooms, watching film tape, and improving their craft for nothing.  They were passionate about their positions and knew that in order to positively contribute to the success of their team, they needed to constantly be improving and learning.  I can't stress enough how transferable I think this is to the fields of student affairs and post-secondary education.  We work at higher education institutions where were are encouraging our students to be lifelong learners, critical thinkers, problem solvers, and resilient leaders of the future, so I think that it's important we do the same.  Lifelong learning is a skill, and when embraced and developed, provides a rich breadth of knowledge to a team.  As one of my mentors once told me in a one-on-one, "If you don't know anything about something, then you should want to know everything", and to this day I stand by that.

We work in an incredibly busy environment and are constantly putting out fires - sometimes literally.  I have met many professionals who don't feel like they have the time to step away from their work to focus on their own development because of how much in on their plate.  But we work in the education business, so shouldn't it be important that we are role modeling that to our students?  How do we do a better job as a culture, an institution, and a field of encouraging ourselves and peers to learn about things outside of the portfolio, the day-to-day job, or even the realm of higher education. Even things as simple as educating ourselves on taxes, mortgages, politics, or finding a particular area of higher education that we are not familiar with and take it upon ourselves to learn more.  After all, we can't contribute to breaking down campus silos if we don't actually know what other departments and groups on campuses do.  But then again, how do we make that important to people?

Feedback and Accountability Are A Key to the Game
Just like the goal of a football team is to be the better of the two and win the game, our goal as student affairs educators, and I hope our campuses as a whole, is to be the best we can be at supporting our students.  When a football team scores more points, they win; when a student is retained or graduates, we win.  Sometimes though, that can be far more difficult said than done, but requires the same commitment to feedback and accountability as a high performing sports team.  In order for everyone to play their role effectively and win the game, we need to hold each other to high standards, and offer positive and constructive feedback.  Think about it like when a QB throws a perfect pass to a wide receiver, and he drops it.  A good teammate would pat his chest to say to his QB that he holds himself accountable and acknowledges that the miss was his fault.  If he doesn't, his QB will likely ensure in the huddle or on the sideline that the receiver hears the feedback, in hopes of creating a learning moment that will prevent that same mistake from happening in the future.  

I try to think of all those people around the table as your football teammates - sometimes we need to acknowledge our own mistakes, and sometimes we need to help others be accountable to theirs.  If we are using feedback and accountability to promote success and support students, we are only helping to make each other better.  Then again, that requires a culture where feedback is encouraged, taken, and utilized.  Without a space where teammates feel they can be honest and vulnerable, lead with respect and open-mindedness, we can't expect that to happen.  So how do we do this better in our departments? Our teams? Our campuses?

You Don't Have to Do It Alone (and You Shouldn't)
If you're a Patriots fan, you vividly remember the moment that David Tyree caught a football on the top of his helmet because it signaled the exact moment that the New England lost the Super Bowl.  Even if you don't remember it, they show it enough times on the Super Bowl highlight reel you've probably seen it, sigh.  While it was an unbelievable play, it ultimately shouldn't have mattered because had the Patriots caught all of the dropped passes they had prior to that moment, they still would have won despite Tyree's absurd catch.  If you watched this game, you also probably remember Gisele Bundchen commenting that Tom Brady, her husband, can't throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.  Why? Because the reason you have a team is so that you don't have to play all the positions yourself.

Thinking about some of the greatest teams of all time - '85 Chicago Bears, '72 Dolphins, '89 49ers, '79 Steelers - they all have one thing in common.  They had a lot of great players who all did their part.  You don't go 17-0 and win a Super Bowl with one or two great players, you get there because you have an entire team of dedicated, passionate, committed individuals who are working to be the best they can at their position to support their team.  It is not the responsibility of the QB, kicker, defensive back, or corner back to make every play.  They are going to have some great days where they demonstrate their individual worth on their team, but they are also going to have bad days that they hopefully walk away from having learned from.  However, if a team relies solely on those one or two individuals, when they don't perform at the highest level or they have a bad game, the day ends in a loss.  When all members are functioning at the highest possible level and excelling at their particular role, they can usually continue to find a win and support their teammate.  At the end of the day, what is a team if all of the players are not actively participating, growing, learning, and pulling their weight? So remember, it is not our job to get a W all by ourselves, but it is our responsibility to understand how our position fits into the greater team and be dedicated to being the best at it we can be for the benefit of our team (and in our case, for our students).

You Win as a Team and You Lose as a Team
If you watched the 2015 Super Bowl, you know that the only thing reporters wanted to ask Peyton Manning about was if he was retiring.  It was as if the entire game was about him and his legacy.  Ironically, Peyton did not have a great year and actually was pulled for half the season, but the questions continued to be about how he came back, won some big games, and might be hanging up his jersey.  You know what makes Peyton Manning so great (aside from his inherent ability, countless records, and hilarious sense of humour)?  It's his ability to be humble and the ultimate team player. Despite how many different ways or times someone asked him about his role or his future, his answer remained the same: the game was a team win.  Peyton definitely didn't do it alone, but he recognized that his legacy wasn't more important than the other 50 players on his team and their contributions.  On the contrary, the Carolina Panthers lost the Super Bowl because their highly rated defense and MVP-winning Quarterback didn't deliver, despite their ability to do so.  So I think it is important we don't forget that whether we're one of the best player or not, we are only as good as our team.  If not everyone on the team plays their part, we can't win; if everyone does, we will likely succeed.  The same goes for supporting our students - when our team members are all functioning at their highest level and dedicated to the cause, our students benefit and we win the game.  This goes back to my previous question - how do we this on our campuses, regardless of which phase of the game we are experts in?

Each Year The Team Changes
We work in an environment where there is turn over each year - our students change, our student staff change, and our professional staff change.  Every year we are a part of a new team and face new challenges that come along with that: relationship building, trust, work ethic, expectations, etc.  The list goes on.  Speaking from experience, I can attest that this is one of the most difficult parts of our work in student affairs and residence life.  Right when you think you have figured out the needs of students, they have moved out and a new group with completely different desires and expectations is moving in.  When you feel like you've made a connection with a particular teammate, one of you is offered an opportunity to continue on in your career elsewhere.  When you see the potential in that particular student staff member and can speak to all the incredible things that they give to their students, contribute to the community, and offer to your team, they graduate.  Again, the list goes on.  Unfortunately, instability is a common practice in our realm, and the sooner you come to acknowledge and accept that, the easier it will be.  It is still something that I struggle with today, and I wish that someone had of told me at the beginning that it can be so difficult.  However, what I have also learned is to hold on tight to those relationships that you build.  When you find that special colleague, don't lose that connection, regardless of how far they go.  If you have an incredible staff member, be the first person on their reference list and check-in from time to time to hear about how they are doing.  Embrace the change, accept that it happens, and hold on to those special people along the way.  You never know, they might just be on your team again some day! 

You Have Influence
Each year, an NFL player is awarded with the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award for his contributions to the community and his excellence on the field.  Some incredible football players have earned this prestigious award because they recognize the influence that they can have on others, and use their influence to create positive change in the world.  Some of them have even used their award speeches to advocate.  We need to remember that while we aren't famous millionaires, we have the same ability to influence and change lives on our own field.  As higher education professionals, we are role modelling life long learning, professionalism, self-awareness, empathy, and expectations.  Whether it be for our teammates, our staff, or our students, we influence communities in the office and outside of it.  Sometimes I think we forget, myself included, that we have such an incredible opportunity to make change in people's lives.  We have the privilege of supporting students through mental health concerns, behavioural issues, academic risk, homesickness, and a million other things that impact their transition in, through, and out of their post-secondary career.  Sometimes all it takes is a meaningful conversation, a smile in the hallway, a learning conversation, a person who cares, or a tutor.  Like an NFL player, you do have the ability to change lives if you want to.  So take a moment each day to remind yourself that you do make a difference, and be conscious of how you're influencing and inspiring others.

It's Hard But It's Fun
At the end of the day, Tom Brady wants to win a game.  So does every other football player out there, because that's the goal.  But when Brady runs in a touch down and fist pumps, or Gronkowski spikes the ball in the end zone, or when Gostkowski wins the game on a field goal and the team hoists him in the air, it's fun.  Sometimes we get so caught up in winning and supporting our students that we forget to take a minute to smile.  Our jobs are not easy; we work tirelessly to ensure that our students make it to the next day, next semester, next year, next chapter, but don't forget to appreciate the moments along the way that make you smile.  Whether it's a team win, a funny comment in a meeting, or a "I can't believe that just happened" moment, take a breath and smile.  We put in the time, effort, and compassion because we love what we do, so on days when it seems like you lost the game, let yourself laugh.  It doesn't mean you don't care that you didn't necessarily get a win this time, but it does mean that you can move on with your head in the game next time. If all a player gets is 16 games in a season, they might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
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Move Out to Move Up
Finally, sometimes it is devastating to learn that you have lost one of the best players on your team.  I actually cried the day Vince Wilfork got traded to the Texans while watching a goodbye video montage that a fan had put together (...did I just admit that?), but I couldn't help but smile because he made the choice to move on and I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for him.  I think about how attached I was to my first institution, because not only was that my first professional role, it's also where I spent 6 years of my life and was a proud student.  It was, by far, one of the hardest decisions that I ever had to make.  What made it easier though, was knowing that in order to pursue my dream, continue on in my career, and gain new skills and experiences, I had to leave.  So the day I packed up my car, drove 14 hours home, and cried the whole way, was the day that I accepted that sometimes you need to move out in order to move on.  Since then, I have worked at two different institutions in two different positions, and have gained so much perspective that I would have never gotten otherwise.  Ironically, this was recently echoed at ACPA as well, recognizing that there are many entry level jobs, but as you try to climb the professional ladder, jobs become fewer and far between.  So remind yourself that throughout your career you're going to be a free agent, and you might have the option to stay on your current team, but in order to advance you may have to go elsewhere.  Speaking from experience, there will always be a special place in your heart for the team that drafted you, but it isn't difficult to put on new colours, work on a new team, or live in a new city if it gets you one step closer to your own Super Bowl dream.