I don’t know about you but I spent the first part of this year deep in grant writing mode. The grant is resubmitted and I emerged – after a few days of relaxing and recharging – ready to return to my passion for teaching leadership.
The weeks leading up to a grant deadline are a great time to reflect on later when the grant is done. Your behaviors in response to the challenges that inevitably arise are a good indicator of your level of leadership. That is because writing and submitting grants is usually stressful. There seems to never be enough time or data! If you operate as I do, you get excited about the grant project as you spend more time with it. You gain more clarity about the important problems to address and the data needed to make a strong case.
At the same time, your anxiety grows in reverse proportion to the amount of time left. For your team that may mean last-minute research, long hours, or even work on things that are unrelated to their actual projects. Preliminary data are collected and usually, things are not working as expected – or worse, they are not working at all. Gaaaa!!! Your team has to work within a tight timeline, they know what is at stake, they put pressure on themselves. You put pressure on yourself.
As time runs out and average hours spent relaxing and sleeping decrease, things can go one of two ways:
1) You and the team members get increasingly tired, anxious, frustrated, maybe short-tempered. Or
2) the team pulls together, people support each other, and thrive on the thrill of fast-paced work.
Together you create a great piece of “science fiction”, one to inspire and be inspired by. This time I made sure I supported the team to go for 2.
They did great work as they always do when the stakes are high and I put what I learned about leadership to work. Although we were ready for this to be done last Friday we had a good time. We grew together as a team and even had fun hanging out at the lab during the weekend. There was less stress, less frustration than we experienced in the past when we took approach #1!
This is us the Monday after, celebrating a team member’s birthday, still liking each other, being proud of what we accomplished together during the months leading up to our deadline.