In last week’s blog, I discussed the challenges you face as a new PI. These do not only apply to new PIs BTW. They are problems that many faculty face if they haven’t shifted gears. This week, we will share seven fundamental principles that will help you navigate your faculty role.
- Lead from Vision to Mission to Goals
Research informs us that people who take the time to explore their why and who set and monitor goals in alignment with their vision, are more successful. There was a Harvard study that monitored college students who either had a goal setting practice–or not. The ones with goals ended up with higher paying jobs years later. Different studies show a positive correlation between finding purpose in your work and your wellbeing.
- Thus, know and then remember why you do your research. What are you after? This is the part where you need to distinguish what you really care about from how you frame your research for funders and the public. They are two different things.
I, Stefanie, didn’t figure this out until late in my postdoc (with the help of life coaches and a lot of introspection). It almost cost me my academic career. I love the cell biology of brain injury, puzzling out the mysteries of the brain by manipulating cellular processes and looking at the outcomes for astrocyte biology. That’s it. That’s what I love. But when I came to the US for my postdoc, I was constantly asked how my work mattered clinically. So I adopted a belief that I should care about human health and that my research isn’t relevant unless it is solely centered around human health. This belief caused me a lot of doubt and anguish. I seriously considered leaving academia because I was so miserable. It wasn’t until I untangled this confusion and realized that my personal purpose can be different from how I present my work to an audience that I found joy and satisfaction in my work again.
- So, know your why (and you don’t have to heal diseases).
- Once you have your purpose in mind, think about your vision. What would success look like in the future?
Our friend Jia Ng, a physician scientist, has the vision to help 10 million patients. This may seem like an ambitious goal. And that’s okay. Ambitious is good. Concrete and specific is great too. Jia plans to conduct medical research that is so impactful that at least 10 million patients will benefit from it. She also helps clinical scientists with fantastic frameworks for more productive academic writing. That’s another avenue that allows her to make an impact and move toward her vision.
Stefanie’s research team’s vision is: We teased out why astrocytes change after mild traumatic brain injury, what factors determine if, how, and when they change, how their changes affect brain function and behavior, and how to therapeutically manipulate aspects of their response. That’s a little less concrete but just as ambitious. So much so that I sometimes cringe when I read it because it sounds a little big for my bridges.
- But you don’t want to play small! And you know what? Your vision is less about reaching this outcome, it’s more about the journey you’ll embark on by setting your sail in this direction.
The vision is the key part from which you can derive your strategy to move in the right direction. This strategy is also informed by your mission, which will guide you in achieving your goals and can solidify your values to make sure folks go about this as intended. You can find our example here.
Then, the rest of the planning becomes easier. Regardless of the performance tracking system you use, as long as your yearly, quarterly, monthly, and weekly planning aligns with your vision and mission, you are on the right track. Every task that contributes to moving in the right direction is valuable and should be considered with caution.
- Don’t Ignore Your Stakeholders
As I outlined in our last blog, you have now reached a stage where academic “politics” become more and more important. When I started my lab, I just wanted to focus on that and not bother with politics. But I missed some important opportunities to build relationships with people who could have helped me tune and accelerate different aspects of my vision. The good news is that it is never too late to start. And if you just started your program and have your hands full getting compliance lined up, building your team, park stakeholder management. Just don’t forget about it. Decide strategically when and how to invest time for this.
Relationships matter and being intentional about managing your interactions will better position your research program. This is also important for your team members who need to be able to rely on your professional network when they move on to the next stage in their careers.
- Build strong relationships with colleagues, collaborators, decision-makers at your institution, in your professional societies, and within your research field.
- Take initiative and don’t wait for them to approach you. Just ask for a chat over coffee, lunch, or even just 10min in the hallway.
- Make a point of better getting to know the other person and their goals and vision.
Also let’s not be naive about it. Not everyone will be in your court. Knowing who is supporting you and your ideas and who isn’t is key. Understand that different types of personalities require different approaches. We don’t have to cancel everyone in our environment who doesn’t share our beliefs or opinions. But we also don’t have to tolerate abuse. Learn how to interact with different personalities. Anticipate the impact those stakeholders can have on you and your work. No need to invest energy on someone who isn’t in your court but also has little bearing on your goals. This actually is a longer conversation to have and perhaps we’ll write a blog dedicated to just this one topic. If this is useful to you, drop us a line at info@glia-leadership.com.
- Acquire the Necessary Leadership & Management Skill Sets
Let’s distinguish between two significant roles that will fall on you and very likely require new skill sets. Separating them for yourself will make delegating easier once you hire folks who can help with these aspects of running a productive research program.
The first role is that of stepping into your leadership, where you need to:
- Know how to co-create a vision, a mission, team values, etc., with your team.
- Create a psychologically safe culture that allows your team to be independent and interdependent at the same time, allows for high performance standards, productivity, and creativity.
- Understand how to use the appropriate leadership style for specific situations.
- Be able to read team dynamics and shape them to be empowering for everyone.
- Find the right fit team members for different roles (not only based on technical skill set).
- Learn how to self-regulate your emotions and energy.
The second role is managerial, where you need knowledge about:
- Process management.
- Problem-solving.
- (Multi-)Project management.
- Stakeholder management.
- Self- and team management.
- Performance management.
Sometimes new research team leaders confuse leading and managing. Both are important and they definitely interact. Both require systems, which we help folks learn about and implement in our leadership training, one is starting this September.
- Drop us a note at info@glia-leadership.com if you like more information.
The better your systems, the easier it is to focus on your mission while also keeping time for other things outside of work that are important to you .
- Shift Your Focus and Responsibilities
Leadership, management, and mentoring activities will become a bigger part of your work. It is essential to allocate a good portion of your available time to these aspects. The exact amount depends on the size and maturity of your team, among other factors. 30% of your time is a good number to play with. See how you can’t expect yourself to just squeeze this in on top of everything else?!
When I was a postdoc about to start my own research program, my mentor said: “Treat yourself like your own postdoc.”
I understand where he was coming from. You gotta be productive.
- But a better approach to that is to make sure you hire folks strategically, to invest in your team to make sure you have someone doing research independently as fast as possible.
- Key here is to make sure that the people who join your lab can operate without you. Maybe not during the first few months. But quickly. Once you have at least one person who is independent from you, they can train other people without your time investment.
- You need to switch your mindset from being an operator in your research program to being the owner of your research program.
Your ownership (read leadership) responsibilities are not secondary tasks. As you invest in leadership and management, you may not reach your personal maximum productivity in terms of scientific outcomes, but you can reach much higher levels of productivity with your team.
It’s also important to adopt a more abstract view of the research your team conducts. You don’t have to be an expert in every single experiment. As your team grows, you can delegate work and assign specific expertise to different individuals.
The hardest part, as I’ve learned from our clients, is overcoming the fear that things will go wrong if you’re not directly involved. This fear can become a self-fulfilling assumption. When people don’t take responsibility for their actions, they never learn how to do things correctly. They simply lack the experience. Accept some mistakes in the beginning and act accordingly, as written in the next paragraph.
- Become a Mentor Instead of a Teacher and Problem Solver
It all starts with teaching. People need to learn the skills required for the job. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll find a candidate who comes equipped with all the necessary skills. You or one of your senior team members have to provide as much support as possible to familiarize new team members with what they need to perform in your team. However, once you have shared your knowledge, you should stop thinking for your team members.
- Consider the following situation: a team member enters your office and asks you a quick question, such as whether you can review a protocol because an experiment isn’t working. You look at the setup and immediately identify what’s wrong.
So how do you proceed?
You can answer the question and provide a quick fix, which won’t take much of your time and allows your team member to be productive instantly.
However, in the long run, this trains your team member to look at you for solutions instead of finding their own.
- Instead, guide your team members to find solutions independently.
This way, it’s more likely that they won’t ask you when similar problems arise. Mentor your team to be problem solvers instead of relying on you.
- Implement Systems to Minimize Non-Value Adding Activities
Systems help reduce waste in various dimensions (money, time, effort), making you more productive and increasing efficiency, quality, and effectiveness. There are countless examples of how you can improve your workflows. Most systems are easy to implement and use. Here are two examples from my lab:
- Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to align team priorities: Our performance management and planning system uses OKRs. My team and I agree on 2-3 objectives for a three-month period. Each team member writes those out and gets feedback from me and the team. Next we work out key results. They have to be measurable and when all key results are achieved, the objective should be achieved. We have monthly discussions about the progress, and that’s all. This system ensures that our objectives align with our vision and what needs to be achieved. Reflecting on a three-month period and preparing for upcoming challenges strikes the right balance between overplanning and lack of control.
As example, here are my OKR for Q2 of 2023. You’ll see that I have four objectives. I ended up postponing my grant submission. In doing this for the last three years or so, we discovered that we rarely manege to execute 4 OKRs. Often one or two will get less attention and shift over into the next quarter. That’s fine as long as this is a conscious decision.
O1. Map out a compelling book proposal. (My current value-adding project)
KR1. Attend all Top 3 WS sessions & do homework.
KR2. Edit two book chapters.
KR3. Write and edit book proposal.
KR4. Identify publishing houses to submit the proposal to.
O2. Submit a competitive R01 grant on our favorite topic atypical astrocyte responses after TBI concussion. (Funding)
KR1. Attend all sessions with Ann and come up with a compelling SA page.
KR2. Deliver at CDIB Grants Club.
KR3. Find degradation expert collaborator.
KR4. Write remaining grant sections and send to edit.
O3. Connect & network with Neurotrauma community. (Stakeholder management)
KR1. Attend Neurotrauma meeting.
KR2. Learn about new directions in the neurotrauma field.
KR3. Get to know TEAM folks and mentor-mentee subcommittee.
O4. Co-Create an onboarding process that works reliably for the team. (Optimizing Lab Systems)
KR1. Make a plan with Pitna including all pieces that we need and make assignments for content.
KR2. Set up a membership site in Kartra or other medium to concentrate the content.
KR3. Test on new team member.
- Implementing RACI when things go wrong because multiple people don’t do what they are supposed to: Our mouse colony turned out to be a big resource suck. Over the last 7 years, we lost more than one (or two, or three, or four, …) transgenic lines due to folks not maintaining the colony the way it should be maintained.
At some point, we paid $7,000/ month for animal cage charges for a 10-people team, not because people worked like crazy but because people didn’t remove cages they didn’t need. And because nobody, including myself, paid attention to our monthly charges.
This is despite the fact that I regularly trained people in colony management, made videos about lines and breeding schemes, and despite rules about how to take care of lines. People just wouldn’t do the thing. So, we finally sat down, documented our process and came up with a system.
The most important part of this system is that every team member knows exactly what they are supposed to do when. Many people are Responsible (the R in RACI) for different tasks but only one person is Accountable (the A in RACI) for the whole process. This person has specific time blocks on their calendar each week to check the colony and whether specific metrics are being adhered to. If not, they will mentor the person who didn’t do the thing to course-correct. The accountable person isn’t there to pick up the slack. they are there to make sure the process is executed as agreed on. We also clarified who needs to be Consulted (the C in RACI) when problems arise and who needs to be Informed (the I in RACI). The consulted person is the best person for helping troubleshoot the issue and the informed people are everyone who needs to know that this problem exists. For example, sometimes our genotyping doesn’t work. We have one person who is excellent in molecular biology and can help fixing PCR problems. This is the person to consult. But when genotypes don’t work the entire lab needs to be informed because this potentially affects everyone’s work.
- Identify processes in your program that don’t go smoothly, break down, or are very sensitive or costly. Systematize!!
7. Account for Your Leadership and Management Activities in Your Calendar
This is the most important piece of advice. Since your responsibilities have changed dramatically, your time allocation should reflect that as well. If you still plan to spend 90% of your time doing research, there’s a high probability of working very long hours. Leadership and management commitments will consume a significant amount of your time but shouldn’t take all your time. If you don’t balance these with other value-adding activities throughout the day, they’ll push into your free time.
- To address this, block specific time slots in your calendar to accommodate these new activities.
For example, I designated Mondays for team meetings. I write each day, Monday–Friday, from 8am to 10am. I try my very best to not book any meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s when I do value-adding, creative activities only, no leadership or admin, no other meetings. Friday afternoon, I use two hours to clean out my email inbox, do some admin, and tie up loose ends so that I can enjoy my weekend. Unless absolutely necessary (looming grant or paper deadline), I will not attempt to finish it all over the weekend. It’s never finished… So, next time I have a work block dedicated to this type of task, I’ll pick it up again.
It took me a while to figure out what time blocks and boundaries work for me. This may look different for you.
- The important thing is that you decide how to spend your time and experiment when you don’t like your results rather than letting the day-to-day stuff determine what happens to your time.
Of course, there may be occasions when you need to adjust your schedule due to deadlines or urgent matters. However, by proactively blocking time in advance, you make an intentional decision to prioritize one important issue over a less critical one.
In conclusion, stepping into the exciting role of PI offers you the opportunity to exceed the limits of what a single person can achieve. To thrive in this position,
- Identify your purpose and vision, independent of external expectations.
- Set meaningful goals that align with your vision to drive success and inspire your team.
- Build strong relationships with stakeholders who can provide support.
- Equip yourself with effective leadership and managerial skills to lead your team with confidence.
- Focus on mentoring and empowering your team members rather than solely solving problems for them.
- Implement streamlined systems to minimize non-value adding activities and enhance overall efficiency.
- Account for your new leadership and management responsibilities when planning your schedule.
Embracing these principles will help you excel as a new PI.
Stefanie