I have individual meetings with my team members once a month and typically include summer students. When I asked the student about her project, I noticed she couldn’t quite articulate it. I had delegated supervising the student, let’s call her Terra, to a postdoc in my lab.
I asked the postdoc, Anna, to join our meeting to explain the project. I did this to get a better idea of the problem and because I genuinely wasn’t sure what exactly the student was working on. Oops! Faculty accomplishment unlocked, I guess.
So, I couldn’t have explained the project to Terra even if I wanted to.
The goal of getting both Anna and Terra together was to enhance transparency and identify areas for improvement.
It is also better to have all parties involved in a project or “situation” at the table before you form opinions.
Now, when I started asking questions about the project and interjected even more questions when Anna explained, she got a little flustered and repeatedly stated “But I told you this. ––– We talked about this. ––– I explained this before.”
She did this with quite a bit of intensity and an energy of blame in her voice.
Anna defended herself because she didn’t want me to think, she didn’t do her supervisor’s job well.
Meanwhile, I secretly judged Anna a little for not taking responsibility and for being so oblivious to Terra’s needs. So I participated in the blaming too, even if just in my head. People usually pick up on this energy.
If you are not careful with situations like this, i.e. if you talk to people separately and let your opinions shape before you see the full picture and if you don’t take control when communication derails, those situations can easily contribute to a toxic environment.
Fostering a psychologically safe culture means that you correct yourself and others with clear and determined communication.
When the dynamic that I described above unfolded and I noticed tension building, I interrupted this pattern (mine, Anna’s and also Terra’s as you will see) by saying: “Let’s not play the blame game.”
What really happened here was that Terra didn’t understand Anna’s rapid fire explanation of the project that included lots of tech lingo and sciency shorthands but didn’t want to bug Anna with questions. Anna, the postdoc, is new in the role, hasn’t worked with very many people and with no student in the U.S., which led to assumptions about the skill and knowledge of the student.
My bad, really! I should have set the two up for success by having a joint meeting at the start and checking in more frequently and earlier. I did get a sense that communication didn’t go well. But with lots of other things going, I didn’t have the presence of mind to do something about it earlier.
So when I said “Let’s not play the blame game!” and followed that up by explaining a little more about the learning and teaching process, I got all of us out of the tense moment. Terra apologized for not having brought to Anna’s attention that she needed help.
It’s rarely too late to course-correct.
We went through the project, I “translated” some tech speak and we broke it down until we were at the right level of communication. Then, we had a discussion about teaching and learning. There are those 4 stages of mastering a skill or field:
- You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t even know who or what to ask because this is a complete blindspot. When we start projects and are all excited we’re often in this space because we don’t yet know what’s coming.
- You know what you don’t know. This is this uncomfortable place of learning where you see all your glory inabilities. This is also the place that you need to get folks on your team to when they first start or learn a new skill. Once they are in it, they need to be supported through it. Support isn’t doing it for them, it’s providing them with resources to keep taking steps. Sometimes the resource is just cheering them on.
- You know what you know. So that’s a great place to be as a teacher or mentor. From this space you share most of the relevant information. You also watch how this information lands with your team members.
- You don’t know what you know. That’s the area to watch out for when folks train each other. According to research, 70% of necessary information is not shared when an expert trains a person new to the skill. That’s why it occasionally takes so much time and so much practice to train folks on intricate techniques. Folks are doing stuff that isn’t captured in protocols or SOPs and that the expert isn’t aware of, so they are not articulating it. The next person has to figure it out through practice and watching. Some of the crucial info likely never makes it to their conscious mind. And so the circle continues.
In my humble opinion, we haven’t made it to true mastery until we know what we know and know what we don’t know, so that we can teach, train, and coach others through a process of deliberate practice. This means we help people operate right at the zone between know/don’t know. We take them carefully out of their comfort zone but not so much that they get stressed, overwhelmed, burned out.
That’s one thing we do with our clients in Research Leadership Mastery. We increase your levels of awareness and your ability to adjust your approach and communication, so that you are on eye level with the people you work with while elevating yourself and them. You also learn how to foster a psychologically safe culture. From my example above, you saw how this is more of an ongoing process of working with your team, not a one-time thing to set up or something that happens if you have the right intentions. It also requires quite a bit of self-awareness and self-regulation skills on your end to pull everyone out of weird dynamics rather than participating.
Research Leadership Mastery starts mid September and we have a few open slots. We don’t take more than 15 clients at a time and already have 6 folks who raised their hands. If you want to get your leadership to the next level, email me at stefanie@stefanierobel.com. We will set up a 30 min chat to talk about your goals and to determine if the program is a good fit for you.
Stefanie