By Stefanie Robel
As a postdoc I struggled…
Not with the sciency parts of science! But with the endless thankless tasks that come with doing science. The tasks that pile up skyhigh and make us feel like there is never enough time.
You know what I am talking about: Lab safety paperwork, administration, maintenance, online trainings–always more online trainings. During my postdoc, one lectures me on homesickness while traveling in a foreign country. At that point, I am 30 years old, I’ve been living away from home for 13 years, traveled around Asia, without a cell phone, without calling my parents or anyone in four weeks. Now I live in the US, 4,708 miles or 7,737 kilometers away from home to be accurate.
But I have to complete an online training on homesickness to get permission to travel to a conference in my home country.
In the beginning I argued: I lived in Germany for 29 years, I think I’ll be fine. I won’t miss Alabama that much.
… … …
Eventually I learned this isn’t about making us safe, it’s about the university getting their back against a wall.
Gone are those days when I reveled in the beauty of the brain without worry about wasting my precious time.
I am running in the rat race full out, doing more and more. Lots of my time is spent not arguing about administrative requirements.
I am tense all the time, I don’t sleep well, I have a hard time letting work go. I worry that I am not doing enough to make it to the next career step: leading a research team, the one I thought I wanted so much. But I dislike the work. Actually, I hate going to work. I can’t even remember what I once liked about it.
I think about quitting academia for the first time.
Naturally, I now had to figure out what to do instead. I went inward to discover what I am passionate about–for the first time, I will add. But that’s a different story…
I read books about personal growth. I worked with mentors, not the academic type but the ones called “life coach”. Because of the profound impact that coaching had on my wellbeing, I trained as a life coach. I started to question my way of thinking, working and being, in short my whole approach to life. I changed my way of thinking, working, being.
Ever so slowly, I inched my way back to joy and fulfillment.
But this wasn’t just a turning point because I felt better or because I learned which parts I had contributed to my misery and how to not do that.
If I had to pinpoint the moment where I discovered the secret sauce to running a research program with all the exciting AND all the endless thankless task that are part of it without selling my soul, it’s this one: Kind of as a test to see if I liked it, I started working with a small business that taught academics the art of grant writing.
I loved the look behind the scenes! I loved the freedom of working with people you choose, only those dedicated to their personal and professional growth. I loved the creative aspect of developing programs that help people dig deeper into their thinking. I loved that the business owner leveraged technology to help us be an efficient remote team. This was long before covid, in 2013! I loved taking courses that helped me learn aspects of the business.
I just loved the world of entrepreneurism that suddenly had opened up to me!
Also the responsibility of bringing in money, no matter what, to pay the bills, without a monthly paycheck, without any safety net, terrified me. So, in 2013 I backed away from the career option “business owner”.
But the “damage” was done: I was infected with an entrepreneurial mindset!
An entrepreneurial mindset refers to a specific set of attitudes, skills, and behaviors that drive you to recognize, evaluate, and pursue new opportunities–often in the face of uncertainty and limited resources.
Sound familiar? Exactly!
An entrepreneurial mindset is not exclusive to entrepreneurs starting or running businesses; it can be applied in various contexts, including running a research program.
See your research program with the eyes of an entrepreneur instead of the eyes of a manager.
Pursuing funding and research projects is all about evaluating the current status quo, identifying gaps, and designing solutions. This is about recognizing, evaluating, and pursuing new opportunities.
If you see it in that way and think big and do your market research you are thinking like an entrepreneur. Ask yourself: Where is the market gap that if filled would really create value for your research community and/or the public?
As an entrepreneur you convince clients, customers, or investors of the value that they are creating by laying out the status quo, gaps or problems. Then you aim to convince folks of the value of your solutions.
Sales is part of entrepreneurship. IF you can get comfortable with sales, your golden. The secret here is: You are already selling, all the time. Just maybe not consciously and maybe not as effectively as you need to.
You sell new research ideas to your colleagues or funders. You also sell your data interpretations to your research field. Or you sell the relevance of knowledge to your students. Without sales, we’re out of business–even in research.
I used to be profoundly uncomfortable selling.
I still sometimes am, which is problematic because as a business owner (as you see, I embraced this role after all) I need to sell seats in our leadership programs.
I think this discomfort that many of us have selling ideas or products comes from:
1) A stereotype in the back of our minds of slimy and manipulative sales people that sell ice to Eskimos purely for their personal gain and against the best interests of the buyer. Obviously we don’t want to be like that.
2) the belief that if we have noble intentions, we can’t possibly take money as compensation.
But sales does not have to be manipulative, it can be a conversation about the needs and wants of the buyer (for example a potential collaborator who you’d like to recruit for a project) and the fit of what you have to offer to move their agenda forward alongside yours. There may be a fit or there may be no fit.
If there is a fit, it is important that there is a fair exchange of energy.
You create value and you receive value. Payment may come in the form of monetary compensation, e.g. when you write the collaborator into a grant budget or when a client pays for the training and coaching to uplevel their leadership game. Payment may also be something else, like authorship or intellectual input.
I do encourage you to be careful with intangible forms of payment. This is not about making all aspects of research (or business) transactional. But it is important that your investments in time and other resources are sustainable for your research program. You can spend each dollar only once and some investment decisions will result in a return on investment more likely or faster than others. Look at them like an entrepreneur.
If you “ruin” your research business financially or by burning through resources like your team’s time in an irresponsible way (i.e. without an eye on the value and output that is created), your business will not be sustainable and make long-term impact.
Pay attention to the Return On Investment (ROI) even if it’s not easily quantifiable. Here is an example: As postdoc/ assistant prof I made a $40k investment into grant writing training.
You can call that crazy because I could have paid a graduate student for a year instead.
But then I brought in $6M in funding within the first 2 years as faculty. That is a 150x ROI that has hence increased to 200x even considering additional consulting! We can probably all agree that expecting a graduate student to create a 150x or 200x ROI by working in the lab for a year is completely unrealistic.
This is something only you as an entrepreneur can do and often it requires that you take a calculated risk and make an investment.
Here is another one: Do you hire a staff scientist or a graduate student? A staff scientist may be able to work independently faster but also cost you significantly more. A graduate student will likely take a year or two to become productive. But perhaps you enjoy teaching graduate students or you find their fresh perspective drives innovation. Plus, how much each team member contributes to productivity and innovation will depend not only on their experience but also on their level of commitment, attitude, drive, analytical and intellectual abilities, and on their ability to organize themselves and integrate into the team. These things are difficult to predict and quantify. So you have to build and use your entrepreneurial skills to recognize, evaluate, and pursue new opportunities, which includes finding the right talent for the project.
One of the best pieces of advice that I received from an entrepreneur at an early stage in my career was:
Invest your start-up money, don’t save it!
I took the advice and believe me, I stressed and sweated because I had a burn rate so high that I was on track to run out of money within two years.
I mostly invested in myself, my skills, and my people and it paid off!
I believe this is because I embraced an entrepreneurial mindset, made calculated investments, took some risks in investing money and/or time and managed my fears along the way.
You can do the same and we’re here to support you!
Happy leading!
–Stefanie
P.S.: Unlock the next level of research leadership. This September, we’re launching a new cohort for our Research Leadership Mastery Program. Join our community and redefine what it means to lead in the world of research.