By Kendra Sewall
Like most academics, I balance many jobs and struggle with all of them. I am an associate professor and PI at a mid-level state R01 school, I had 2 kids pre-tenure after using IVF to start my family, and I care for 2 aging parents with complex health conditions.
For me, work-life ‘balance’ is more like trying to ride a see-saw by myself, as my life partner and co-parent has a non-academic job with far less flexibility. I am equally likely to be serving as a parent-teacher-playmate-counselor-chef-housekeeper as I am to be writing-reading-planning-editing-analyzing-managing my research lab.
I (over)share this experience because I believe most of us face unique and often impossible demands and finding solutions requires being honest about the obstacles of exhaustion, overwhelm, and burnout.
I became an academic scientist because I love reading, learning, thinking, and creating.
However, to get through tenure, I focused on what had to be accomplished. I met those expectations by adopting a product-oriented mindset. I read about goal setting and management and productivity but lost connection with my natural pace of learning and thinking and thus my deeper intellectual self.
So the summer I (finally) got tenure I landed in the classic post-tenure slump. I was spending my time ‘putting out fires’ and answering emails.
I felt like I was on a treadmill of thankless tasks.
I was trying to submit more and more grant proposals to hire more and more people but never getting to the real work of DOING science.
I judged myself as inefficient, not hardworking enough, and not innovative enough to be ‘successful’ (measured as the number of external dollars and papers my most productive colleague produced).
I hated my job, these endless minutiae that didn’t seem to lead anywhere meaningful.
I was so miserable I thought about leaving academia.
The only reason I didn’t try to leave is that I was so discouraged and self-critical that I didn’t believe I had any marketable skills!
I realized the academic game wasn’t going to change (at least not quickly)–I had to change the way I played it.
I signed up for several workshops – the most impactful of which was Stefanie’s Research Leadership Mastery. Over 6 months I did get out of my slump but it required relearning much of what I believed about productivity and lab management.
My top 3 mental traps were:
- “I will relax when my tasks are completed.”
But an academic career is like bailing water from the Titanic with a teaspoon – tasks come in faster than you can check them off!
I ended every day feeling like a failure because I never got to the bottom of my to-do list. Worse, I spent my time doing the wrong things (namely trying not to disappoint others instead of the intellectual work that required so much more time and focus)!
I was burnt out, discouraged, and exhausted.
To change my approach to work I had to realign my values with my time by defining my own success.
I did this by tracking my energy and engagement with work and developing a vision for my career. Once I had clarity about what energized me and was impactful I could block time for the work that advanced my career in ways I most care about.
I know this sounds idealistic – I’m not claiming I don’t work nights and weekends ahead of deadlines or that I don’t get trapped in email purgatory–but now I have a process for getting myself back to a healthy, energized, and engaged place.
- “If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.”
My team came to me for everything!! It was so exhausting to be constantly interrupted by problems that I gave up and spent hours sending instructions, doing research side-by-side with students, and writing manuscripts myself.
I now see I was inadvertently training my team to come to me for everything. They were terrified of doing anything wrong and had no ownership of their own work. I felt like they had no ambition or work ethic and they felt crushed under the weight of my micromanagement.
Like many academics I am extremely organized and good at project management – but I had no training in LEADERSHIP!
I had to reflect on my experiences as a trainee and learn about leadership styles. I worked with my team to develop our lab philosophy and expectations documents and changed how I structured the time I interacted with my team.
If you’ve been meaning to develop a lab philosophy statement or lab manual the Research Leadership Mastery program will walk you through co-creating vision and mission statements that get buy-in from your team and developing strategies to use those in recruitment, hiring, and building team culture.
- “Fulfillment comes from professional success.”
I believed that I would feel fulfilled in my career if I met the external goals of more papers, more grants, more presentations, and more recognition. I saw that the goalposts would always move – nothing would ever be enough – yet I was fixated on my failures.
I held the deep societal belief that motivation came from external goals – I feared that at my core I was lazy and uninspired. When I did have a success I discounted it out of fear I would be seen as arrogant. I had created a mental cycle in which I could never be fulfilled – happiness and satisfaction would have been character flaws indicative of laziness and hubris!
Deprogramming societal beliefs about worthiness and fulfillment is a life-long process, one I started during my leadership training. Luckily, as scientists, we are trained to identify and question assumptions which is the first step in this process.
Meeting regularly with colleagues open to reexamining our training, academic culture, and existing strategies has helped me change how I approach my work.
I still get discouraged and waste my time and energy in self-criticism, but I have tools for getting back to a positive place and friends to reach out to for support. In this way, I am able to reconnect with the love for my career despite the sometimes tedious aspects of the job.
I’ve continued to work with Stefanie, now as an instructor of Research Leadership Mastery, because I think the best way to make academic science more diverse and impactful is by helping people rediscover the joy in their work. The best way to change culture is to first change ourselves. My goal is to make academic science less toxic and address diversity, equity, and inclusion at the deepest level by advocating for multiple prototypes of academic success. I do this in my classrooms, my lab, my department, and by working with Stefanie to support other academics. We’ve put the program on the schedule starting in September. If you want to know more or are looking for an assessment of your current team leadership and areas of growth, schedule a strategy session with Stefanie here.
Hope to see you in September!
–Kendra
PS: I often hear leaders say they’re swamped, and finding time for professional development feels like one more ball to juggle. I get it, I’ve been there too. But here’s the catch: if there’s no dedicated slot in your calendar to hone your leadership skills, you’re missing out on unlocking your full potential.
This leadership training isn’t about piling on more work. It’s about investing in yourself, ensuring your team thrives, and advancing your career. And from personal experience, it’s not just a task – it can be genuinely enjoyable. Let us do most of the heavy lifting for you. Dive in, and you will find it’s not only valuable but also invigorating.