I have a hate-hate relationship with annual performance reviews!
I dislike administering them to my team. It causes stress and worry. It’s unnecessary because we have a culture of providing ongoing feedback for behaviors. Am I really supposed to remember the behaviors of 10 team members over the course of a year to formulate an “objective” evaluation? Studies show it’s impossible to see your team members’ performance objectively. And it is heavily influenced by your unconscious biases.
To make things more objective, most universities adopted managerial systems from other industries. We use them for annual faculty evaluations and when we hire. So we measure productivity using metrics such as the number of publications and submitted grant applications. Impact is measured based on the number of citations.
It’s great to have objective metrics because it allows us to compare researcher X and Y and make decisions about hires, salary increases, and promotion less subjective. But there is a fundamental problem with this:
Once there are metrics to measure performance, people focus on delivering on metrics.
It only makes sense. If you are evaluated based on the number of publications, you start thinking about cranking out more publications. Cranking out publications becomes a surrogate for the work you once deeply cared about, then it turns into the purpose.
Before you know it you are running in the rat race. You make the moves, you are diligent, you do what it takes.
But it feels empty because there is no deeper purpose to counting publications.
On top of this, you are not only evaluated based on one metric. Here in the US some are Scholarship metrics (grants, papers, mentoring), Teaching metrics (how many classes, student evaluations), Service metrics (departmental, college, university, national, international), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (fuzzy) metrics. Ideally, your department has a nice table that states how much of each you need.
There are two ways of dealing with those metrics 1) Being a cog in the wheel or 2) making yourself the linchpin.
Cogs are model citizens. You do everything that is expected of you. You check the boxes. You say yes to most opportunities, often service or teaching-related, that present themselves. You spin your wheels. You work a lot to keep up with the demands of others and your own work.
But it is never enough! To do it all is impossible because there aren’t enough hours in the day.
You can do anything but not everything. And for sure not at the same time.
What you spend your time on matters! Service alone won’t get you promoted if your scholarship is not excellent.
Yet, it is easy to pick up service activities. In a way, it’s safer too. You invest your time to sit on a committee, give your input, do some work. Unless this activity is 100% aligned with your mission (see below how linchpins go about the requirements for service) you probably won’t pour your heart and soul into it.
It’s scarier to do work that is meaningful, put it out into the world and expose it to the judgment of others!
So lots of faculty play it safe. But at a deeper level, this way of operating is dissatisfying BECAUSE you don’t pour your heart and soul into it. And you know that you are not the only person able to do the stuff you are doing there. If you didn’t show up tomorrow, someone else would take over, maybe even do it better.
Day to day, department chairs think that they want cogs. After all, they are easier to deal with. Have a task? Just assign it. They can rely on the cogs to get the factory work, the bureaucracy, the admin work done.
The problem for you is that there is always somebody else who does more of it better. Cogs are replaceable. It doesn’t take your unique brilliance to keep the factory called academia going. It’s set up to keep going independent of the individual researcher.
Highly impactful, innovative, creative work isn’t factory work. That’s the work linchpins do.
That’s the work that makes a difference, the work that makes you proud to be a researcher. Often that’s the work that made us work hard to become research team leaders in the first place.
It’s also the work that is frustratingly slow, unpredictable, and leads down dead ends too many times to count. It is the opposite of safe!
Doing this work takes more courage.
You have to say no to most of the “safe” work, focus, trust yourself. Nobody can guarantee that you will succeed when you take this route. In fact, failure is certain if you aim high enough. But if you keep going and persist, this is the work that eventually earns the accolades.
Linchpins are irreplaceable because they put their unique brilliance into their work. Nobody else has the exact same training, experiences, ideas. There are no forms or roadmaps for this work. You’re building the plane while flying it.
This is the work that is fulfilling!
Now think about those people in hiring capacities and with negotiating power: Who will they harder fight for to retain? The person with the accolades, the impactful work, the unique contributions? Or the person who can be replaced by another model citizen?
A word of caution: Linchpins do not ignore productivity metrics or their local communities because that “head in the sand” approach can be deadly.
Linchpins know the metrics but their focus is on THEIR mission, not on the metrics. To allow the evaluator to check all the right boxes, they align their mission strategically with institutional values. They have clarity on priorities. Which values are prized higher? Then they say yes sparingly to those activities that are in alignment for them.
To give you an example: In the last two years I have been asked to sit on search committees (3x), on a committee building a website, and on a committee planning a university celebration. I didn’t have much game in the skin, so I politely asked how valuable my participation would be or if I’d be easily replaced. My participation wasn’t prized highly, so I said no. But I did say yes to chairing a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee , which is fully aligned with my desire to facilitate a change in the academic culture.
So you have a choice:
Play it safe, be a cog in the wheel. If you do this well, you will likely be promoted. You will likely also be miserable 10 years down the road, if you aren’t already.
Or be the linchpin. It’s still work, a different kind of struggle. You need to manage your fears. You need to do the work of finding out who you really are and where you want your zone of impact to be. You need the guts to say no even when that is uncomfortable to you and inconvenient to others.
Choose carefully, choose in alignment with who you want to be 1, 5, or 10 years from now.