Good Memes

When I was speaking about leadership virtues to a group of junior researchers at a leading pharma company, audience members raised examples of eminent scientists who were abusive, dishonest, manipulative or simply absent from the laboratory. How did these people get into positions of leadership and get their labs to do world class research?

The answer is fairly simple. When it comes to promotions in academia, what goes on in the lab stays in the lab as long as strong papers are published and grant money keeps rolling in. Even in corporate labs, evaluations are primarily based on lab performance against goals. If the lab is successful but the head is a dictator, that bad behavior can be overlooked if it is noticed at all.

Alice Sapienza’s book, Managing Scientists: Leadership Strategies in Scientific Research, offers a glimpse of what good scientific leadership really looks like. She asked 147 experienced scientists, most of whom were in the life sciences and half of whom were in industry, how they would describe the best scientific leaders they had worked with. Interestingly, only about 15% cited the leader’s technical prowess as an important characteristic. Good communication, management and organizational skills topped the list. Being a good role model, mentor, or coach took second place as important characteristics possessed by strong scientific leaders they have known.

Here are some more characteristics of a strong scientific leader, based both on my client experience and the results of Sapienza’s poll: excellent listening skills, practiced with all lab members at all levels; a willingness to admit mistakes; appreciation of social, ethnic, and gender differences and how they contribute to a wider view of the scientific enterprise; an intuitive knowledge about how much independence each researcher requires and for how long; and the ability to handle conflict decisively but tactfully.

In other words, good scientific leadership is like good leadership in business and politics. Provide vision in an understandable way, supervise flexibly, ensure that morale is good, practice what you preach, etc. But lab heads who strive to practice these virtues often stumble when their lab members aren’t following the vision or are just being unproductive. How do you hold people accountable to hard metrics without treating unproductive workers as though they are faulty machines? How do you tell them their work is unacceptable without unnecessarily hurting their feelings or embarrassing them?

In brief, you need first to be sure that you can separate the projects from the people, seeing the steps to completion in a purely objective way. Then you learn to criticize the work without criticizing the person. This is not an easy task. I’ll introduce you to a few successful strategies in an upcoming post.

It’s hard to develop your leadership and management skills in science if you have never seen what a good leader looks like.  In my coaching with scientist clients who have worked under very accomplished PIs, I hear them talk about  leadership and management styles that are clearly dysfunctional and destructive.  It’s all too easy to imitate those styles if that’s all you have experienced and if you believe those styles helped account for the success of the PIs.  In fact, those styles may have been obstacles to greater success, and the PI might have succeeded despite, rather than because of, those styles.

The problem of identifying good leaders and managers in science is compounded by the fact that cultural stereotypes about leaders exist, thanks to movie and television depictions of despicable characters.  Leaders of companies are often portrayed as bad guys who are only out for themselves and are willing to exploit their employees whenever it pleases their selfish aims.  Recent press coverage of bank CEOs, which plays into this stereotype, only add to the confusion about what a leader, good or bad, looks like.

Fortunately, there are some excellent resources out there to help you understand great leadership and management in science.  Unlike some of the fluffy bestsellers in the business book section of your bookstore, these are based on actual studies of how good and bad leadership works in and out of the lab.

One of my favorites is a book by Alice M. Sapienza called Managing Scientists: Leadership Strategies in Scientific Research.  Sapienza works from extensive interviews with scientists about their experience with good and bad PIs.  I’ll summarize her findings in a subsequent blog post.  Graduate students in the sciences should be required to take a science management course, and this should be a required textbook.

If you haven’t read it, get the valuable free book produced by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the  Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty.  Finally, take a look at some of the books written by Kathy Barker, especially At the Helm: A Laboratory Navigator.

I will continue to list good resources of scientific leadership and management on my Still Point Coaching and Consulting website.  Future blog posts will discuss the essential elements of great leadership and management in the lab and beyond.  Stay tuned.

Why is it so hard to change?  We all want to do it, once we feel that discomfort between where we are in life and where we want to be. Sure, there are plenty of people out there who say they can help you.  Psychologists, psychiatrists, New Age gurus, consultants and coaches tap into this multimillion dollar market.  There’s enough conflicting advice out there to make you wonder whether there really is a proven way to alter your behavior in positive ways.

If you really want to know how to change, the best way to find out is to study people who have successfully made great changes in their lives.  This was the reasoning of James O. Prochaska, a research psychologist who wanted to help people to overcome very serious habits, especially alcoholism and smoking.

Prochaska was aware that different types of therapy helped different patients more than others.  Combining his understanding of successful self-changers and his knowledge of different psychotherapy models, he formulated what is now called the Transtheoretical Model of change.  Its two main tenets: successful behavioral change unfolds over a period of time according to six basic stages, and each stage is best supported by a different type of intervention.  Unlike so many other approaches, Prochaska’s model has had proven success in everything from drug addiction to weight loss, adolescent rehabilitation and cancer management. 

Let’s cut to the chase.  Here are the 6 stages, summarized so nicely in Wikipedia that I stole them:

1. Precontemplation - lack of awareness that life can be improved by a change in behavior

2. Contemplation - recognition of the problem, initial consideration of behavior change, and information gathering about possible solutions and actions

3. Preparation - introspection about the decision, reaffirmation of the need and desire to change behavior, and completion of final pre-action steps

4. Action - implementation of the practices needed for successful behavior change (e.g. exercise class attendance)

5. Maintenance - consolidation of the behaviors initiated during the action stage

6. Termination - former problem behaviors are no longer perceived as desirable (e.g. skipping a run results in frustration rather than pleasure)

Although the stages are progressive, in real life people usually move back and forth through these stages until they finally succeed.  Relapse is normal and expected.

An approach that emphasizes taking concrete action isn’t appropriate for  someone from precontemplation (Stage 1) to contemplation (Stage 2)  because the person isn’t ready.  However, a self-awareness technique, be it psychoanalysis or a simple self-assessment method, might move a person to the second stage.

A good change agent (therapist, coach, etc.) will be able to identify what stage you are in and use the approach that is most appropriate.

Interested in learning more?  Read Prochaska’s Change for Good.  If you are working with a change agent and you feel things aren’t moving forward, find out if the approach she is using matches your needs at your current stage.  For self-changers, use the Stages of Change framework to move yourself into more desirable behaviors and to understand yourself (empathically) when you are in a rut.

If coaching is all about helping you discover and achieve a better life at work and home, then trusting your dreams would seem to be terribly important. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has some eye-popping news for people who believe they know what will make them happy. In his new book Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert uses experimental studies to support a radical idea: if we really want to know what will make us happy, we are better off looking at what makes others happy instead of relying on introspection.

Gilbert claims that people are very bad at predicting their future happiness because they don’t account for how well they will adapt to new situations. Thus, they expect that both positive and negative events will have a much greater impact on their happiness than they will. For example, people who are eager to marry someone they love experience a blip of extra happiness (usually), but within two years their self-assessment of overall happiness is about where it was before marriage. Also, women who believe their life will be joyful if only they have a child eventually rate childcare on the same level of fulfillment as doing laundry.

When I went through formal training at a coaching school, a lot of emphasis was placed on helping clients discover their dreams. We were trained in helping clients through visualization exercises. This kind of thing seems to be fairly common in coaching training and practice. Gilbert’s work throws water on this notion.

So what consistently helps people to achieve greater happiness? A warm family and close friends is unrivalled. The satisfaction of making progress towards a worthy goal. Raises and increases in responsibility and status should be less valuable — at least after a certain level is achieved — than having more harmonious relationships with co-workers, mentoring, and leading teams towards a goal that they can collectively feel good about.

One lesson for coaches and their clients: if the stakes are always lower than the client imagines, reminding the client of this fact should help to reduce stress, leading to better performance.

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting article that provides a common sense account of why more women don’t go into science: they don’t want to.

Quoting several social scientific studies and interviews with their authors, the writer claims that the gender gap in science is greater in countries where women have more rights and overall freedom to choose their professions. She also cites other studies showing that women generally prefer working in people-intensive situations. In psychology, unlike the natural sciences, women outnumber men 10-1.

The findings of these studies have no bearing on whether women suffer from sexism in their scientific careers or whether women are typically discouraged from entering science. For anyone who has had children, the selective bias of girls from human relations and boys for tools seems obvious. Girls generally go for the dolls and boys head towards the trucks.

Perhaps if there’s a lesson to be learned from these studies, it is that science needs to be conducted in a more sociable, humane environment in order to attract more women. Men still set the rules of the game in science, and often it’s not pretty.

Writing about scientific issues has improved dramatically in print and electronic media over the past decade. Part of this may be due to sustained efforts by scientists to insist upon accuracy and to complain when journalists get the science wrong. In addition, more and more people with scientific backgrounds are choosing to become journalists.

It’s striking that this trend towards greater critical thinking in science reporting has not spread into other subjects of coverage. I’m reminded of this particularly in the coverage of politics. This morning I heard a journalist interview a Clinton campaign member who argued that Clinton is the best choice because polls say she can beat McCain more decisively. An Obama supporter countered that he is in the best position to beat McCain because he has more support among Democrats. What would a trained natural or social scientist say in response to these claims? Like so many areas that journalists cover with a straight face, these arguments have so little weight to them that they are meaningless. There’s no basis for having any sense of probability that either assertion is true.

Some people may chafe at my complaint, claiming that you can’t apply experimental methods or probability theory to test the viability of a candidate who isn’t even facing off with their opponent from the other party. That’s right. So why not challenge the supporters’ claims as mere puffery or, better yet, ignore them and move on to more substantial matters?

Reporters put up daily with pseudoscientific interpretations of poll data, which are about as reliable as weather predictions — pay attention to the forecast for the next three days, but bring your umbrella just in case. If journalists took a hard look at what they are reporting, it would be a very short news day. Which would leave more time to play good music instead. I’m all for that.
Technorati Tags: science journalism, media