Changing Academic Life

Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS for short) is an internationally renowned author, company founder and thought leader in coaching. Michael is the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that helps organizations move from advice-driven to curiosity-led. He's the author of 6 books, the best known of which is The Coaching Habit which has sold close to a million copies and has thousands of 5-star reviews. His latest book The Advice Trap, focuses on what it takes to tame your Advice Monster. We start off the conversation reflecting on his career choices and discussing the differences between academia and industry. He then discusses what it means to be more coach-like in our work - staying curious a little longer, asking good questions, and being slower to jump to advice – as well as how to recognise our different advice monsters. We finish off with some questions posed by participants on a recent academic leadership development course.

Notable quotes:

[10:49] “[Two things] I hope. One is people find work that is meaningful for them, that lights them up and you enter that virtuous circle of doing work that amplifies and strengthens the best of who you are. […] And then the second thing I hope for is that you do work that gives more to the world than it takes.”

[17:00] “I'd love people to stay curious just a little bit longer and rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly.”

[20:13] [Even] if you've got some advice, which is stellar, which is the perfect advice, […] is this the right act for the moment? […] What's the consequence of me giving advice at this moment? Sure. It might solve the problem, but does it increase capacity and confidence and competence and autonomy and self-sufficiency in those around me? Because often the bigger win is to build those capacities because they're longer term capacities.

[30:27] “You don't have the answers because it's not your job to have all the answers.”

[33:39] “The three advice monsters are tell it, save it and control it….But each advice monster has prizes and punishments. And the prizes tend to be short term and a bit kind of ego-driven punishments tend to have bigger implications.”

[38:13] “If you can manage people in a way that liberates them and frees them and encourages them, then that's brilliant. And your advice monster is not going to be a path for that.”

[39:54] “What is the game being played and how are you playing this game? And are you happy with the choices you're making? Because for many of us, those choices are automatic rather than mindful.”

Overview (times approximate):

[Full Transcript also available here for download.]

00:28 Preamble

04:07 Bio: Michael gives his short bio and introduces his two books, The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap

07:26 Career choices: We discuss interesting career path choices, finding work that is meaningful and gives more to the world than it takes

11:41 Academia: We explore the ways in which academia might be different and also similar to other organizational contexts, especially when it comes to being ‘experts’

16:45 Curiosity: Michael talks about the power of curiosity, reflected in his manifesto for change, where people stay curious a bit longer and rush to action and advice giving a bit more slowly.

18:05 Advice challenges: Michael discusses the three challenges with moving to advice giving too quickly and proposes instead we first explore what is the real challenge.

23:26 Getting practical: Michael gives some practical conversational phrases and strategies for how we can play this out in different situations.

32:22 Advice monsters: Michael describes the backstory to The Advice Trap book, and explains the three different advice monsters, tell-it, save-it, control-it, and their respective prizes and punishments.

42:51 Misc questions: Michael responds to three questions from our recent Academic Leadership Development course: when is a coaching-like approach not appropriate; what if others around you don’t buy into this approach; when is it culturally appropriate; and can you apply this in giving advice eg to government bodies.

51:32 Wrap: We wrap up the conversation. My post-script

53:55 End

Related Links

https://boxofcrayons.com Box of Crayons has taught coaching skills to hundreds of thousands of people around the world

https://www.mbs.works “Where people find clarity, courage & community to do work that's thrilling, important & daunting.”

And you can find the link to the advice monster questionnaire at https://go.mbs.works/theadvicetrap

Books:

The Coaching Habit - the best-selling book on coaching this century

The Advice Trap Be humble, stay curious & change the way you lead forever

Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.

Dr. Tanita Casci is Head of Research Policy, and Dr. Elizabeth Adams is Workstream Lead – Research Culture, at the University of Glasgow. The trigger for this conversation was an LSE blog article they wrote about rewarding contributions to research culture. In this conversation they talk about their journey in trying to promote a supportive collegial research culture that is aligned around core institutional values that reflect what matters to the people in the research units. They discuss various initiatives that are part of this, such as promotion criteria that reward collegiality, formal recognition of everyone’s contributions to research, from PIs, researchers, students and to technicians, and better supporting early career researchers. They make a compelling case for the importance of culture for good research, and role model what universities can do to proactively enable this.

“The university succeeds when the individual succeeds.“

“You can do better bigger things working together across disciplines and sectors.” 

“It is expected that you will be collegiate in your teaching and your research and your knowledge exchange and all the different things that you do and that you will support others and by doing so research will be better for everyone.“

“Culture is the vehicle to better research.”

“Of all the things you could be doing, what is the very small number of things that you are going to align all your communications, activities and investment to?”

Overview (times approximate): 

[Full Transcript also available here for download]

2:00 Introductions: Tanita and Elizabeth introduce themselves

4:20 Defining quality: formative reviews to understand what quality means to different disciplines and what is needed to help people succeed

9:40 Recognising different types of contributions

12:50 Aligned initiatives: Showcasing good practice, setting collegiality expectations, and supporting, rewarding and celebrating what they value

17:00 Early career support to develop positive research cultures

18:25 Culture as the vehicle to better research

20:40 Understanding the values to inform strategy

24:05 Role of sector drivers

25:10 Practical strategies, challenges, and navigating a good pace for change

30:05 Reinterpreting good research practice for different disciplines

33:20 Roles of governance structures and local leadership, and giving PIs tools and support

39:20 Looking at it as a long-term learning game – nothing is born perfect

41:20 Importance of communication & clarity re focus and definition

45:30 What they are proudest of – support for fieldwork, and including collegiality in the promotions criteria, and putting outputs on a par with impact

51:00 End

Related Links

Tanita Casci – Glasgow Uni profile,  LinkedIn profile

Elizabeth Adams – Glasgow Uni profile

University of Glasgow Research Strategy 2020-25: Collaboration | Creativity | Careers and Research Culture initiatives

Sector initiatives:

DORA “The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated.”

Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2015 Report

Concordat The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers – Sept 2019

Research Excellence Framework – “the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions.”

Athena Swan Charter – “a framework which is used across the globe to support and transform gender equality within higher education (HE) and research”

Articles:

Adams, E. & Casci, T. (2020) Rewarding contributions to research culture is part of building a better university. LSE Blog.

Casci, T & Adams, E. Research culture: Setting the right tone eLife 2020;9:e55543. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55543

Casci, T & Adams, E. (2019) Reimagining research culture. F1000 Research blog

Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Communication Studies and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University in Chicago in the US. He also directs the Social Media Lab. The trigger for this conversation was the recent discussion with John Tang about reviewing and Jeremy continues this discussion, looking at issues around authoring and service asymmetries, the unsustainability of the current review and publication models based on what he calls the perpetual motion machine that pushes researchers to churn out more and more papers. He calls for a greater focus on quality of papers instead of numbers and to identify quality signifiers beyond just publications. We discuss his role as conference chair of the upcoming CSCW conference, which is traditionally about distributed online collaboration, and moving the conference online. Shifting topics, we also talk about his personal coming out and the pivot of his research to explore topics around gender and sexuality. Through all of these discussions, Jeremy’s curiosity and care comes through again and again. Much to ponder on here.

“If you are playing the long game, eventually it [career] does work out.”

“I’ve come to believe that you just need a smaller number of very very good papers to make your contribution and a name for yourself.”

“On search committees, writing tenure letters, it is in our collective interest to not be obsessed with numbers and to focus on the contribution and on the quality of the work.”

“As a junior person it is easy to get caught up in the perpetual motion machine mentally where you are constantly spinning out new papers.”

“We’re smart observant people. If we look around and have these conversations we can come up with a way to fix this. This is a solvable problem but it takes stepping back, noticing and talking about it.”

“There’s something I really enjoy about throwing myself in a situation where all of my assumptions are very likely to be wrong and trying to figure out where to go from there.” 

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Jeremy’s background and career path to date

07:50 Reflecting on reviewing and service challenges

36:35 Shifting to queer research topics

53:00 Values & superpowers

59:09 End

In a little more detail… or download the full transcript here

Background:

02:00 Jeremy gives an overview of his background and career to date.

04:30 Jeremy discusses why he moved from Cornell to Northwestern, right before he was up for tenure, and early career choices and challenges.

“If you are playing the long game, eventually it [career] does work out.”

Reviewing & service:

07:50 We shift to the ongoing discussion around reviewing (building on the conversation with John Tang).

08:20 One issue is the arms race in CV length, the pressure to publish lots of papers, and the volunteer service required, which can put the emphasis on the writing that we must do and not the service that we can do.

“In order to get the papers published, people need to review. But if that is getting de-prioritised it is getting harder to find people to review.”

09:50 The cost structure of reviewing – once written the cost of submitting is very little and the cost of reviewing it is pushed onto the community. A sustainability issue.

11:10 We discuss the impact on quality and how large numbers of papers do not equate to quality, and what he finds more compelling when on a search committee.

“I’ve come to believe that you just need a smaller number of very very good papers to make your contribution and a name for yourself.”

13:20 We talk about where publication numbers do have impact, in the filtering process of initial applications. And he talks about looking for other quality signals. But you have to look for it.

15:00 Jeremy discusses the debates about highly selective conferences but not as much of a shift as he would like to see – a hard thing to let go of if you have been arguing for selective conferences all your career. And acceptance rates being arbitrary.

17:10 We note the impact on younger academics and career pressures and I Ask about alternative suggestions? Jeremy talks about not being obsessed with numbers, focusing on quality, and re-thinking deadlines and acceptance rates.

“On search committees, writing tenure letters, it is in our collective interest to not be obsessed with numbers and to focus on the contribution and on the quality of the work.”

“As a junior person it is easy to get caught up in the perpetual motion machine mentally where you are constantly spinning out new papers.”

“If we focused on writing a smaller number of better papers, accept rates might go up.”

The shift to multiple deadlines or being able to submit anytime means you can submit when the work is ready.

21:00 Jeremy talks about it as a classic social dilemma problem and possibly experimenting with charging but then the equity issues this opens up, and also issues around review karma. And saying no to review requests.

26:55 Jeremy talks about stepping back from being an associate editor because of how hard it was to get reviewers and doing more reviewing again. The asymmetry of power to say no, and of information around reviewing and service - the lack of transparency into what other service people are doing when they do say no.

29:50 Jeremy discusses how we can become blind to some processes and assumptions when we come into a field and need to stop and look around.

“We’re smart observant people. If we look around and have these conversations we can come up with a way to fix this. This is a solvable problem but it takes stepping back, noticing and talking about it.”

31:00 Jeremy talks about planning the next CSCW conference and the experiments they are trying, and how to promote more social interaction.

33:00 They have appointed a virtual attendance task force to think about how to address this e.g., through more structured activities, ways to have random encounters, but not trying to replicate face to face.

34:30 We discuss CSCW as the area that has been researching distributed collaboration since the 80s and dealing with distributed and online now in the pandemic. And finding the ‘beyond being there’ moments.

Queer research:

36:35 Jeremy discusses his shift in research from more pragmatic interests (publishable and fundable) to sexuality and gender studies. Also coming out when he was 25. And starting on this new research area looking at CraigsList ads and then Grindr (leading to Charlie’s undergrad thesis) and the encouragement of Fred Turner to look at this as research.

42:45 Jeremy discusses some of the research studies he is doing in this space, including working with collaborators in India and learning so much.

47:00 Jeremy responds to the question about whether there have been personal challenges in coming out and he says not really and the HCI community being very open and welcoming.

49:30 Jeremy reflects on how the community could still change and do better. “There are some hard conversations ahead and hopefully they can be productive conversations.”

“There’s something I really enjoy about throwing myself in a situation where all of my assumptions are very likely to be wrong and trying to figure out where to go from there.” 

Values & superpowers

53:00 Jeremy reflects on other values driving his work – addressing real problems in a way that can impact broader understanding, thinking about Pasteur’s Quadrant. And the superpowers he brings – a naïve curiosity and being willing to ask questions at every stage.

57:20 Wrapping up.

59:09 End

Related Links

 Acronyms:

CHI Computer Human Interaction

CSCW 2021 conference - Computer Supported Cooperative Work

 People:

John Tang’s recent podcast episode on reviewing

Gillian R. Hayes: Inclusive and Engaged Research. CHI2019 SIGCHI Social Impact Award talk

Mary L. Gray  Microsoft Research, Harvard Uni Klein Center for Internet and Society

Fred Turner, Stanford

Jed Brubaker, Colorado

Papers/Books:

Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta. 1992. Beyond being there. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '92). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 119–125.

Katta Spiel, Os Keyes, Ashley Marie Walker, Michael A. DeVito, Jeremy Birnholtz, Emeline Brulé, Ann Light, Pınar Barlas, Jean Hardy, Alex Ahmed, Jennifer A. Rode, Jed R. Brubaker, and Gopinaath Kannabiran. 2019. Queer(ing) HCI: Moving Forward in Theory and Practice. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper SIG11, 1–4. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3311750

Donald E. Stokes, 1997, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Brookins Institution Press.

Neha Kumar is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, with a joint appointment between the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. Her research area is human-computer interaction for global development.

In this conversation she discusses the circumstances and choices and people that contributed to her path from India to Germany to the US, where she studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley, with time working at Microsoft in between. She then talks about her current faculty position and setting up her own research lab. She also talks with great generosity and reflective insight about the penalties and privileges of always being an underrepresented voice in every room and respecting difference. She brings a similar capacity to take perspective and see the bigger picture in talking about her tenure process, her service roles and how she looks after herself in the middle of all this.

Notable bites:

I started to feel that this is a product that the top 1% of the world uses, and it's not really driving my passion and I don't know what to do about it. I call it my quarter-life crisis. I was 25. [14:48]

Everything could be a blessing and a curse. It's just a question of molding it in that way. [31:56]

We're so tied to this performance that we always feel this pressure to be right. That's something I've been thinking about—how we don't give ourselves room to be flawed, but we are... We are inherently flawed, except we want to make it look like we're not. [45:53]

It's about what's liberating. I think it's tremendously liberating to feel like I can grow in this moment, as opposed to: "I'm just going to stay put and not move.” [47:54]

I hope we can think a little more about each other and a little less about ourselves alone. And if there was one thing that I would hope for, it would be that--to really believe in the power of the collective, to believe in solidarity, to believe that we're stronger together, and that we cannot really do better by putting other people down. We have to rise up together. To me that's super important to remember in the minutest of things that we do. [01:03:18]

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Preamble

03:10 Neha’s path and career choices towards a PhD

13:00 Finding her own way and the value of good friends and supervisors

22:50 Getting a faculty position and running her own lab, TanDEm Lab

36:10 The experiences of always being an underrepresented voice in every room and respecting difference

48:25 The tenure application experience

55:00 Service roles and self-care

1:02:10 A call to the power of the collective, being stronger together

01:05:54 End

Transcript

Full Transcript available here

Related Links

TanDEm Lab, Georgia Tech

ACM Future Academy

ACM SIGCHI

Michael Best – Faculty mentor at Georgia Tech

Book: Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, 2013, Crown.

Photo credit: Susan Dray

Having talked about superpowers and strengths, in the last related work podcast, it’s a natural follow on to talk about job crafting and exploring where we the power and autonomy to shape the work we do. Drawing on work by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, I talk about three ways you can job craft – cognitive, task and relational – and draw on examples including from pervious podcasts to illustrate. We all have more scope to make work more meaningful than we might think and even small tweaks can make a big difference.

Related work links:

Job Crafting website – including an exercise you can buy and links to various published papers https://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/cpo-tools/job-crafting-exercise/

Michelle McQuaid’s podcast conversation with Amy Wrzesniewski about job crafting

First key paper: Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E.(2001) Crafting a job; Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201.

Specific to academia: Wellman, N. and Spreitzer, G. (2011) Crafting scholarly life: Strategies for creating meaning in academic careers, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(6), 927-931.

The love-loathe article: Buckingham, M and Goodall, A. Work-Life Balance is a myth. Do this Instead. Time Magazine, June 6 2019.

The Changing Academic Life podcasts mentioned – see the notes on the webpage for dipping in if you don’t want to

Ali Black podcast conversation

Cliff Lampe podcast conversation and Cliff’s article on why he loves academic service

Katherine Isbister podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

Image acknowledgement: Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Transcript

(00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.

(00:21):

In the last related work podcast, we talked about super powers and strengths, super powers and strengths being those things that we're not just good at, but that we really love doing where we're at our best, and we can really make an impact. And we also talked about the literature saying that if we can work out and identify what our strengths are and then use and develop, the more we'll be happier, more engaged have all sorts of positive benefits from it. So what might be some practical strategies then for how we go about doing that? What I want to talk about today is a theory of job crafting that was developed by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton in a paper in 2001 based on some qualitative studies that they'd done on people at work, and they identify three different types of ways that we can craft our work to connect to something that's more meaningful that makes more use of our strengths. That makes work more fun.

(01:30):

And so I'd like to just spend a little bit of time now, just reflecting on that. So to start off with that might be useful just to think for yourself about, you know, if you think about the, all the different sorts of aspects of your work from your great work that you really love, where you're using your strengths, where you're at your best to have to work, that you don't enjoy that that's just tedious, but you can't really get out of and just think about what some of those might be, because I'm going to suggest that the strategies that they propose can make the great work, even more fun and allow you to do even more of that. And to turn some of the, have to work, that's a bit of a chore and a bit tedious into something where it's still may not be your favorite thing to do, but you've found a way of connecting with it more to make it more interesting.

(02:29):

And why I think this notion of job crafting is really interesting is that it invites us to explore what are the things within our power, within our control that we can shape, even when we think we may not have a lot of scope. I think that we still do have, we still do have scope to make things better, to some extent, and especially as academics, this notion of academic freedom and autonomy, even though we know that it's probably a contested notion these days is we're still very lucky that we do have a lot of autonomy to some extent compared to many other people. So how do we make best use of that? So the three types of crafting that they talk about cognitive crafting task crafting and relational crafting. So let me just walk through each of those.

(03:32):

So cognitive crafting is about changing the way we think about or approach some job or work. So it's about changing your mindset in a way that might connect to something that you care about. So I can give you an example for myself where I think I'm marking, you know, especially if you have sort of long essays to mark in a big class can be something that, you know, where you just look at that pile of papers to be marked and go, Oh, do I have to do it? And I've been working on lately trying to flip that around and just say I'm really interested to learn from the students because often they will pick essay topics. If I give them an open essay topic where they write about things that I don't know a lot about. And I think I said last week, I'm quite eclectic in my interests and I love learning new things.

(04:32):

So I've, I've reshaped that to think about, Oh, this is a great opportunity just to learn about a topic that I don't know anything about and what I've also done is I often ask the students to write a reflective learning report. And I, of course, I think there's value for them in doing that, but it makes my marking more fun as well because one of the other things I really care about that drives me is helping people develop themselves. And I love reading the learning reports now because I can see the journey that the students have been on. So I've still got the job of marking, but it's no longer quite feeling as tedious as it was. It still takes time, but I I've found a way of finding meaning in that work. So in, in previous podcasts as well, you may remember Cliff Lampe and I always, this always struck me because he talked about loving, going to faculty meetings and that's changed for me how I think now about faculty meetings that they're, they're not something that's a big chunk of time out of my week or out, out of my calendar that doesn't add any value. But he challenged me to rethink my relationship to faculty meetings and that thinking about it as a chance to catch up with colleagues and to contribute to the future direction of this.

(06:13):

So what are the things that might be your 'have to do' work that isn't fun. That is a bit tedious. And is there a way that you can change the way you think about it, even, that it makes it a little bit different that changes the energy around it when you go to do that at work,

(06:39):

They also talk about task crafting, and this is where you may be able to find, so you still have to deliver on a task and there's still some output that's required, but there may be a way that you can change the mix of activities that you do in delivering on that task, or that you have possibility to change the scope of the task in some way, or that you can change the way you perform the task that may be connects to more of your strengths. So it's sort of exploring the boundaries of that task and how it can be made different. So if I pick up on my marking thing, the other thing that I've done with marking is I now also change the way I do that job as well, apart from adding in the reflective learning report to the task for the students, and to my task, I also mark the papers on the iPad with the pencil and go and sit somewhere nice. So I changed my location and the setting makes a big difference. It's sort of an inviting, warm setting, you know, that I choose and just even changing the setting has helped with that as a job that I didn't particularly like doing, and it would feel worse doing it, sitting at my desk.

(08:08):

I can also reflect back on something I did with the teaching challenge as, as being an instance of task shaping to fit, to connect more to my strengths. So I had a lecture that I'd been doing quite a number of years, and the slides were getting quite outdated in the design and the content may be needed updating as well, but I was really, really busy and I just didn't have time to put in all the effort that was needed to do that. But I did care about the students' learning experience as well. And just as a sort of an essential sort of solution, I started conducting this course not so much as lectures anymore, but as facilitated discussions workshopping with the class, obviously it was a small enough class for about 30, 40 students that it was possible to do this. And I realized that I had more fun and the students were more engaged and it felt like, and it seemed like it's certainly in their assessments that they learned a lot more as well.

(09:22):

And what it did was I connected I'm actually, I think one of my superpowers is in facilitating these sort of group workshopping type experiences. And I'd actually fallen back on one of my natural strengths as a solution for shaping the way I did that job of teaching to deal with the very practical challenge. But now it's the way I, I now choose to run my courses wherever I can, wherever the content suits that. And I, I think that's been really important because I now really look forward to teaching those classes. I'm not just standing up going blah, blah, blah, the whole time. I think the students do too.

(10:05):

And I'm also reflecting on a story that another colleague in another university was telling me about how they were given a database class to teach, and that's not their area at all for first years. And they weren't looking forward to it. They were inheriting someone else's material, and they ended up crafting how they taught this topic. So they still had to deliver to the curriculum, but they were, there are very creative person and their core research areas more in multimedia. And they ended up connecting to multimedia type databases and materials and metadata as example data that the students worked with in the database class. And I thought that was a really lovely example of someone, again, shaping a job that didn't seem like it was going to be so good or much fun, but connecting it to what they knew, what they were good at and having the freedom, you know, using the freedom that they had to shape sort of the examples that they used in the assignments to make it more fun for them and of course the students.

(11:14):

And I think in the podcasts conversations that I've had so far, the chat with Ali Black is also a lovely example of shaping the task. And I don't know if you listened to Ali's conversation it's really worth listening to, she talked about how she was pretty sort of feeling like a failure and pretty broken down by the whole managerial approach to academia and the challenge of trying to get promoted and, and, you know, ticking all the boxes and ended up as a reaction or as a totally pivoting her research that she did. And actually focusing on slow scholarship as, as a topic of research, and paradoxically has ended up producing lots of beans that get counted that do the tick boxes, but now it's not being done just as an external motivator, but it's come out of something that she loves doing and that she cares about, which I think also connects then to the third type of crafting that can be done, which is relational crafting.

(12:32):

So that's changing where we can, who we do things with, or the social context will support that we draw on in getting work done. And so the other part of Ali's story is that she created this wise woman's writing group, and, and she talks about how this wise women writing group became a real saving space for her and helped to find her own ways of working on what mattered to her. And in the end, she was able to create a promotion application that she said was like me. So I thought that was really useful and strategy because when she was struggling, the way she shaped her work was not just to pivot in the topic that she was working on, but reaching out to colleagues and, and being instrumental in forming this writing group in the first place so that she had that support. So I'd really strongly recommend listening to that conversation.

(13:37):

Katherine Isbister as well. She didn't talk, she talked about this after we actually finished recording, and I just mentioned it at the end. She also talks about how a really important thing that she has done that helps her deal with just her role more generally, is that she has a weekly Skype call with a friend colleague where they act as a peer mentor for each other and help hold each other accountable to commitments. And just check in. And again, like this is just building on social networks and relational aspects to shape the work so that you're not doing it so much alone.

(14:20):

And I think we could also interpret Mike Twidale's example from last week where there, there was some of the details that of scheduling a job that needed to be done as part of his curriculum role. He didn't like that at all. And he had just assumed that no one would like it. And then he found a colleague who lit up and loved doing that sort of work. And he ended up, she ended up taking that on and he could then do the more strategic things that he was better at. And that, I think that's a lovely example of crafting as well, is co-opting other people and being able to draw together all of your different strengths and working together on the task. I know that for the academic leadership development courses that we're running, doing it with Austin Rainer has just been such a pleasure and so much more rewarding and enriching than just doing it on my own. And I've learned so much more from doing that, even though it's been a little bit harder in some ways, in terms of needing more time, just to coordinate and plan together.

(15:26):

And we could also think about, you know, the move in a lot of academic circles to have shut up and write groups or reading groups. These are all nice examples of relational crafting and shaping aspects around our work to connect to other, and those notions of high quality connections can be really important. The literature also talks about in terms of relational crafting the value of understanding who benefits from your work. So it could be for us, as lecturers may be hearing back from students or connecting back with students to hear how they're going, or from what they've learned in your courses, or if you're doing a lot of participatory research with participants, you know, thinking more also about how they might benefit from the work.

(16:25):

So I think that, you know, even if the power that we have to shape our work to craft our work is only in terms of how we think about it. That's a huge power because how we think about it really can impact how we engage with the work and the energy that we bring to it.

(16:47):

And then if we also have the opportunity to, you know, to the autonomy, to shape the task itself in how we engage with it, or the boundaries of it, how can we shape this job to do more of this sort of thing and less of that, the other sort of things. I know that it goes going back to the task shaping. I know that if I have a research problem, I will choose to shape the research questions that connect to more, how and why research questions that connect to my love of more qualitative exploratory in depth research, rather than framing it up as a hypothesis that would require an empirical lab study. While I, I appreciate the value that such studies bring, they not working to my strengths, or they don't get me as excited. So we often have much more power than what we think.

(17:41):

And we can help others that we work with also explore what are the boundaries that they to shape their work, and whether that's people were mentoring or people that we're working with, or students, even in working with masters students or PhD students, when they're looking at their key topics, or they're looking at their methods, we can have conversations with them. That sort of say, what, what do you want to get out of this, this research work for your thesis for your future career? What skills do you want to develop? What knowledge areas do you want to develop, and what do you really love doing? And help them iterate around to shape a question or an approach that connects to where they want to go, and that makes use of where they are. And if we're working as a team in the way that Mike did with the woman that he was working with, you know, how do we exploit the exploit? That sounds like the wrong word in this context, doesn't it. But how do we enable the shaping of the work as a team so that everyone's able to do more of what they like?

(18:48):

And there was an interesting

Two recent interactions made me think more about the importance of knowing our own unique superpowers (as Aaron Quigley discussed), ie our strengths, and also our kryponite (thanks Lewis Chuang), and how this can help us work out what is our good academic life. And to recognise that it’s ok that we can all have different superpowers.

Related Links:

The twitter thread started by Lewis Chuang:

Aaron Quigley podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

Acknowledgement: Photo of power pose by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Related Work:

Michelle McQuaid, 2014, Ten Reasons to Focus on Your Strengths No matter what your job description says, Psychology Today.

Jeremy Sutton, 2021, Cultivating Strengths at Work: 10+ Examples and Ideas, PositivePsychology.com.

Ryan M. Niemiec, 2020, Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You Turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health. Psychology Today.

Transcript:

(00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.

(00:27):

Where do you naturally choose to spend your time? When you have the option of making a choice, what do you naturally gravitate to doing where's your happy place or places as an academic? What is it that you really love doing when you feel the most alive and in the flow maybe? I wanted to muse on this today triggered by two different, but I think related interactions from last week, one was the discussion with a senior professor whose colleague made a comment to them that they should be writing more and notice the 'should'. But for this senior academic, they would always choose to spend time with their students, not sitting down, writing another paper yet, even though they were really clear on this as their own choice, they felt that they still felt somehow weren't measuring up to what an academic should be. Again, the 'should'.

(01:32):

The other example was a Twitter discussion, responding to the conversation with Aaron Quigley, where he talked about his super powers of not worrying who gets the credit listening and talking. Lewis Chuang started a Twitter conversation around superpowers. And interestingly also asked Aaron what's his kryptonite. I love this nod to the Superman comics. So if you remember, kryptonite is Superman's Achilles heel, it made him weak and all sorts of different types of kryptonite emerged over the series, having different effects on Superman. And then in some, some of the episodes, he could become immune or found that he could be immune from kryptonite by traveling to alternate dimensions.

(02:19):

I think a generic kryptonite for many of us as academics is thinking that they must be some ideal, super academic academic that we all should be aspiring to. And this isn't helped by the hyper competitive culture and the generic metrics that we all have to report to. And I would suggest that we can get some immunity from this kryptonite by traveling to the alternate dimension of knowing ourselves better and identifying what are our unique superpowers, looking to where we get our energy from in doing our academic work and also knowing what's our kryptonite. It's more specifically, and having mitigation strategies against this. I really strongly believe and promote that there's no ideal academic that we should all be aspiring to. We're all unique. And we need the diverse mix of us all to deliver good science overall.

(03:25):

So what are your superpowers? The questions I started with can be one way to start to reflect on this. So for example, when you do have the option of making a choice of how you spend your time or the opportunity to volunteer to something, what sort of things do you naturally gravitate to doing? Where's your happy place? What is it that you really love doing that makes you feel alive and where you really get in flow? If I think of people I've worked with over the years, I know that there's one person I'll always find in the maker lab if they have free time, because this is what lights them up. Another person I know will be there behind their closed door, sitting at their desk and reveling in the time to write. And for me, I know that I will always prioritise time for people and mentoring over writing or tinkering. None of us are better or worse academics than the other. We're just different. And we bring different superpowers to our work.

(04:38):

So I can also give another illustration too, that just might help make this more concrete. So all of us work who are working in universities might be required to do some lecturing. And so on the surface by role title and by task, it might look like that is all pretty much the same, the same job of lecturing. But if you actually ask around to the people that you know, and ask them, what is it about lecturing that they really like if they, if they like it. And I'm sure that you will get a whole range of answers. So some of the answers that I've heard to this question, you know, some people love the aspect of actually standing up in front of the class and performing in a way and engaging this class. Other people will talk about it's really the interaction with the students and facilitating learning conversations. For others, it's about breaking down complex ideas into teachable chinks, and how to communicate that .For others, it's the creative work of developing, learning materials, innovative learning materials, or it might be the strategic planning of the whole learning journey for the student. And that sort of that strategic thinking is what really drives people. Or it might be that you're just motivated by inspiring the next generation of leaders.

(06:16):

And I'm sure you can come up with other reasons. And it'd be interesting to know what are your reasons for anything we do. I would suggest even in delivering to the metrics, the things that we have to do, we can still ask ourselves though, what other parts of this that we might actually love, and then look at how we can do more of that in delivering to what we have to do, because that's where our energy lies. And that's where we get to use our strengths and our superpowers. So in delivering to the metrics, it may be really annoying and painful, but maybe I can also take the time to celebrate for myself what it is that I've learned over the time. If love of learning is a strength for you just as an example.

(07:12):

So there's really strong evidence across a lot of diverse literature in different countries, cultures, and with different settings from students to businesses, to everyday life. That points to really strong benefits of knowing and using and developing your strengths. And the literature talks about things like, you know, people use their strengths more, a happier experience, less stress, feel healthier, have more energy, feel more satisfied and more confident. They're more creative and agile at work, and they experience more meaning at work and are more engaged as well. So recognising that we all have different superpowers also reminds us that we don't have to be good or excellent at everything, and that's completely okay. And that we all bring very different interests and superpowers to our work. And that's the great value of working in collaboration with others. I had a conversation for the podcast with Mike Twidale some time ago, and he gave us a great example of how we can put our different super powers together to complement one another, just take a listen to this extract.

(08:32):

"I realized that, you know, one aspect of delegation that I could do with delegate things, to people who were really good at doing this thing that I was really bad at doing, and that's partly recognising strengths and weaknesses in ourselves. And it was a struggle because at times I'm inclined to be very egocentric and think, well, if I hate doing it that surely everybody else hates doing it. So I am now going to ask them to do this horrible thing. And then discovering this thing, I think is horrible. It's something they think is really nice. And this is something they think is horrible, I think is fun. So learning what it is that, you know, plays to other people's strengths. And then maybe it's something that everybody hates and that has to be dealt, but often there are these sort of different strengths and skills that can be played to." [Mike Twidale]

(09:20):

So isn't that a great example. So it's also worth knowing that it's not enough just to name our superpowers and assume that they're always fantastic to use or that we don't need to develop other skills if we need to. So two examples or caveats around the whole notion of superpowers. One is not having some super power doesn't mean that we can't do something at all, or that we couldn't learn. It just means that it doesn't come so naturally to us. And we'll have to put in more explicit effort to develop that programming is an example for me, so I could learn how to do programming and even be good at it. But I really had to draw on my super power of conscientiousness and persistence to put in the hard work, to get through it and to enjoy the sense of achievement at the end, even if I didn't enjoy the process and it took explicit effort. I'm also not so great at the bigger picture, strategic thinking. And I could go on courses for this. And luckily, so far, like Mike's example, I've been able to work with other people who are better at this and to compliment our strengths together.

(10:39):

The second caveat is that sometimes our strengths or our super powers can also be hidden kryptonite for us if we overuse them or under-use them, or use them unskilfully or inappropriately in a specific context. So one of my superpowers is being really curious and love, just love to learn. And what that means is I have really eclectic interests and, you know, have a broad feel of lots of what's going on in different areas. But the downside that I have to watch out for is because I can be interested in all sorts of things, I'm really prone to going down rabbit holes. And so I need to work much harder on staying in focus if there's something I need to do and watching out for myself, going down a rabbit hole and wasting time. Another example is I think one of my super powers might be fairness, and that leads me to behave in particular ways around people and with people to, to see that things are just and fair, but it can also not serve me well when I notice unfairness or injustice somewhere else, or feel like someone's treated me unfairly and I can really end up ruminating and being very upset and having sleepless nights around that. So I need to have strategies for trying to manage that. So just having a superpower doesn't mean that that's brilliant, you know, there's lots of nuances around actually understanding and using your superpowers to best advantage.

(12:28):

So in summary, we all have our own particular superpowers and our own particular kryptonite. And what I think is interesting in all of the podcast conversations that I have, how much we hear this in different people's stories, everyone has a different, a different career path, different motivations for their choices, different sorts of things that really drive them and that they get excited about. And it's just a great reminder that there's no such thing as the ideal academic or the good academic life. It's, what's a good academic life to you. And this connects to our related work today, as I said, there's a huge body of evidence in the psychology and in the organisational business literature about the power of using superpowers more.

(13:22):

So I'm going to link to two popular science articles that provide a broad overview or summary or discussion of strengths, and also links to the underlying peer reviewed papers. And I said that some of the ways that you can investigate your own superpowers is to just think about the questions that I asked, but you could also ask others, because often if we think something comes so naturally to us we, we just take it for granted and assume everyone can do that because it's just so effortless for us. So sometimes it needs others, we need other people to reflect it back. And so there's a link in one of those articles to an exercise called reflected best self, where it helps you. It talks about how you can go and talk to other people about helping you identify your strengths. And the articles also point to some online profile profiling tools that you may like to use as tools to think with that might start to point you I'll also link to a third article by Ryan Niemiec that talks about 'Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health’. So have fun discovering and playing.

(14:48):

You can find the summary notes and related links for this podcast on www dot, changing academic life.com. You can also subscribe to changing academic life on iTunes, and now also on Stitcher. And you can follow ChangeAcadLife on Twitter. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues so that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.

 15:26 END

John Tang is a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research, joining in 2008 and having previously worked in other industrial research labs at Xerox PARC, Sun, and IBM. He has a PhD from the design division of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He is a deep expert distributed collaboration and in particular the use of video in this context, which is now highly relevant considering the increase in video conferencing in these pandemic times. He also serves in many senior editorial and papers chair roles managing the review process for papers.

In this conversation we reflect on the increasing amount of overwork and exhaustion we are seeing in the peer community and how this is playing out for the review process and also look at the broader implications.  John describes it in terms of invisible disabilities and it being a community problem needing solutions at the community level. We also talk about the differential effect the pandemic is having, the particular challenges for more junior people and recognising his own privileged situation. He embodies a graciousness and generosity in how he approaches these challenges, including the impact on himself, that can serve as a role model for us all. He also reflects on the experiences of video connections in pandemic times.

“I’ve been a bit saddened by the amount of overwork and exhaustion out in our community, evidenced by the reasons why people aren’t available to do reviews. Illness, caregiving, childcare, all really good reasons that people are not available to do a review, and while it makes my job as an Editor/AC harder, my heart goes out even more to people who are dealing with daily stresses. All the more why I don’t want to needlessly add to the stress about a late review…" [email]

“It's just so common that it was so systemic that we just really needed to again, think about it as a community problem, not an individual problem and figure out how we can help each other work through this aspect of it.”

“The thing that surprised me … is that all this intentional remote connection is maintaining strong ties, but we're losing weak ties.”

“I'm super interested in how this global increase in video literacy and remote collaboration, what that's going to enable in the future”

Overview (times approximate): - see below for full Transcript

00:30 Preamble and introduction

05:10 Reviewing in a pandemic: John talks about how he thinks of the pandemic impacts (around reviewing) as invisible disability and the differential effects of the pandemic despite the supposed common experience, and how this impacts getting reviews done, how much people disclose, and the job of editors/chairs

10:25 Impacts: We discuss that reviewers, editors and authors all have impacts and the widening gap between junior and senior people and the temporal ripples of impacts.

17:25 Who has power to manage boundaries: We wonder about who is more able to say no to reviewing and how level of seniority can make a difference in how we manage work-life boundaries, and more particularly younger people trying to establish boundaries for the first time in the pandemic

23:00 Managing boundaries: We discuss the impacts of losing the office-home boundary with working from home and missing the commute and managing this.

28:35 Community issue: John talks about the challenges with reviews and reviewers as a community issue and we explore possible different ways of doing things, and a call to senior people here – a call to graciousness and generosity and how to foster that as a community on all sides and inviting senior people to step up more

39:35 Distributed work & video: We shift to discussing the experiences of distributed working from home in the pandemic, reflecting on his 30 years of research working on these topics. He talks about the challenges of supporting serendipitous interaction, reflecting on the old Media Space work, and on all the video conferencing experiences, not being surprised by the fatigue and loss of spontaneity findings from recent research, and surprised by how much we lose weak ties and the impacts of this, and by how smoothly we apparently have migrated to online and curious about what this global increase in video literacy will mean for the future, and the blurring of live and pre-recorded interaction, and the role of social acceptance.

55:15 Final thoughts: John reminds us how to think about it as a community problem and how to help each other and care for each other as a community.

58:31 End

Related Links

Web article about Microsoft’s upcoming virtual commute feature: How to create your own Microsoft Teams virtual commute, today.

A Microsoft story about the collection of wellbeing features being introduced to Microsoft productivity apps: New tools can help boost wellbeing and soothe unexpected stresses of working from home - Stories (microsoft.com)

eWorkLife Project and Anna Cox being interviewed about #FakeCommute

Media Space – example publication: https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/CSCW/2013/papers/Bly-mediaspaces-CACM93.pdf

John’s publications on video and distributed work: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=E4cMwQMAAAAJ

Acronyms

AC Associate Chair

CSCW Computer Supported Cooperative Work

HCI Human Computer Interaction

Transcript

Download the full transcript here - created with Temi.com - unedited

Aaron Quigley is a Professor and Head of School in Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales. He discusses his various career moves that have brought him to the current position and the role of both strategic hindsight and foresight around choices. He talks about silent warriors in relation to mentoring and supervision, as well as peer service. And he talks about his three secret powers of not worrying who gets the credit, listening and talking, and how they play out in practice. As part of this we also hear about his approach to leadership, getting the best out of people, and making the world a better place. 

Notable bites:

“That’s the thing about the Head of School job – it is to help others to achieve success and together we work towards greater success.”

“There are a lot of people out there who are the silent warriors, who are doing work that actually makes the world a better place but they don’t necessarily get the acclaim.”

“You can get a lot done in this world if you don’t care who gets the credit.“

“I think the things I can help set up and nurture and support will help make the world a better place in the long run.”

“World leading, world beating, or world building. Pick your poison and work in that way.”

“There is no handbook. Every head of school’s role is different. The handbook is - start building, start thinking, start looking, start documenting, start understanding, start meeting.”

“You have to know how to talk to your audience…You’ve got listen. You’ve got to look. And you’ve got to talk to them in way to keep them encouraged.”

“Success has many parents.”

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Career path from degree in Computer Science to Head of School at UNSW

16:00 Making choices, strategic hindsight and foresight, and getting the right advice

22:55 The importance of silent warriors and service roles and his secret power of caring about getting things done and not caring about who gets the credit

34:15 His secret power of listening

37:55 Moving into his new role as Head of School

44:45 His secret power of talking

58:21 End

In more detail, he talks about…

02:00 Aaron talks about stumbling into computer science, and about computing being a global field and his various moves over his career – Dublin, Germany, California US, Japan (to teach English), Australia, Austen Texas, lecturing in Newcastle and PhD in Sydney Australia, Mitsubishi Research Labs Boston, travelling in Patagonia and Europe, post doc in Sydney Australia, Dublin Ireland, Tasmania Australia, St Andrews Scotland. 10 years in Scotland, never thought they would leave, but Brexit came along and then a global pandemic and now back in Australia at UNSW as head of school.

16:00 Aaron discusses the extent to which the moves were strategic, that there was always a long term strategy to get back to Australia and how he thinks there is strategic hindsight and strategic foresight. Foresighting activities are where he will go to round out his skill set.

18:30 Aaron talks about an example of unexpected re-connecting with people, using a recent Clubhouse experience as an example, and connecting to his three secret super skills. Your paths always interconnect.

22:30 Aaron talks about the value of seeking advice from the right people, and Bob Kummerfeld and Judy Kay being exemplary as supervisors in how they nurture the next generation, and being silent warriors

25:55 In relation to silent warriors, Aaron talks about he is very aware of this through his work as CHI general chair and his SIGCHI work writing blog posts about SIGCHI policies, and the importance of making policies for codifying decisions and guiding actions; talking in particular of all the people contributing for example to the CHI courses policy – three digits can include weeks of thinking by numerous people about why do we do that; and the balance of trying acknowledge all the people who contributed but also recognising the people trying to claim false credit.

29:45 Aaron discusses his ‘why’ for his various service roles, including lots of small things that are invisible. His secret secret secret power is: “I think you can get a lot done in this world if you don’t care who gets the credit.”  (with a digression into the attribution of Henry Ford’s supposed famous quote)

34:15 Aaron talks about his second secret power being listening. He gives example of how he listens – listening in to podcasts and clubhouse sessions and learning from them. Looking for different ideas and making connections.

37:55 Aaron talks about when he started at UNSW, meeting with every single person and listening – what’s your passion, what’s driving you, tell me about…. He also used a tool that tracked proportion of talking and his goal was to only talk 20% of the time. He is looking for world leading, world beating, or world building and looking for people to convince him they are doing one of those three things and he will have their back. Listening to 55 people was exhausting.

41:10 Aaron started at UNSW 10 Aug, 400 page handbook – but a blank sheet of paper. “There is no handbook. Every head of school’s role is different. The handbook is start building, start thinking, start looking, start documenting, start understanding, start meeting.” He writes his own book, synthesising what he’s heard from colleagues (plus strategy work of the last 6 months)…. The next thing is present, listen … and the students have something to say as well, and the alumni, and international relations people and benefactors. Discusses John Lions – understated influence on the world (open source etc) and a distinguished lecture series starting 27 May.

44:45 Aaron talks about his secret power, talking… how he talks differently to different people. He talks about how he learnt this during his time as an English teacher in Japan and talking to different people there about or in English.

51:10 The icebreaking game, three truths and one lie (that GF fails badly at!)

54:15 Wrapping up. Talking about podcasts. And points to Vicki Hanson and the ACM Future of Computing Academy, the  ACM ByteCast, and Clubhouse, and encouraging people to listen and learn. Listen and don’t wait to talk.

00:58:21 End

Related Links

 People: Aaron Quigley, Paddy Nixon, Joe Marks, Judy Kay, Bob Kummerfeld, Patrick Baudisch, Albrecht Schmidt, John Lions, Vicki Hanson

Misc:

UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering

CHI2021, SIGCHI

Clubhouse

ACM Future of Computing Academy, ACM Bytecast podcast

Event: In augural John Lyons Distinguished Lecture Series starting 27 May

Book: Richard N Bolles & Katherine Brookes, What color is your parachute

I hadn’t thought before about the fact that under managing could be just as harmful if not more than micromanaging. Finding the sweet spot is my challenge moving forward. These reflections are triggered by an experience this last semester, where I realised in trying not to micro manage I hadn’t set up the team for success. The challenging part of this was learning to step back from pointing the finger at the ‘others’ and to ask how I was complicit in creating this situation as a manager and what I could learn from this to do differently next time.

“How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” [Jerry Colonna]

Related Work:

Jerry Colonna https://www.reboot.io/team/jerry-colonna/

Deci and Ryan (various) Self Determination Theory – mini theory of ‘Basic psychological needs’ -autonomy, competence, relatedness https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

Victor Lipman, 2018, Under-Management Is the Flip Side of Micromanagement — and It’s a Problem Too, Harvard Business Review, Nov 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/11/under-management-is-the-flip-side-of-micromanagement-and-its-a-problem-too

• Don’t be a conflict avoider
• View goal-setting as mission critical
• Is this the absolute best work you can do [GF: not sure I agree with this last one]

Transcript

Automated transcript via Temi.com so may be some inaccuracies.

(00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.

(00:25):

In this short podcast, I'd like to share some of my own reflections on trying to find that sweet spot between micro-managing and under managing. And this has been triggered by a particular experience in this last semester, brought to light, I think because of the circumstances of COVID and being remote. But before getting to there, it's useful for me to start back to when I first started being responsible for research projects and a bunch of researchers, and I inherited a large number of projects and people, and this was in the early two thousands. And I felt really out of my depth and really insecure. And I think, you know, the imposter syndrome would have, would be a definite definition for what was going on then. And I know that at times this led me to slip into micromanager mode, which isn't a very helpful mode to be in because it can really undermine the people that you're working with and good people. And there was a particular incident incidents where without going into details, the researchers should have walked away from a day of running a study, celebrating a great success. Yes, we could reflect on lessons learned and what we could take forward to our next study, but they actually had really done a great job. But they walked away feeling really de-motivated and deflated because of some of my unnecessary interventions that day, and this isn't the sort of leader that I want to be.

(02:08):

And I I'm grateful for people who've put up with me on my own learning journey that hopefully I have a much better sense now that it's not my role. I don't need to control, but I should enable and empower people. And that, especially in academia where we're working with really clever people, how can we trust people that we're working with and provide the enabling and supportive structures and create more of a learning mindset and making mistakes and learning experiences okay. But without feeling like you need to step in as the all-knowing expert. And this is underpinned by Deci and Ryan self-determination theory, and there are many theories part of that about basic psychological needs, which talks about how all of us want to experience autonomy and a sense of competence and a sense of relatedness. And micromanagement, it cuts down on all of those, I'm in micro-managing, I'm not giving people autonomy, I'm taking it away. And often unexpectedly. I'm questioning their competence by the way, the inappropriate way that I might step in. And it breaks our relationship because I'm not showing any trust or respect for them in their own learning journey. So I think that over time I've got much better at not micromanaging. I know that when there are times of stress, I may tend to step back into that again. But I think I have a little bit more self-awareness and recognized and step back.

(03:51):

But the experience of the last semester has raised the question for me about whether I might even be now under managing people or projects. And there's a paper that I'll put a link to by Victor Lee Littman from 2018, that talks about under management may be just as big a problem as micromanagement.

(04:15):

And what happened this semester? Again, I won't go into details, but we got to a situation where I found myself feeling quite cranky with some people, because I felt like why wasn't this stuff getting done? And don't they know that something's needed. And you know, so I, I was really reacting to a situation and there was a, you know, a sense of sort of blaming them for not being good enough or, and wondering whether I should be confronting the situation and say, look, what's going on. But I was reminded by something that a master coach, Jerry Colonna says a lot, which is ‘how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want'. And that's a really powerful question because it puts a spot spotlight back onto me about what am I responsible for. And the complicit is not, it's still recognizing that others may have been able to act differently, make different choices, but what's my role in all of this in setting this up.

(05:31):

And what I realized was that I had just assumed a whole lot. I always remember my mother saying assume, never assume because it makes an ass out of you and an ass out of me. And that's certainly what I'd been doing. I thought that this was a situation that we'd been through before that people just knew what was needed and expected and by when, and we have any explicit discussion about it. So I actually didn't set people up for success. I wasn't enabling them. And as I think about it as well, there were very particular circumstances this semester, where they actually had quite a big pressures on them related to COVID in the situation where even if they may be, should have known or could have known there were other circumstances that they were trying to deal with us.

(06:27):

Well, so what this points to for me is what can I do next time? You know, how do I look forward? Not in terms of focusing on the problem like what's going on. So for the immediate step, we, we did have a discussion. I had been able to step back from the crankiness and blaming them in my head and could actually have a discussion and own up to the fact that I hadn't been very good at setting expectations on, you know, getting some shared understandings about what was needed when, and then we looked very practically at how we could move forward and get done what was needed. And what I've learned from this for future iterations that might be similar is the important need of finding that sweet spot, where I'm still enabling and respecting people's autonomy and competence and relatedness. But I'm also recognizing my own role as a manager and scaffolding that a little bit more and getting clarity because that's really where I can help empower them.

(07:41):

And it's not that I should step in and say, okay, this is what we need done by when I say, does everyone agree? We're all on the same page, great go forth. I can still do get to clarity and set, shared expectations in a way that empowers them. So I can say, what's your thoughts so far about what we need to do when, or who might be responsible for what, and set it up as a discussion where they can have real input and control over how we set up the plan for the, for the semester or the project or whatever it is, where we might agree, timelines, where we might agree responsibilities. And I can then sort of say, what do you need from me going forward to support you in this? And also making it very clear that there's open communication to come back and ask questions.

(08:33):

It may be appropriate to set up regular check-ins or communications. And I realized I'd got away with a lot of under management, probably over the years, because we'd been co located where I could do a lot of that, just dropping my, you know, dropping into someone's room and just doing a quick, check-in saying, how's it going? Or I had more visibility. Well, just because we're in the same physical space. And these are some of the things that we've lost or I've lost at least in being physically distance from people. So, you know, those more informal check-ins, you know, awareness stuff and, and just being able to sort of have visibility. But I think even when we do have our office spaces back again, and we can be hanging out together, it's a really good practice to think about how do I best scaffold and people and set, and projects and set them up for success. So that's my lesson that I take away from this last semester, trying to find the sweet spot between micro-managing and under managing that can empower people to take their own learning journey, but feeling like they're doing, they're doing it with support and with clarity, and that there's a shared understanding.

(10:00):

You can find the summary notes and related links for this podcast on www dot, changing academic life.com. You can also subscribe to changing academic life on iTunes, and now also on Stitcher. And you can follow change our life on Twitter. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues so that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.

Acknowledgements:

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Austen Rainer is a Professor at Queen’s University Belfast in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His main focus area is team-based software innovation for societal, economic and environmental impact. Austen and I also co-facilitate an academic leadership development course. We talk about lots of different topics, from the motivation for his various moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland, and negotiating various cultural differences, to his experiences being an academic leader, what he has learnt, including about having difficult conversations, and the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon his COVID lockdown experiences, both in teaching his team-based module and how well that worked, and the personal challenges negotiating boundaries and staying well in working from home.

“It can be easy to overlook the fact that people who come into a new job, it’s not just a new job, it’s a new country, a new culture, that there’s all sorts of challenges.”

“How do I navigate the way that you should lead in this particular culture and the way that you led in a previous culture may not be the way that fits with the current culture.

‘“There’s a whole range of really difficult but also interesting and rewarding challenges about how you relate to all these different people [academics, technical, professional staff as a leader]”

“If you are going to take on these [leadership] roles there will be difficult decisions, there will be tensions, there’s competing interests, there’s politics. … So difficult conversations happen.”

“The challenges don’t go away. Just because you handled something well in one situation it doesn’t …just naturally follow that you’ll handle it well in the next one because of the subtleties of personality and politics and the situation you are dealing with.” 

“Care can be interpreted sometimes as interfering.”

Overview (times approximate - see full transcript at end):

02:00 Motivation for moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland – exploring different cultures and being after a challenge.

07:20 The subtle cultural differences such as national cultures, academic cultures, and how software engineering is regarded.

11:35 The real diversity you can get within an academic school and a university, and the challenges of relocation.

13:25 Suggestions for things to help people with relocation and the ways that different cultural signals can even get in the way, making it uncertain as to how to navigate the challenges.

16:25 The challenges coming into a leadership position as a new person and the challenge of how to figure out how to lead in this particular culture.

17:30 The move into a role as head of department at Canterbury, building on other previous leadership roles at Hertfordshire, and discussing different kinds of leadership.

20:30 Lessons from moving into leadership roles, big L and little l leadership roles - how varied and different academics can be, as well as various professional and technical roles etc.

24:50 The difficult conversations that come with leadership. And always learning since situations are different.

30:00 Imposter syndrome, the masculine perspective, and the value of sense checking with other people.

34:00 How else he has learnt along the way: by going on courses and the difference between general professional environments vs academia; 360 degree assessments in conjunction with a coach or a mentor.

39:00 The values and strengths he brings – fairness, equality, respect, care, inclusiveness, analytic in wanting to understand the root of the issues, depth of thinking and reflection.

45:00 The team-based software engineering module for final year students and learning how valuable the right technologies are for doing this online during COVID experiences.

50:15 The COVID experience – rewarding for him as an introvert and also the challenges of managing the boundaries when working from home, dealing with dependents, the importance of nature and exercise, and cooking more.

54:00 What drives him as an academic – multidisciplinary challenges and team-based innovation

55:30 Key learnings from the last leadership development course

58:09 End

Related Links

Austen’s links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/austenrainer/?originalSubdomain=uk

https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/austen-rainer

https://softwareinnovation.nz/austenrainer-chair2017/

Academic leadership development course – next course starting 11 March 2021 https://www.informatics-europe.org/services/academic-leadership.html

Atlassian ‘My user manual’ https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/my-user-manual

———Transcript———

Automated transcription via Temi.com – may well be inaccuracies!

Intro (00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

Geri (00:29):

This first conversation for 2021 is with Austin Rainer. Austin is a professor at Queens university Belfast in the school of electronics, electrical engineering, and computer science. And his main focus area is team-based software innovation, the societal economic and environmental impact Austin. And I have the pleasure and the privilege of co-facilitating an academic leadership development course, and Austin is just such a great person to work with. And I'm keen to introduce you to him here, so you can get to know him too. We talk about lots of different topics from the motivation for his various moves from the UK to New Zealand, to Northern Ireland and negotiating the various cultural differences that you necessarily encounter. We also discuss his experiences being an academic leader, and what he's learned in including a discussion about the difficult conversations that you have to have. And through all this we also hear a very clear sense of the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon the COVID lockdown experiences and impacts on teaching software engineering as teams for students and how well that worked and the personal challenges, negotiating boundaries, and staying well in working from home. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Austin Rainer.

Geri (02:01):

So I'm really excited to introduce everyone today to Austin Rainer, who has been and continues to be a great collaborator and friend. And we've been working on the academic leadership development course together, and we have another one coming up with it starting in March. So if people wanted to sign up, we'll put a link at the, on the webpage so you can follow through. And I just thought it would be useful just to have a chat with you Austin, and introduce you to people a little bit more. So thank you for getting up so early in your morning.

Geri (02:43):

Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me today. I'm very much enjoying working with you. I just, you're a software engineer through and through. And in that you did your PhD in software and that's been your sort of focus and research area ever since. And I noticed actually that we got our PhDs in the same year in 1998. Yeah, I hadn't noticed that before, but what, what I'm really interested in is you, you were at Hartford CIF for a long time after your PhD at moving through various positions, and then you moved to New Zealand and now you're back in Belfast in Northern Ireland. So I'm just curious about what were some of those transitions about what was some of the things?

Austen (03:39):

So what I intended the motivation. Yeah. yeah, gosh, sort of large question in a way. I mean, sure. Like some of it's some of it's challenge that different roles as I progress through Hertfordshire and then over to New Zealand and then Northern Ireland are professional opportunities in the professional challenge and opportunities for growth that comes with that. But for me also, I mean, you know, Geri, you and I will know about this, we've talked about the whole work-life balance thing, but for, for lots of these decisions, sure. Some of the decisions were professional decisions in terms of career and kind of professional opportunity. But for me, for many of these decisions were also if you like a work-life balance decision in the sense of what's the implications for my wife and my children and my family overall. So it's a combination of things.

Geri (04:35):

Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Austen (04:40):

Yeah, sure. My, my pause is I may unpack in a different direction to what you'd like me to

Geri (04:47):

Anywhere anywhere you want to take it. There's no, no agenda here.

Austen (04:52):

Yeah. I mean, I New Zealand obviously was a big move. If you see what I mean, and people asked me before I went, you know, that's a kind of long way to go. And, and I was like, well, I'm after a challenge, you know? And it's like, well, you know, that's a big challenge to emigrate a long way. I mean, I, I realized as well, Geri you've, you've done your fair share of M immigration and immigration. So some of it goes back to my roots as well. My, my parents lived in Africa for 14 years. And so I've spent a lot of time when I was younger traveling and moving around. So some of it was around wanting to explore cultural differences both academically in terms of how a different department and university did things. And one of the things I found really interesting about Canterbury and New Zealand is the emphasis they place on engineering broadly within, within if you like society and industry.

Austen (05:47):

I think it may well be the case in Australia as well, that the sort of status of engineers and engineering is in some senses, much more highly regarded than maybe it is in the UK. This is a course or relative. But also the emphasis they put on software engineering and New Zealand as being you know, it's something that's professionally accredited. So if you graduate with an engineering degree in New Zealand, and once you have sufficient professional experience, then you will recognize this as a certified engineer. And I thought that was particularly interesting in contrast to the kind of perspective taken in the UK where software engineering much more sits within a sort of computer science kind of discipline and perspective. So, I mean, that, wasn't the only thing, but when you're kind of asking about unpacking it a bit, it was looking at this fact that there was a very different perspective and culture academically, and then also in terms of where software engineering sort of fit within things. And we were after a challenge and it was a kind of good time in terms of the age of the children and you know, let's go for it. So that's,

Geri (06:53):

And you couldn't have moved much farther good shake.

Austen (06:57):

Well, indeed. Aye, aye, aye, aye. Joke with people I went about as far as you could go and still be in a civilized sort of, I mean, Dunedin is a little bit further, but you know, we're talking about a few hundred kilometers, which isn't yeah. But it was a, it's a long way away and a long way to go.

Geri (07:13):

Mm. So other cultural differences that you noticed, you know, I don't know, in faculty culture or, you know, other, other aspects that were interesting or surprising. Yeah,

Austen (07:29):

Yeah, yeah. New Zealand is. Well, I mean, part of my pause is that it's w w what was very interesting is actually how subtly different cultures can be when you think on the surface, that they're very similar in that. I mean, one of the things we were thinking about New Zealand is, is a Western culture, if you like. So I mean, my you know, my parents spent a long time in Africa and my eldest brother has been in China and Hong Kong for a long time. And I use those as examples because on the face of it, you would think they would be very different cultures are very different languages and very different ways of doing things. And then what, what I found very interesting is sure New Zealand is a Western culture is a first-world country, et cetera. And then there are subtle differences in the, the kind of national culture, if you like.

Austen (08:18):

And then also you find, I think, differences in the way that a particular university or the university sector approaches things. I think yeah, I I'm, I, my, my pause is to think through some of the, I mean, as I mentioned already, the, the, the, the way they position engineering and software engineering, I found very interesting. We, where there are with where I am in here at Belfast Queens university, it's very interesting to compare the, the kind of cultures, the academic cultures which I think here is probably in a sense, more hierarchical. But part of the reason I pause is you know, you can talk about a sort of national culture and then a particular university, but then even within a university, you will find very different cultures, even within the same academic school, if the school is large enough.

Austen (09:12):

And, and part of my pause is, is taught to be one, goes into the detail, but I think it's very interesting to reflect on, on working in New Zealand and he even here working in Northern Ireland, and then I reflect back on working in Hertfordshire, which is the particular group of people that you might be working with within a department that can have, you know, positive or negative effects, but that might be quite a different experience to something else that's happening in the very same academic school, you know, because it is about the particular kind of people you're working with and the way they approach. Yeah. So really good question. How to summarize it.

Geri (09:54):

Yes. Yes. Cause you make a, you're reminding me that. Yeah. Have you, as you said, having moved around myself that sometimes you think that just because you're speaking extensively the same language, and of course they're even language differences in the way people speak English, there are lots of subtle cultural differences. And I know that sometimes when I was in Sussex, I would have to go, Oh, was I just being Australian? Because I realized I had said something in a particular yeah. And the thing about cultures being different.

Austen (10:24):

Yes. Sorry. I was just going to respond to your comment on language, which is I was just joking with the colleague on email who was in New Zealand. He was asking me to provide some information from when I was there, which is like, you know,...