Having Difficult Conversations

Communication / Doing Research / Management & Leadership / Mentoring

No matter how in tune you are with your colleagues, at some point, you’ll find yourself in conflict and needing to have a difficult conversation. In my leadership roles at VUMC and elsewhere, I’ve had plenty. Here are some strategies for making these conversations less stressful and coming out with a win for all sides.

First, what is a difficult conversation? Of course, it’s anything hard to talk about. Self-esteem of one or both parties is often at risk, and important issues are at stake. Often, when you’re having a difficult conversation, you care deeply about the other person or people. These conversations can center on a host of issues that may involve misunderstandings, assumptions, a clash of values, or a perception of unfair treatment. Some examples in science include:

  • A postdoc skips regular meetings with the group leader. The leader lets it slide, and then the postdoc attempts to publish on their own.
  • Authorship order and inclusion is not established early.
  • Trainee projects and roles aren’t clearly defined, leading to conflict instead of cooperation.
  • Someone in the lab isn’t doing their fair share of work.

When an issue like this arises, you have a few choices for responding. You can remain silent—but silence can take an emotional toll, and the issue can simmer until it explosively erupts. You can respond immediately—but then your response may become confrontational and/or unproductive. Or you can respond later, giving yourself time to think, but there is some risk with waiting too long.

Take a deep breath. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is the importance of the issue and the relationship?
  • How does it make you and the other person feel?
  • What does this say about me and my identity?
  • What do I really want?
  • What do I want for others?
  • What do I want for this relationship?
  • Is this something I can possibly resolve with the other party, or will we need help?
  • What are the options?

Each difficult conversation is really three separate conversations: 1) What happened? 2) How does it make the people involved feel? 3) What does this say about our identities?

“What happened” is often a matter of perspective. Consider the picture to the right. Just because the person who thinks the number is a six is correct doesn’t mean the person who thinks it’s a nine is wrong. Both have their own perspectives. Assigning blame early is rarely productive.

Many people are reluctant to talk about feelings at work, but avoiding any discussion of how an incident made you feel can cause you to miss some important underpinnings of the conflict. How each party feels has implications for their identities. If someone is concerned about being perceived as a bad person, it’s hard to have a productive conversation.

Curiosity helps immensely in these situations. Try to set aside your preconceptions and learn more about the situation. Some things you might say:

  • Tell me more about…
  • My point of view is different. Can you help me understand…?
  • Help me understand your intent when you said/did…
  • What were you feeling when…?
  • Let’s figure this out together

Listen to learn, not just to respond. Bring empathy and grace for yourself as well as the other party. Acknowledge that impact often does not equal intention (and vice versa).

Here’s an example of this process in action: Imagine you are a radiologist like me. You’re performing an ultrasound on a pregnant person and a medical student is with you. You can’t find the fetal heartbeat, and the mom, knowing something is wrong, starts to cry. The medical student rushes from the room.

You could assume the student is uncaring about their patients. You could even say this to the student. But if you listen to learn, you might instead say, “I noticed you left when the patient started crying. Can you help me understand what was going on?” And you might learn that the student had a miscarriage three weeks ago. The initial assumption no longer makes much sense.

Stay curious and aim for the most respectful interpretation of others’ behavior. Let that curiosity lead you in these interactions and frame these conversations.


I am a certified Leadership and Performance Coach and have mentored and coached over 130 physicians and other individuals. Having a curious and open mindset is essential to coaching. I have published multiple peer-reviewed papers and have given national invited presentations on mentorship and coaching. My mission is to help physicians, scientists, and other individuals achieve personal and professional growth and fulfillment. Please feel free to reach out to me at Lori.deitte@vumc.org if you are interested in learning more.

Some of the information in this post comes from Crucial Conversations by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and Emily Gregory, and Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. Check them out for more tips and strategies to make these kinds of conversations go well.

Hiring tips for new group leaders

Management & Leadership

I became familiar with the hiring process from the standpoint of an applicant, most recently as a newly recruited Assistant Professor. Despite this lived experience, being at the leading edge of hiring my own team is much less familiar. Here, I share some tips and tricks for new group leaders to consider when building their research team. My recent lessons learned.

Some of these steps can be done well ahead of your official start date. If you have the bandwidth to start hiring before you arrive, reach out to your department administrator about how to do so.

1) Writing a job advertisement: I recommend beginning by reflecting upon the role you hope the employee you hire will fill in your group. Will they have managerial or administrative responsibilities? Will they train others? Consider what technical, interpersonal, and organizational skills this person needs to possess to be successful in this role.

Next, write the job advertisement. Begin by reaching out to relevant division and human resources administrators as there may be specific requirements and language that must be included in the job ad. In addition to the requirements, I recommend providing information about your research program. Listing expectations for successful candidates will help prepare applicants for what is to come should they join your group.

2) Advertising your position: While your institution can advertise your open position through institutional job boards, professional websites (LinkedIn, Indeed, Academic Keys, etc.), and society job boards (ASCB, SACNAS, etc.), group leaders can also contribute to this process. If you have a strong social media presence, advertising on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook accounts may help bring attention to the opening. If not, you may have collaborators or trainees who can endorse the position on Twitter to help spread the word. Attend recruiting events to put a face to the name of their laboratory. These could be internal events (i.e., graduate program events and departmental poster sessions) or external events (i.e., society-sponsored online career events and networking hours at conferences).

3) Interviewing and preparation: Once you have decided whether an applicant is a good fit for the position, you can begin to interview candidates. The type of interview may vary depending on the position. For example, for a postdoctoral candidate, I first perform a phone “screener” interview (~15-20 minutes, conversational but led by a set of questions I wrote). If this phone screener interview is successful, then I host a full interview with the candidate and members of my lab. During this full interview, I ask the candidate to present a 30–40-minute virtual research presentation to my lab. However, because my lab was just me when I interviewed my first postdoctoral candidate, I invited members of the hematology community within my Division at Fred Hutch to join the seminar along with research colleagues/collaborators from other institutions whom I trust. It was SO helpful to have supportive and inquisitive scientists join the seminar! My colleagues asked thoughtful questions, helped show the candidate the diversity of research at the Center, and provided insight that helped me decide whether to make an offer to the candidate.

After the seminar, the applicant and I met for a more formal interview where we could speak in-depth about their research and discuss projects in my laboratory. I also created a list of interview questions that I used to guide this conversation. For a postdoc, these questions range from “What do you believe are your strengths as a scientist? What do you want to improve upon or learn during your next phase of training?” to “What traits do you want in a postdoctoral mentor? What style of mentoring do you prefer as a mentee?”. I use this list of questions to guide the interview while also making sure to leave time for the candidate to ask me questions. Using a list of interview questions to direct your one-on-one conversation helps ensure upon completion of the meeting, you have gathered the necessary information to inform your hiring decision.

Along these lines, I have a set of questions for all types of positions I plan to fill in my lab, including postdoctoral fellows, research technicians, undergraduate researchers, and graduate rotation students. Being able to take notes directly on this set of questions is also hugely helpful for me when I go back to review my notes.

Conclusions

As a new group leader, taking care to hire individuals who have the skills and qualities to be successful is incredibly important for your own success. Being thorough in creating a job advertisement and interviewing candidates can help ensure you make the best possible decision to support the success of your group.

Flight Tracker: Streamlined Career Development Tracking & Analysis

Management & Leadership / Networking & Collaboration / Productivity

Career development programs, no matter what stage of the academic career they cater to, face similar challenges. A wide range of information about scholars is available, from demographics, publications, and grant submissions to pilot funding, composition of mentor panel, training activities, and career milestones. Much of this data needs to be reported to funding agencies at regular intervals, but is scattered across different public and internal sources.

Enter Flight Tracker. This software allows users to track and understand their scholars’ careers longitudinally via automated data collection. Flight Tracker was developed at Vanderbilt and is now used by 55 institutions in a growing consortium. Programs across the breadth of academic career development use the program, from graduate programs and training grants to departments tracking tenure and promotion and research impact. Data lives securely in a FISMA- and FERPA-compliant REDCap database.

Watch the Flight Tracker intro video.

Flight Tracker collects the following:

  • Grants from NIH and Federal RePORTER (and optionally, from the home institution’s own grant management software);
  • Publications from PubMed;
  • Bibliometrics such as the Relative Citation Ratio and Altmetric;
  • Patents from the US Patent Office;
  • Demographics, education, honors and awards, job changes, and more via surveys of scholars;
  • Custom resource use such as attendance at workshops or online courses;
  • Anything else you can dream up.

Flight Tracker uses this data to produce visuals, dashboards, and metrics about your group of scholars. These are just a few of the tools available.

K2R Conversion Calculator

This tool shows the percentage of your scholars who have moved from career development award to research independence. You can slice and dice the group along lines such as gender, degree type, department, or type of career development award, as well as by date ranges. It includes up-to-the-minute data every time you access it.

Social Network Graphs

Visually demonstrate relationships between scholars, mentors, and more with chord diagrams. The example to the right is a graph of co-authorship relationships among a subset of career development awardees at Vanderbilt. Each square on the edge of the circle is a person and each line is a publication the connected people have co-authored. These diagrams can also be used to show connections between mentors and mentees, for example if you’d like to show that the participating faculty for your grant have been publishing or writing grants with the former trainees and the applicant pool. Chord diagrams can also help identify interdisciplinary grant teams.

Success Curves

Kaplan-Meier Success Curves provide a breakdown of programmatic elements contributing to your K-to-R conversion. In this example, the black line is the conversion ratio of Vanderbilt career development awardees since 2000, with about 70% converted by fifteen years after the start of their career development award. The orange and green lines show this conversion for subgroups who used key resources like internal study section. Use of these resources confers a 30% increase in successful conversion to independent funding, providing evidence to invest consistently in these programs and encourage participation.

Staff time for Flight Tracker upkeep is generally light. With a large number of scholars, initial effort may be high, but once over the hump, ongoing effort is minimal. For all career development awardees since 2000 at Vanderbilt, which totals approximately 550 scholars, it takes me:

  • 2-3 hours a month to assure grants are auto-categorized appropriately as Ks, Rs, etc.;
  • 3-4 hours a month to check new publications for problems like another John Smith’s paper being pulled into my John Smith’s profile;
  • 30 minutes a month to add new scholars or make updates to existing scholar profiles;
  • 2-4 hours per year to set up and monitor annual surveys.

Flight Tracker also saved considerable time with our recent CTSA renewal. With data in the system from surveys and external sources, the software can produce Tables 5 and 8 of the standard NIH reporting tables at the touch of a button. We were also able to include some of the visualizations above in our grant text, as well as quickly access metrics like K-to-R conversion, demographics, and more. Retrieving these numbers before took tedious manual calculation.

To get started with Flight Tracker, ask your local REDCap admin to enable the “Flight Tracker for Scholars External Module” on a REDCap project. The same institution can have multiple projects, e.g., each T32 and K12 can have its own Flight Tracker, or each doctoral program.

You’ll be able to put in a list of names, departments, and resources to start tracking data immediately for your project. After setup, Flight Tracker starts collecting data immediately. Once data is in the system, you can wrangle your initial set of grants and publications for accuracy.

Then, join the club. The Flight Tracker Consortium gets members up to speed and keeps everyone on track with two calls per month: A “newbie” call to help new users get started and a full consortium meeting with updates. Email Scott Pearson to receive invitations to these calls. You can also view our video archive for instructions, tips, and tricks for importing and working with scholar data.

We release updates to Flight Tracker regularly, many based on requests from consortium members. Establish a regular upgrade schedule with your REDCap admin.

We hope you’ll join us.

More Resources

Writing Your K or CDA Progress Report
Beginner’s Eye for the Science Guy (or Gal)
Get Your PMCIDs PDQ

Build a Great Team: Help Your Staff Help You

Management & Leadership

Whether you have a few hours a week of a lab tech paid for by your startup funds or you’ve been running your own lab for years, a high functioning team can help you achieve your research goals. Senior research staff often have greater insight into the details of executing research than PIs (they’re paid to attend to the details and free your time!), and at least one senior mentor says she learned everything practical she needed to know about doing research from her staff.

The advice below comes from senior lab staff at Vanderbilt working in a range of scientific areas from wet lab to clinical research to quantitative science.

Keep them in the loop: Have regular meetings with a running agenda. (Protip: Use something like a REDCap survey or Google doc to allow all members of the lab to add to the agenda.)

Include them in meetings outside the lab when appropriate. Defer to them when you’re not sure—they probably know your study protocol better than you.

Have them write down systems and processes. Especially as your lab grows, it will get harder to remember those passing requests to order this reagent or fill out this piece of paperwork. Having documented methods of doing things also helps with cross-training.

Encourage communication with other areas at your institution (e.g., if you expect a staff member to keep track of your funds, ask your budget officer to cc that staff member on emails).

Understand the difference between research staff and administrative assistant. A whiz at writing IRB applications may not be great at calendaring. Research staff may not have the access that admin staff do to an institutional credit card or account to purchase a book from Amazon.

Use your power and funds for good: Build up your staff by paying for or allowing time off for courses, workshops, or intensives that will make them a better employee. Pay for their membership in a relevant professional organization. Buy them useful books or software.

Include staff as authors when reasonable:

  • Did they write your IRB application and study protocol?
  • Did they enroll 100-1000s of participants?
  • Did they run experiments?
  • Did they clean data?
  • Would you have a paper to write without their contribution to the work?

On Teamwork

If you have multiple staff members, team members should be aware of what’s involved in their co-workers’ responsibilities. Emphasize cross-training and having predetermined backups for sick and vacation days.

A team with members who all understand each others’ work provides several benefits. Multiple connections between team members prevents siloing and allows for collaborative development and optimization of processes and tools. It also creates staff-to-staff mentoring opportunities. Backup coverage for days off is easier; no one feels guilty asking for coverage because it’s expected and not done as a favor. Critical functions will always be managed by trained, experienced staff even if multiple people are out.

Thanks to Sarah Jones, MPH, CCRP and Tonya Yarbrough, RN, for their contributions to this post.

More Resources

A Guide to Managing Research Teams

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

Simple Steps to Validating and Managing Others: A Bedtime Story

A Guide to Managing Research Teams

Management & Leadership

Research training programs rarely teach management of staff and trainees. Particularly for those of us who go on to careers in academic medicine, our ability to effectively manage a team is critical to the success of our career. Graduate school, fellowship, and postdoctoral training provide substantial opportunities to develop scientific expertise, but very little structured training in management and team building. I discovered very early on that staff and trainees can respond to the same type of management and oversight in different ways, which often left me at the mercy of how well a trainee could operate under my management style. With the help of my mentors and colleagues, I have developed a training infrastructure for my group that tries to balance highly structured onboarding with loosening oversight as a staff member or trainee demonstrates independence. Importantly, the system we have established leverages several modern web-based platforms that allow for more seamless oversight of trainee activities and progress, even when traveling (or working from home due to a pandemic), and reduces the flood of email chains that can often result in items slipping through the cracks. I hope you find this structure useful as you launch your own team.

Structured Training Agendas. Early on, it became quite clear that trainees would engage with training content in very individual ways, making it difficult to evaluate the degree to which a given trainee was prepared to operate independent of oversight. To address this challenge, my colleagues and I at the Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center have established highly structured training agendas that we use for all new staff and trainees that include boilerplate onboarding, individual training modules that are consistent across the center, and additional training modules that are specific to a staff member or trainee’s job description. After each training module, trainees are required to populate a short presentation that provides an overview of what they learned and they then “teach” the content to their primary mentor or supervisor. This provides a structured environment where the trainee can receive direct feedback on where they missed critical information, and begins to set expectations about work products, timeliness, and professionalism. These training agendas often require a few hours of commitment from the mentor or supervisor for the first few weeks, but we have found that the result is a more rapid transition to independence for high capacity trainees, and appropriate continuation of supervision for trainees who struggle a bit to get on their feet.

Developing the individual training modules can also be a bit of work, but we have found that the development of a module can actually be a fantastic training opportunity for new staff as well. Many of our current modules were developed during training by a new staff member, which provided them an opportunity to learn the material while also giving us an opportunity to provide feedback and help formulate the module in line with our expectations.

Evernote for Lab Notebooks. While lab notebooks are certainly the norm in many basic science laboratories, particularly when working in a wet lab, they are not as common in dry labs. We have implemented a system for lab notebooks in which I build an Evernote notebook for each staff or trainee that is owned by my user profile and shared with the trainee. Importantly, this means there is no risk of losing the notebook when the trainee moves on from the lab, and also provides an incredibly useful way to quickly check in on trainee progress without having to set up a meeting. Trainees’ notebooks include notes for training agenda items, and then eventually for individual projects and tasks that are assigned. At the top of the note the trainee records the location of all files (more details on the file structure below), details about the dataset being leveraged, and a short summary of the goals. Then, each project includes the down and dirty details of analyses, including bits of code, summary of results, basic figures, and any roadblocks. During mentorship meetings, I can just pull up the lab notebook, evaluate progress, and provide some feedback. Importantly, I can also easily see at any time exactly where a trainee is in terms of their progress, which means when I think to myself “I wonder where so-and-so is on Project A and why I haven’t received an update in a couple days?” I can easily hop on the note and check where things stand. This often results in either shooting a quick message or dropping by their desk to talk through an issue. It also allows me to do quick checks on progress very quickly outside of office hours by pulling up their notebooks on my phone.

At first, it took some time to get this off the ground because not all trainees fully embraced it. However, by being consistent in asking about the notebook, and having a few staff and trainees who could model strong notebooks, it has become part of our culture.    

Box for File Management. A major hurdle in providing feedback and helping to troubleshoot code is access to proper scripts and raw data files. Moreover, copying and moving raw data files can result in major data version issues that can easily be missed. We have established a lab Box directory where all raw files and all staff and trainee files exist. Most of our data analysis is performed in R, and the Box structure allows for easy cross-checking and troubleshooting by referring to centrally stored files. This means that I can easily hop on any script written in my group, run through it to find the broken piece, and troubleshoot if needed. It also means that manuscript “code” checks can be completed quickly without pushing data back and forth. Importantly, this also means that we only need to point to file locations in Evernote and never actually store any data within Evernote (which would not comply with the data use requirements for the datasets we often leverage in our work).

Asana for Project Management. The Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center is an interdisciplinary research center focusing on risk and resilience of Alzheimer’s disease. Many investigators within the center infrastructure have large-scale collaborations with faculty and staff biostatisticians that require constant communication and carefully documented progress reports. Asana is a web-based platform that allows project tasks, communication, and results to be tracked within a single space. Projects are built in Asana and individual tasks within that project (e.g., building an analytical dataset, performing primary analyses, performing sensitivity analyses, developing manuscript quality figures) can be assigned to team members. This has streamlined our collaborations and dramatically reduced confusion over missed emails or unwieldy email threads.

Slack for Communication. After a year of working remotely due to COVID-19 and onboarding several team members who have never met in person, our lab has found Slack to be an effective communication tool. The web-based messaging tool with a channel structure helps the team ask individual questions, share interesting publications to a central location, discuss shared hardware issues or computational bottlenecks, and celebrate wins among the team. Slack’s storage and search features also allow team members to locate and refer to past conversations, as needed.

Other programs and techniques can certainly be leveraged to help navigate the challenges of team management; these are just the ones that have worked for me! When you prepare to launch your team, I recommend taking the time to think about and organize your workflows so that your system can easily scale as the team grows!

More Resources

How to Manage People as a New Investigator

Go go go…read The Progress Principle

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

10 Tips for Supervising Research Interns

Management & Leadership

I recently came across this post on Twitter that said, “I’m mentoring an undergrad researcher for the first time! What advice would you give for how to be a good mentor?”

Supervising students is one of my favourite parts of academic life. The post made me think about how I supervise my interns and what tips I would give people that are new to it.

The first thing that came to mind was what I call the “3 rules of my lab.” I always tell these to students when they start in my lab. They reflect my approach to research, supervision and, I suppose, also reflect my personality.

The three rules in my lab:

  1. There are no stupid questions
  2. If you stuff up (break something, etc.), tell me. It’s okay, we all make mistakes; it’s part of learning.
  3. Don’t ever assume I know what I am doing. I could be wrong, so if you think so, say something

On a more serious note, these are the ten tips that I would give to people new to supervising undergraduate interns. Besides number 1, these are in no particular order.

  1. Be KIND. Be patient. Doing an internship is a great experience, but it can be overwhelming and scary.
  2. Ask the intern what they want out of the experience. Why are they doing the internship?
  3. Communicate expectations. I usually emphasize that I am always happy to help, but they are in charge of their own learning. The more you invest, the more you get out. Let the intern take ownership!
  4. Be honest about what you can and can’t provide and what is achievable within the time-frame they have.
  5. Encourage the intern to ask questions, lots of them.
  6. Encourage them to share their ideas and thoughts. To me, great research happens when people just think out aloud and bounce ideas off each other. For every 10 crazy and unfeasible ideas, there is a great one.
  7. Include the intern in the group. Have the intern attend group meetings, seminars etc. A large part of an internship is being part of a research team (if that is possible).
  8. Train the intern properly, then supervise but let the intern explore things themselves. They might break something, but that’s (mostly) ok. (AKA don’t give the intern that previous sample.)
  9. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. It might not be the data they wanted or expected, but they likely learnt something about their system. Welcome to research! Remind the intern that the main point of research is to ask questions, to experiment (in the literal sense of the word).
  10. Tell the intern that a large part of science is living with uncertainty. Many times, if they ask a question, you might not know the answer. Again, welcome to research. Let’s find out together, then guide the intern to the next experiment.

Finally, also be kind to yourself! Remember supervising is not something that we are explicitly taught as academics. You are learning as well. Don’t be shy about asking more senior mentors for advice.

More Resources

Microaffirmations

10 Takeaways for Managing Undergraduate Research Assistants

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

Are you a genius or a genius maker?

We’ve all had experience with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the ones around them and always need to be the smartest ones in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, lightbulbs go off over people’s heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them, especially now, when leaders are expected to do more with less.

In this engaging and highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman and management consultant Greg McKeown explore these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations–getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.

In analyzing data from more than 150 leaders, Wiseman and McKeown have identified five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers. These five disciplines are not based on innate talent; indeed, they are skills and practices that everyone can learn to use–even lifelong and recalcitrant Diminishers. Lively, real world case studies and practical tips and techniques bring to life each of these principles, showing you how to become a Multiplier too, whether you are a new or an experienced manager. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you could harness all the energy and intelligence around you. Multipliers will show you how.

Benjamin Tingey is leading the Edge Conversations virtual book club on Multipliers. It’s not too late to request to join this closed group discussion – the format is read-as-you-go: https://www.facebook.com/groups/edgeconversation/

Benjamin Tingey is an Innovation Manager with the Atrium Health Innovation Engine. In this role he champions the voice of the consumer in the designing of care experiences. He co-leads the community partnership and social innovation efforts with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, as well as Atrium Health’s corporate intelligence and environment scanning. He and his team apply human-centered design, disruptive innovation strategy, Jobs to Be Done theory, Lean Startup, and other demand-side innovation tools to transform Atrium Health into a more consumer-oriented system of health. Benjamin also curates the voices of his brilliant Innovation Engine teammates and other innovation thought leaders as host of A Sherpa’s Guide to Innovation podcast

Most importantly, Benjamin is the proud husband of Jackie and father to Ian, Spencer, Truman, and John. They fill his days with endless wonder, his nights with interrupted sleep, and his heart with gratitude.

Accommodating Employees with (Invisible) Disabilities

Management & Leadership

61 million people in the US—one in four—have a disability. Beyond stereotypes, “disability” can include conditions that can’t be observed directly. Consider these examples:

  • A staff member with depression is struggling to mobilize in the mornings and get to work by 8:00.
  • A postdoc with chronic pain wishes they could sit in the lab rather than standing most of the day.
  • An employee going through chemo needs specific times off work for appointments, and fights severe nausea at times when at work.
  • The fluorescent lights in your space trigger migraines for a student trainee.

Medications can have disabling effects like drowsiness or foggy thinking, which may not be immediately obvious.

At some point in your career, one of your staff or trainees will come to you requesting accommodations to do their job. Many of us are concerned that we won’t know how to handle it when someone comes to us needing help or that making accommodations might be expensive or difficult. The rules and requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act are actually straightforward, and provide a clear path to getting your employee what he or she needs.

The ADA mandates that employers engage in an interactive process with employees with known disabilities in order to provide reasonable accommodations. Important Note: This does not mean you are required to hire or retain certain people simply because they are disabled. Employees must be able to perform the essential functions of their job.1

Here’s how to recognize when someone needs help and how to work through an interactive process.

Recognizing an Accommodation Request

An accommodation request can come in several forms, none of which require the individual to say the words “disability” or “accommodation.” The staff member can:

  • Have obvious limitations, such as requiring a wheelchair or crutches.
  • Show a change in performance (tardiness, not finishing work assigned, not performing tasks as well as previously).
  • Request an accommodation, with or without using those words. They can request to avoid a repeated wrist motion when performing a task, mention having trouble with their memory or concentration due to a new medication (without then asking for accommodation), or show you a doctor’s note stating they shouldn’t lift more than 20 pounds.

Accommodation option: Employees with difficulty concentrating in an open office or lab environment may need to wear headphones to do their best work.

Any of these should cause you to start a conversation and determine the sort of restrictions or limitations the individual has, whether these limitations impede essential job functions, and how you/your institution can even the playing field with accommodations so the employee has the same opportunity to be successful at their job as an employee without a disability.

Keep the conversation to the whats and whens: What can/can’t the person do, what do they need, and what is the duration of the restrictions or limitations? Don’t ask for details you don’t need to help them, such as what disease or condition caused their impairment, what treatment they are receiving, or if they’re taking their medications. If the individual volunteers information or asks for advice, it’s okay to engage them, but don’t go there without an invitation.

Making Reasonable Accommodations

When working out reasonable accommodations, consider:

  • Is the problem activity essential to that job? Could it be given to another employee and another task substituted?
    • For example, your research assistant normally spends the day at a desk analyzing data, but four times a year you ask her to walk around a local event for three hours handing out flyers about your study. She says back pain prevents her from standing and walking for that long. Since the activity is so infrequent, can it be given to another member of your team while the employee needing accommodation takes something off that team member’s plate or has a different role?
  • If the activity is essential to the job, can it be done in a different way? For example:
    • Can the activity usually done standing be done sitting?
    • Could the time be shifted? (I.e., an employee can no longer drive and needs to access public transportation at a set schedule; a sleep disorder prevents working an early shift but would allow later start and end times.)
    • Would an assistive device allow the employee to do the activity? (The Job Accommodation Network has a dizzying list of assistive devices, including vendors and model numbers, broken down by type of limitation and disability.)
  • Are there multiple possible accommodations? If so, consider the employee’s preference, but the decision of which to use is ultimately the employer’s.

Accommodation option: Screen magnifiers may be useful assistive devices for people with low vision.

In a survey of 781 employers who made accommodations for disabled employees, the Job Accommodation Network found that 59% paid nothing for the accommodation, and of those who did have to spend, the median cost for the accommodation was $500.

Once you and your employee have settled on an accommodation, discuss when and how you will check in to make sure everything’s working as expected. Keep iterating as needed to ensure success.

People with a disability may not see it as a disability or may not feel comfortable coming forward to request an accommodation. If you see someone struggling—especially someone you mentor or manage—ask if they need help, or if something about the work environment could be changed to make it easier for them. Let them lead the ensuing discussion, but make clear that you are available to talk about accommodations if necessary.

1 “An individual with a disability must…be qualified to perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation, in order to be protected by the ADA. This means that the applicant or employee must:

  • satisfy your job requirements for educational background, employment experience, skills, licenses, and any other qualification standards that are job related; and
  • be able to perform those tasks that are essential to the job, with or without reasonable accommodation.” Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

Management & Leadership / Mentoring

One of the more challenging aspects of being a principal investigator (PI) and running a research lab is people management. Labs are complex environments comprising hourly technicians, salaried research scientists, undergraduates in their first lab, graduate students in training, and postdoctoral fellows working to launch independent careers, all performing different tasks, with different expectations, and regulated by different offices (Student Affairs, Graduate Affairs, Postdoctoral Affairs, and Human Resources). Complicating the matter further, as PIs, we are also responsible for providing career guidance, career development, and scientific training (in all its forms) for our lab members, which I broadly define as mentorship. Rectifying management and mentorship is not trivial, especially for the new PI. Here is how I, a junior faculty member, am approaching management and mentorship. As always these days, n=me.

The disclaimers: I am a newer assistant professor and a management novice. My career path has been a straight shot through undergrad, grad school, and a postdoc. I therefore find myself closer in age to most postdocs rather than other PIs. I believe myself to be a reasonable manager and mentor, but I have attended enough “how to be a good mentor” talks and known enough self-proclaimed “good mentors” to know there can be a large disconnect between appearance, perception from trainees, and reality. Over the years, I have also realized that the PI behaviors I thought were “cool” as a graduate student are not necessarily reflective of good mentorship and managerial practices, and in some instances, have been predatory. These are my attempts at balancing a supportive environment with professional boundaries.

Staff and trainees are not friends: For many of us, the biggest struggle is advocating and supporting our staff and trainees without wandering into the minefield of treating lab members like friends. As humans, we like to belong and generally want people to like us or think we are fun. Being a new PI without a large number of other young faculty around can also make it oh-so-easy to go into the lab and cultivate friendships with your subordinates. Yes, subordinates. If you sign their hours, control when they graduate, serve as a sponsor on their grants, or control their career outcome in any way, they are your subordinates. Yes, this word also bothers me. I consider myself a career guide and a trainer of scientists, not a manager. But a manager I am, and making important decisions that impact the well-being of the lab (such as firing, changing projects, deciding conference attendance, etc.), are much easier when I am seen by myself and my team as a boss and not a friend.

The lab is not a family: It can also be easy to fall into the “lab as family” trap. From the PI perspective, investment in trainee development and happiness while maintaining authority can feel like parenting. Again, I am a mentor and a manager, and not a parent. My authority is granted by the institution and my staff and trainees are adults. On a lab member level, the lab as a family mentality can give rise to some strongly gendered expectations (for example, “lab mom”) and complex dynamics that are much better left out of a work environment and research program.

Set expectations: On the advice of many wise new and established PIs, I have developed a fairly exhaustive lab manual that discusses what my roles and responsibilities are, as well as the roles of staff and trainees. Spelling out what my role is helps define what my staff and trainees can expect from me, both as a manager and a mentor. I am also of the scientific generation that used the Individual Development Plans (IDPs) throughout their postdoc, and although irritating to fill out, they are very useful for tracking progress. We review these annually to evaluate performance for every single lab member. These provide actual data for progress and are not reliant on my recollection of lab members’ accomplishments, struggles, and goals.

Meet regularly: This is an obvious point. Meet with your lab members. We do a weekly lab meeting where we cover data and papers and address any lab business. This is a mandatory meeting (excluding lab members out of town), during business hours, scheduled to accommodate all schedules, and attended by all lab members. I also meet with every lab member one-on-one once per week to discuss progress, evaluate concerns, and address any mentorship and managerial issues.

Promote inclusive lab events: Lab events are non-work focused events with the goal of fun, team-building activities. I am still learning to navigate these successfully, but ideal lab events should appeal to all lab members and avoid activities that are objectionable or unpleasant. These events should also not put undue burden on your staff and trainees. If you have parents in the group, appreciate that after-hours events might not be possible or might require a child-friendly environment. These events should cater to everyone and not just the lab members who share your interests. Finally, although everyone’s financial reality is different, it is likely that you as a PI have more disposable income than your trainees. Pay for the pizza or laser tag.

Support lab events independent of yourself, the PI: It is also important for your lab members to do fun things independent of you. If that means a 4pm coffee break for the lab or trivia night, these are all great. I buy coffee and occasional cookies for the break room, and I love to see lab members sitting around and discussing science and life.

Encourage outside interests for your lab members: Although we do have lab activities, I also strongly encourage interests outside of the lab and independent of other lab members as well. It is much easier to weather the ups and downs of research if the lab is not your only interest and lab members are not your only friends. This is true at all levels, and especially for PIs.

Promote growth: One of our biggest responsibilities as managers is promoting growth in our trainees and staff. This can include broadening the skill set of your technicians, working with trainees to write fellowship applications, or facilitating new collaborations between your postdocs and neighboring labs. I know my staff and trainees all have goals beyond my lab, and it is important for me, as a mentor, to facilitate their development. The IDPs are particularly useful in tracking progress towards these goals.

Accept that mentorship and management are challenging: Effective training and mentoring, along with personnel management, are one of the most challenging aspects of being a new PI, and it is also something in which we have the least experience. You will make mistakes. I certainly have. Read the management books, talk to your mentors, and be patient developing these skills.

After running a lab for two years, these are my thoughts on management and mentorship. Obviously, it is too early to assess outcomes. Whether my staff and trainees would agree I am avoiding the friends or lab as family traps, I cannot say. But I do know I am working towards keeping a professional distance while being invested in their happiness and success. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps an anecdote to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

A Guide to Managing Research Teams

Build a Great Team: Help Your Staff Help You

Strong Performance

10 Takeaways for Managing Undergraduate Research Assistants

Management & Leadership

Tiffany Woynaroski, PhD, studies speech development in children with autism.  She also mentors 14 undergrads as part of her research team.

The undergrads on Tiffany’s team are an integral part of her lab and involved in all aspects of her research.

Over dinner, she told me why she loves working with undergrads and how she manages such a large team.

10 Takeaways for Managing Undergraduate Research Assistants:

  1. Prioritize undergrads planning to attend graduate or medical school.
  2. Hire sophomores who are available for a few years.
  3. Pair new hires with experienced seniors to train in the lab.
  4. Learn each student’s interests and long-term objectives – tailor research training to these goals.
  5. Clarify expectations and responsibilities by having lab guidelines and student contracts.
  6. Optimize communication by distributing all team members’ contact information.
  7. Focus on keeping productivity high and continuously track tasks.
  8. Use a project management tool like Basecamp – it’s free for academics.
  9. Apply for undergraduate summer research awards to provide intensive paid lab experiences.
  10. Involve undergrads in all aspects of research, from study design to presentation of results.

Keep reading for a deep dive into working with undergrads.

Wait, how many undergrads do you have?

At the moment I have 14, as well as one undergraduate student who is presently en route here from another institution for a summer training experience! I had seven undergrads in my lab at the beginning of this academic year, but they were all seniors. I started preparing for their departure by hiring seven more undergrads. I paired each sophomore or junior with a senior so they could learn the ropes from a pro.

 

Where do you find your undergrads?

My undergraduates have come from a variety of programs. Many are Neuroscience majors, who are required to rotate in a laboratory/laboratories as a part of their program. I am also mentoring undergrads from a variety of other programs, including Psychology, Child Studies, Child Development, and Medicine, Health, and Society.

Some students work in the lab for formal research and/or course credit, some to complete independent studies, and some to carry out thesis projects.  Others have simply joined the lab on a volunteer basis for research experience and professional development.

Most of my students have sought out placements in the lab, so I have not had to work too hard to “find them.” I receive regular inquiries about laboratory positions from undergraduates, in particular from neuroscience students. Because the demand is so high, I am selective.  I prefer to take on students who are sophomores so I have several years to mentor them. I almost exclusively accept students who are planning to pursue graduate or medical school because they are more invested in, and more likely to apply what they learn from the research experience.

Do you pay your undergrads?

All of my students have started working in the lab on either a volunteer basis or unpaid for formal course credit. When students have completed “basic training” and exhausted their formal research credit, I often offer them paid positions.

A number of seasoned undergraduates work part-time in the lab during the academic year and full-time as paid research assistants over the summer break.

One of my former undergraduate research assistants is currently working as a full-time RA prior to attending medical school.  Other students have already inquired about moving into gap year positions.  It’s a lovely model because former research assistants are already so well-versed in the mission and operations of the lab. They are able to transition almost seamlessly into paid positions that offer a full-time placement and more intensive experience in the lab.  This is particularly helpful for the students who are unsure if they want to pursue an academic research versus clinical career.

What sort of tasks do undergrads perform?

It varies. It’s worthwhile to take time on the front end to learn about each student’s interests and long-term objectives. I try to tailor their research training/experience to their interests as much as possible.  All students complete standard training, for example in conducting human subjects research and in understanding issues relevant to working with families and children affected by neurodevelopmental disorders. Students are then assigned to observe more senior undergraduates in the lab so they get a broad sense of the range of biobehavioral approaches that are utilized in our research and the clinical populations that are involved across ongoing projects.

Over the course of the first semester, students generally identify what research project or method is of greatest interest to them, and their training subsequently focuses on that area.  The specific tasks that students complete thereafter are then quite diverse in nature.

Undergraduates have collectively been involved in all aspects of the research endeavor, from research design and task development/piloting to recruitment; from data collection, coding, entry, and analysis to dissemination of results in the peer-reviewed literature and at scientific meetings, as well as to the broader group of stakeholders and general public.

What problems arise with your lab team and how have you and handled them?

Fortunately, issues specific to undergraduate mentees have been fairly infrequent and easy to manage; this is surprising given the size of the team. The challenges are general HR problems such as last-minute call-offs/no-shows or failure to complete tasks in a timely manner, etc.  These difficulties are influenced by student-specific issues, such as balancing lab time with obligations relevant to other coursework or extracurricular activities and training/travel schedules for my student athletes.

I have learned to clarify expectations up front. All students now read and sign a Lab Guidelines document that delineates the lab mission, organizational structure (from PI, to research coordinators and graduate students, to senior undergraduate research assistants, to junior undergraduate research assistants), and specific student responsibilities.

To address communication breakdowns among team members, each semester I distribute contact information for all lab members and use the Basecamp app to communication with the group or selected individuals.

How do you keep track of so many people?

My lab grew so quickly that at one point it felt like I was herding cats! Now I use a project management tool called Basecamp. When a colleague suggested using this, I was quite hesitant about it. I thought it was another program to clog up my phone/desktop and eat up all my time.

Basecamp has changed the way I run my lab. Productivity, organization, and communication have gone way up. My favorite features for managing a large team of undergrads are:

  • Automatic check-ins to ping undergraduate research assistants daily with a prompt that asks, “Were you in the lab today?  If so, what did you work on?” This prompt links to a REDCap survey where I can easily track their hours.
  • To-do list feature to keep track of specific items to be completed in the lab.
  • Teams to easily target communication to specific groups of individuals on an as-needed basis.
  • Campfire tool for lab- or project-wide instant messaging. This is helpful to quickly survey everyone to determine who can jump in to assist with data collection that is derailing, or who knows where certain equipment/materials might be, etc.
  • Formal message boards and schedules to send reminders, share important information, and keep everyone apprised of upcoming events.
  • Files to keep electronic records of lab minutes, student schedules, and lab protocols.
  • Individual tasks to track due dates and status.

In case you can’t tell, I have now completely bought in to this whole Basecamp idea! As an added bonus, it is free for folks who work in academic settings.

What have your undergrads accomplished?

The students who have rotated in my lab have been very successful. Most of them have earned authorship on presentations at scientific meetings and/or publications for their contributions to the lab.

Many undergrads have secured awards to cover intensive training experiences in the laboratory. For example, Vanderbilt students have received Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Awards that allow them to remain in the laboratory full-time for the summer.  Undergraduate students from other universities, such as Oberlin and Mount Holyoke, have secured similar awards via their institutions to complete intensive training experiences in the lab.

Several undergraduate mentees have developed proposals and secured funding for their own research via internal mechanisms, such as VICTR, or external mechanisms, such as the Autism Science Foundation.

I’m really quite proud of my undergrads and their many accomplishments!

Do you have any advice for working with undergrads?

I encourage others to work with undergraduates!  The undergrads at Vanderbilt and peer schools are of the highest caliber.  They are not only bright and reliable students, but are also incredibly competent and self-motivated young scientists.

Undergrads bring loads of energy and enthusiasm—and lots of new questions and hypotheses—to the laboratory.  Having them in the lab has not only allowed me to invest in their personal and professional development, but has also undoubtedly furthered my own research agenda.

Working with undergraduates is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job and a key to the success of my laboratory to date.

More Resources

How to Manage People as a New Investigator

10 Tips for Supervising Research Interns

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship