Leading with empathy
With Dr Nika Shakiba
Dr. Nika Shakiba started her research career because of her excitement for discovery and being a scientific explorer. What truly motivates her at the current stage of her career is her mentoring role with students and junior researchers. Whether it is through the impact she may be making on her peers or on early career researchers, her values, motivation, and identity have become intertwined with her role as a mentor. “Paying forward” is the term she uses when describing her current role as a mentor.
As a Postdoc, she made a commitment to herself that she would have a short Postdoc period and would transition to another role within a 2 year period. She shared this goal with her PI and engaged in “next step” thinking from the start of her Postdoc. Even though she started her research group in the middle of the pandemic, her proactivity in building her visibility has been part of easing the recruitment of her team.
Do you want to know more about Dr Nika Shakiba:
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking:
· How your outreach and public engagement activities may become a core commitment in your research life?
· What is your own way of getting direct and immediate positive feedback in your research life?
· Why saying aloud your goals and sharing with others your aspiration is part of creating support and personal commitment to action?
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Nika
Growing your network organically
All professionals are told to grow their network, whether people are working in research or anywhere else. It is one of the cornerstones for building professional opportunities. Building our network is something that does not happen on its own. We need to be proactive and invest some time. it is about building relationships. We do not control how relationships develop. The only thing we can do is take the time to interact, exchange, show interest and curiosity, and listen.
For Nika, the building of her network was in part linked to some of her public engagement activities. Her desire to communicate to others about her research interests and science in general was something that fuelled her with energy. It brought a feeling of immediate positive feedback. It felt fulfilling in a very tangible and immediate manner. She probably did not expect that her public engagement work would be part of building her peer network.
o What are the activities that energise you that could become part of your networking rountine?
o Who do you love interacting with? Can you create more chances for these interactions to happen?
o What is needed for you to shift your mindset about networking, so that it becomes something about activities that you really care about?
Choosing which opportunities to take and which ones to leave
As a new research leader building your profile and visibility, deciding what to choose among the opportunities that come your way, or the opportunities you are creating for yourself can be a bit of a minefield. Some researchers I have interviewed say that early on they took everything on, not really discriminating among the options. There is both a trill in throwing yourselves in lots of new things and at the same time a risk of overwhelm.
Nika admits that she was not particularly strategic early on, when she needed to decide which opportunities to take, but that somehow it has worked out for her.
In the way she is now looking at how researchers may be more strategic in choosing opportunities, she suggest they ask themselves:
o What am I passionate about?
o What brings me energy?
In her case, the outreach and public engagement work created that sense of purpose and energy. Outreach work was reminding her of what she was excited about. It created a form of mental exercise that allowed her to touch base with the core purpose of what motivated her. It was helping her to keep going.
There were many secondary impacts from her public engagement activities:
· It raised her visibility. She became known for being an active science communicator
· It provided her a platform to experiment with different research storytelling, building her skills in research communication
· It increased her confidence in talking about her research
Your brand as a research leader
The term “brand” is not something you often hear research leaders use when speaking about themselves. It is clear from the discussion with Nika that the idea of brand is an important concept that she has used in thinking about how she and her work could be perceived to enhanced her visibility.
We know that doing good work is not enough…others need to see the good work we do. We also need to learn to talk about the impact of the work we do. We may think about this when we are writing a CV, but what about thinking about it much more often.
Nika has built her brand in different ways:
Nika has put a lot of efforts in developing a personal website that promotes her research and work ethos. The visibility created through the site was a contributing factor in getting students to contact her and enquire about working with her.
Her brand is also her enthusiasm and energy in all her activities (e.g. giving a departmental talk for an interview, presenting for a panel or outreach event).
All of these can contribute to motivating others to want to work with you. You brand is created through how others experience your way of working and thinking.
Setting up your first lab in a pandemic
The research leaders who have transitioned to PI role since the start of the Covid pandemic have certainly experienced something quite unusual. They all deserve a medal! Nika is one of these PIs, whose first research group was established right in the middle of the covid restrictions. It must has taken tremendous efforts to get students motivated and energised in starting their projects, whilst activities on campus were restricted and normal social life had not resumed.
Being explicit about the work ethos in her lab has been an important part of what Nika has set up in her group. She mentions the development of a lab manual that includes the lab mission, values, how mistakes are handled but also a section on mental health.
Maybe such an usual start has created a path to more open and honest conversations in the research environment. Up until now, few research leaders may have had the vulnerability to really open up about their own feelings of anxiety. The exceptional context of Covid may have facilitated more open conversations about mental health in a way we have not experienced before.
Nika says that she has been sharing with her own students how she has herself dealt with anxiety, during the course of her research career. Having PIs being much more open to these conversations with their team is part of normalising how people may feel in the research environment.
Nika describe leading her team through empathy. This means not hiding from the realities of the complexities of your team members’ lives. A lot may be going on for them that you are unaware of and that they may not want to share. Keeping this reality in the front of your mind, can help you as a research leader engage with more empathy. Simply asking your team members “How is everything else?” as a way of showing that you are seeing them as a whole person can make a big difference in how people are able to engage with you.
The way Nika is developing her leadership skills has been to pay attention to what other research leaders are doing and trying to emulate leaders who inspire her. For example, something that she admires is someone who is bold with ideas.
o What would being bold with ideas look like for you?
o What are the risks you are prepared to take in your leadership with research ideas?
o What is stopping you from embracing boldness in your research life?
We so often talk about confidence, the development of confidence or the lack of confidence. What needs to happen for research leaders to feel confident in their approach to leading their teams? For Nika, confidence development has been about seeing her team as having the research power to make things happen. She wanted her group to have less of a hierarchical structure that maybe others have in their group. She has aimed to having her trainee step into their own research leadership shoes, through building their own collaborations, taking ideas in different directions or learning to juggling many different projects.
“I’ve realized more and more that what gives me joy is the people. The people that I’m working with, the people that have influenced me, the people that I have a chance to influence and to help them find their trajectory and achieve their goals.”
