Taking group leader responsibilities
With Dr Samantha Payne
Dr Samantha Payne is Assistant Professor in Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph (Canada). She has recently received funding from the Canada Stem Cell Network to examine how nerves modulate the response of organs and tissues to injury.
She has moved quickly from her Postdoc to her first PI role. Interestingly, she has returned to the university where she did her Bachelor's degree and Master.
https://ovc.uoguelph.ca/biomedical-sciences/people/faculty/Samantha-Payne
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
What flexibility may you need when moving between research roles?
What opportunities may you create when you are exposed to alternative perspectives and new ways of asking research questions (which you may have skipped if you got your first Postdoc choice)?
How are you preparing yourself to take up the responsibilities of managing people and leading a team?
Some reflections and questions inspired by my discussion with Samantha
Flexibility as resilience strategy
After a PhD in Chemical Engineering at The University of Toronto, Samantha moved to the USA to take a Postdoc at Tuft University to work on breast cancer. When the Postdoc job came up, she did not feel ready to apply, but her mentor encouraged her to apply. Her initial drive to go to university had actually been about becoming a veterinarian. The experience of research during a summer internship gave her the bug for research and she chose a different career direction. Her open approach of “let’s see what happens” continued when she went into a Postdoc that was quite different from her PhD work.
Her master research work on how gecko regenerate their tails was the starting point in her interest in regenerative medicine. She was interested in more applied research for her PhD, as she wanted to do research that was more translational- she wanted to see that her work could have clinical applications.
Choosing a Postdoc role in the context of a tight and competitive research job market means needing a level of flexibility in terms of the position you may get. So the Postdoc position was on a topic more related to cancer than regenerative medicine than she may have wanted, but she valued the experience that this gave her. Samantha explains that this gave her a new research perspective, some new techniques and exposures. She believes that this has served her as a new PI, as this gave her a taste for the need to be always on the lookout for new opportunities. This enhanced her openness for exploration.
Choosing what to do next meant going back to her roots in regenerative medicine and creating a research niche in this area.
Finding a research niche is one of the challenges faced by researchers aiming to transition post-Postdoc in their research career. Everyone has got its own way of making the shift to deciding their research niche. It can actually take quite some time. Quite a few academics I have interviewed admit that it was only a few years after their transition post-Postdoc that they felt they were really establishing their niche. One may feel that the first independent research funding will define this niche. This may not be the case for everyone.
Creating your research niche means asking yourself “who am I?”, honouring your different research experiences, and identifying the gaps “no one is actually looking at this”. Of course, this has to be done in the context of understanding the funding landscape.
There is little certainty in research careers so flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to pivot are all parts of the resilience needed in research life. Back up plans and multiple avenues need to be embedded in researchers’ approaches to navigating research careers. Being able to do this probably requires to hold on to things with more lightness and being prepared to revisit projects and funding applications as many times as needed to take you forward. The resilience needed is immense. It certainly takes a certain types of personality to have the courage to go on this journey of resilience.
o What is the one thing you have decided to hold on in navigating your research journey? What is the one is that is non-negotiable as you face the uncertainties of research careers?
o What are the things you are prepared to let go off, as they matter less?
o Who and what do you need to sustain your resilience on your research career path?
Assertiveness on you PI journey
The jump from Postdoc to PI is a huge transition. The adjustment about your role and responsibilities comes quite suddenly, but your own approach to working and how you feel about your new role may only shift quite slowly. When I asked Samantha about her assertiveness as a new PI, she described that it took her a bit of time to build her assertive voice.
Self-care as a PI is probably not the advice that heads of department will provide to new academics, but Samantha said that learning to become your “own cheerleader” was important to her. Even though you may not start your PI journey as a very assertive research group leader, being kind to yourself when you are not as assertive as you would want to be was part of her own process of transition.
Samantha suggests paying attention to how other more experienced research leaders demonstrate their own assertiveness and modelling behaviours of research leaders you admire for their approach.
One of the big step in becoming a PI has been about getting the responsibility for how other people may succeed. Becoming the “boss” and being the boss means that your PhD students and Postdocs may be looking for guidance from you. You may feel quite out of your depth early on. Moving away from thinking that you should have all the answers to empowering your researchers to build confidence in discovering their own answers is a critical transition.
The people’s side of the PI transition is probably the hardest part of this career step. How do you strike a balance in the way you manage others when you are learning to become a supportive PI. For Samantha, setting up her lab in the middle of the Covid pandemic was probably not the start she had wished for!
What has Samantha learned during these first couple of years as a new PI?
o Your team member may want to do things differently than how you would want them to be done, so managing a middle way to get things done is likely to be needed. Samantha talks about using a “benefit of the doubt approach” as a starting point when working with others.
o Seek out alternative people management perspectives from anyone in your network, whether family or friends, all these alternative and diverse perspectives may bring a lot of insights into how you may want to manage your own research group.
o Recognise your own weaknesses. For example, if a particular conversation feels quite challenging and triggering, ensuring you go well prepared to have this important conversation may seems obvious. Still how many of us end up messing these important interactions because we have not thought through the clarity of our message for the interaction. Being ready to communicate with clarity is a cornerstone of assertive conversations.
o If you have a good line manager or head of department, these senior mentors have the potential to support you in buffering you from tasks and opportunities. In trying to build your academic and professional profile, it could be so easy to take on all the opportunities that come your way. You need to become ruthless and choose carefully the opportunities you need for your probation or promotion. So asking yourself or asking a mentor, whether an opportunity is worth taking can be an important reflection process to take steps towards creating boundaries to protect you from overwork.
“A lot of my training has been in the technical aspect of things. And then suddenly you’re not doing those things anymore. You’re not running experiments and now you’re, really just, you know, 99% or 90% of the time managing people, so yeah, it was for sure, a huge adjustment”
