Enthusiasm as a competitive advantage
With Prof. Stéphane Bordas
Stéphane’s transition to a Professorship was fast considering he obtained it just 3 years after his first lectureship. Stéphane is keen to mention the critical role of several mentors, but also of key team members in his research transition. His drive, energy and competitive nature are felt throughout our discussion. Pushing himself to do the hard stuff is core to his approach in navigating his research life.
About Stéphane
Prof. Stéphane Bordas is an academic at the University of Luxembourg who has had a globe-trotter career, starting in France before working in the USA, Switzerland, Scotland, Wales and more recently Luxembourg. His research area is in Computational Mechanics.
Get in touch with Stéphane:
https://wwwfr.uni.lu/recherche/fstm/doe/members/stephane_bordas
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
How the serendipity of meeting people shapes your next career steps?
Why your approach to failure impacts your research resilience?
What you may need to accept to do “a little bit less”well to create the thinking space to do the hard and strategic stuff of your research?
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Stéphane
How are you building trust with people in your research network?
Stéphane commented that the academic system is based on trust. Trust is built across many practices we have in research from publications or collaborations to recruitment. When people are enthused by us as researchers, peers and collaborators, the trust they will build in our ideas, contributions and partnership is the crux to creating opportunities.
For Stéphane, the trust built with others is what contributed colleagues to make him aware of a job opportunity in Wales, which led him to obtain his Professorship. He may not have been looking for positions at the time as he was already a lecturer in Glasgow, but colleagues let him know that positions would be opening.
His move to Luxembourg is not dissimilar as research friends encouraged him to consider this new country as an excellent place to take his ERC fellowship. He could have been contempt to stay where he was. The trust of others in what he could bring motivated them to make him aware of opportunities.
o What are you actively doing to foster trust in your expertise, your contribution and academic citizenship, so that colleagues will encourage you to apply for your next academic step?
o How are you a supportive mentor yourself to other more junior colleagues who you trust and who may need your help and insights in becoming aware of new opportunities?
o Who we trust is something that can be loaded with implicit biases. Can you raise your own self-awareness of your way of feeling trustful towards others? Are some biases at play in how you build trust with colleagues? Could this stop you from developing trust to the peers/ colleagues/ collaborators who deserve your trust?
Letting our intuition play its role
When we think about the research environment, intuition is probably not the first word that comes into our mind. We are more likely to think about rigour, objective, systematic or strategic ways of making decisions. The idea of using intuition in making decisions related to our career should not be dismissed.
Stéphane mentions that for one of his career transitions, the feeling he had when he met people in the department was critical in helping him decide to move his family to a new country.
The personal cost of moving institutions and countries multiple times when navigating research career is something we limit ourselves from talking about. In many of my coaching conversations, I have heard how research leaders can be torn in deciding whether to move their family and spouse to new locations to take up another academic positions. Each move creates a new learning curve for research leaders and their families.
Knowing when an academic career move will be the right decision or not, is unpredictable, but learning to listen to your gut feeling and instinct in deciding whether to join a department or not, is as good as any strategic decision process.
I am no expert in the concept of intuition! My own way of thinking about intuition is that it is a mechanism anchored in the self-awareness of our own values and motivation. We mostly do know how we want to live our lives and careers. Our intuition becomes hidden from us when the stories we have in our head about what we should be doing (expectations of others) becomes louder than the narrative of what we want (how we want to interact with others or the type of environment that we know we can thrive in).
When deciding on a move, you could ask yourself:
o Am I excited about the new colleagues I will get?
o How do I really feel about this next role/ next location/ next institution?
o What is my intuition telling me about this new opportunity?
What works for me
You can hear in the interview with Stéphane that he is someone for whom competition has been important in his career. He is someone driven to do the hard stuff. He is someone who has thrived on trying to do things that were hard and out of his comfort zone. His drive has been to excel, to make things happen.
As a research leader, Stéphane feels himself completely energised by someone who makes him dream when it comes to research. It builds his enthusiasm, motivation, and desire to want to contribute. In challenging research situations, he asks himself what his mentors would think about it. Knowing your own principles and values, which means knowing what is important to you, is the driver to keep track of how to react in challenging contexts and figuring out what is the right course of action for yourself.
When I asked Stéphane about his approach to being resilient as a research leader, he talks about becoming comfortable with failure in the sense of accepting failure as an opportunity to learn, but not as an option to become complacent with our efforts. When things don’t work out, resilience is not just about moving on the next thing. It is about figuring out what needs to be done differently. He mentions that with grant applications, because the success rate is so low, research leaders after so many rounds of unsuccessful applications may find themselves dejected in putting the effort and the energy needed to apply for the next round.
o What are the things that work for you to get motivated by others?
o What is your own strategy to bounce back when things don’t work out?
o Can you pay attention on offering your own approach/ perspective about life in research, as just your own best way of dealing with things and not the way (letting others find what works for them)?
“ ability to make people dream”
