Believing in your own expertise and value
With Dr Zoe Hewitt
We don’t always know the triggers that shift our interest towards a topic or another. For Zoe, an article in Nature on stem cells was one of the triggers for her lifelong interest in regenerative medicine. So many conversations and small events construct our career path. Two important elements in Zoe’s career direction were the encouragements she received from a tutor to apply for a PhD at the prestigious Roslin Institute and the unfortunate fall through of the funding she was hoping to get for a Postdoc position in Australia.
Needing a job after the mess up of the Australian funding, she applied for a Postdoc position at The University of Sheffield. Even though she did not get the job, she started conversations with another academic from the same institution, who offered her a position to set up a “clean room” (a research lab to grow human stem cells). Her role as a facilities manager started on a 6-month contract and she ended up remaining in the post for many years.
She was told “here is a clean room, make it work”. Nearly straight out of her PhD, she suddenly became a quality and facilities manager, and a team leader. This was a sudden transition to a mid-level manager role without having had the usual Postdoc experience. She became later the manager of a UK-wide stem cell research network (UKRMP).
In this role, she manages how the PIs on the network engage with each other and across various research projects; she also supports the executive team to deliver the projects. She works with many stem cell research hubs across the UK.
About Zoe
Zoe is project manager for one of the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform Hubs. This is a large collaborative translational project involving 4 partner Universities and Research Institutions from around the UK. Zoe is also exploring the world of consultancy through setting up the company Regenerative Cell Therapy Consulting (RegenCTC) Limited of which she is the CEO and founder. This consultancy aims to use the expertise of experts in regenerative stem cell medicine.
https://www.regenctc.com/
https://www.ukrmp.org.uk/hubs/pluripotent-stem-cells-and-engineered-cells/
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
Are the assumptions held by others shaping your exploration of career directions?
Could you shift to believing in your own value and not waste time expecting the validation of others?
Are you embracing unusual opportunities to build your leadership?
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion
How assumptions held by others can shape our own career direction
One of the biggest challenges for Zoe has been that her contributions have not necessarily been recognised through publication outputs. The types of activities she undertook, whilst critical for the research to happen, did not automatically lead to the papers that she may have wished for. Whilst she could have moved to industry, the academic culture of denigrating industry was a barrier to believing that industry was an option. She described that she has felt funnelled down this career path because she was good at was she was doing.
It is easy to let ourselves influence by what people around us say about a particular type of role, a certain institution or even a whole professional sector. Zoe shares that the perception she may have had at some point in her career about working within industry came from the narrative around her from the academics she was working with. This was probably highly influential in limiting her exploration of the types of positions she might have be able to get with her skills in this sector. This type of narrative often limits how we may be prepared to have a go at trying various roles. I am keen to challenge you to consider how the narratives of others is a barrier to your own explorations.
o How are you letting yourself influenced by the views/ assumptions others have about a type of role/ institution/ professional sector?
o Is this narrative preventing you from exploring for yourself whether an option/ an opportunity is something that could work for you?
o What would it mean to you to go against the grain of the career narratives around you?
Is anyone telling you that you are great at what you do?
Zoe admits that for a long time, she did not have a network of mentors. She lacked a sense of the worth of her professional skills. She says that you are not really told that you are valued. Because of the undefined type of position she had, she continued to be referred to as a Postdoc, although she had managed complex projects and facilities. Not being told you are valued and not being told that you are great at something impact how you feel yourself about your worth.
Being always busy and learning to do her job from scratch meant that Zoe had little headspace to define her own career direction. She found herself in a situation of not seeking help to address her career direction but also not knowing where to get help. Zoe reflects that her mistake may have been to expect others to tell her what to do with her career. She now knows that making such assumption can not work. No one is going to tell you what you should do with your career. You are the one who needs to drive it
o Can you practice building your self worth through focusing on the evidence and impact of what you do, instead of expecting positive reinforcement that may never come?
o Can you be the one who will support building confidence in others through the provision of regular positive feedback?
o What is the smallest action you could take to nudge your career towards a new step?
When you don’t know who your mentor could be
Zoe continues to care deeply about the science. In some ways, she has found herself in her role without really planning it. Jumping into setting up the clean room was a way to carry on doing science not knowing what the role would entail, nor what a career as a research manager could look like.
Zoe describes that we are often conditioned with the image of what a normal academic career looks like. The role that she has had does not fit neatly in one category or another (e.g., academic, research, admin, technical) within what the institution understands of research roles. Having this type of role could represent a challenge when it comes to promotion as you do not fit a neat little box that the institution understands well; you are kind of squeezed in between research and management roles. Believing in your own skills is critical even if the institution does not! Getting yourself promoted can be a real headache as promotion panels may not know how to handle your case.
Over the years, Zoe built for herself a role that was at the interface between academic, postdoc, managerial. Often this type of role in universities do not have a defined career progression. There is not always a senior role to the role you play. What would a promotion case look like for this type of role can be difficult to articulate. This means that often research professional in such roles are unclear about where to look for role models and professional mentors. This means that we may resist seeking a mentor because we feel that no one really understand our role. I have certainly made this mistake myself. Maybe this stems from a misconception of what may happen in a mentoring relationship. The mentor does not have to be someone who has the same professional experience. It could simply be someone who is on a different type of professional pathway but has the maturity to get you to reflect on where you are in your career. They are not there to tell you what to do next. They can simply create the thinking space you need to initiate the reflection process that you may find difficult to have on your own. Seeking mentors early on should be something we encourage any new employee to consider. It would allow individuals to reflect deeply throughout their career instead of waiting many years and only at the point of necessary transition (e.g. end of contracts!).
Zoe is now in a period of transition, considering her career options. She has now several mentors from different professional backgrounds who can help her reflect on steps and opportunities to take forward.
o What are you doing waiting to get a mentor…go and get one!
o You don’t need to find the perfect mentor, just one for now.
o Who could be the strangest mentor you could get? They may really challenge your thinking!
When the unexpected builds your leadership
Accessing mentors to create a space of reflection about our career is an incredible powerful process. It was from conversations with a mentor she eventually got, that she realised how she may be able to build her leadership through committee works. She eventually put herself forward for a role on an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee in her department. A set of circumstances in the department meant that she joined the EDI committee and ended up chairing it. This role opened the door to sitting on the departmental executive board. Her role on the committee was recognised through a Vice Chancellor award recognising her contribution towards EDI issues.
Her leadership has been shaped by the type of position she has had. As a facilities manager, research network manager or chair of a university committee, most of your leadership is through influence. She feels that she has been able to subtly influence the thinking of her academic colleagues. She has done this through engagement, conversations, consultations, and working groups. Only through talking, listening, and voicing that you do not have the answers when you engage with others, can such influence impact change.
o Have you explored new opportunities to build your leadership beyond your current set of responsibilities?
o What’s your own approach to influence others when you are not line managing?
o What could you improve in the way you engage others to get onboard with your ideas?
“you can’t make people want to change, but you can just subtly influence their thinking by hearing different voices”
