In addition to teaching communication, team building, and leadership skills to YSM trainees and faculty, I spend a great deal of my time delivering leadership development coaching to emerging and established leaders in healthcare and academic medicine.
Sometimes, when I am coaching a Principal Investigator in charge of overseeing a program of research, I hear concerns raised with regard to reduced research productivity within the research lab. This complaint was especially pronounced earlier on in the pandemic, when labs were working on restricted hours, with a restricted number of personnel, and lines of communication among team members were limited mostly to the virtual realm.
For me, this is a hot-button complaint because although it may at first seem that the “problem” lands squarely with a given lab member, it often turns out that reduced research productivity instead reflects something gone awry on the interpersonal or systemic level of the lab.
By definition, research labs are team-based environments in which people are working interdependently. Prior studies by Amy Edmondson and others have shown that clear communication, building commitment and trust, and sharing feedback are bedrock ingredients for effective teaming and interpersonal relating.
Given this, when I hear about reduced research productivity, my first line of inquiry tends to focus not on productivity, but on the interpersonal processes undergirding the team’s work. As we discuss these dynamics, the PI and I will inadvertently find ourselves exploring how effectively the principles of conscious accountability are – or are not – being practiced. Some questions I often ask are:
My hope is that after our conversation, the PI will feel empowered to employ the tenets of conscious accountability with their team, elevating everyone to consider what they want to get done, how they can best work with one another to achieve these outcomes, and how everyone can take responsibility for their collective process and results.
Daryn David
- How well has the PI clarified expectations to the team from the get-go and ensured that postdocs and research assistants really know what they should be doing?
- From the trainees’ perspective, how much safety is there to ask questions or admit to having made a mistake?
- Is there an open-hearted conversation about what occurred and how this could be fixed going forward, or does communication seem to shut down at that point?
We further explore what mechanisms are in place – or could be – for providing feedback to one another, and how much opportunity there is to try something again, even if someone did not succeed the first time around. Even when things are going smoothly, to what degree does the team collectively review work done and deliberate on how everyone is engaging with one another?
My aim in asking these questions is not just to help solve the immediate problem of reduced productivity, but to provide a model of inquiry and activity that can be put into practice time and again.
Said another way, my hope is that after our conversation, the PI will feel empowered to employ the tenets of conscious accountability with their team, elevating everyone to consider what they want to get done, how they can best work with one another to achieve these outcomes, and how everyone can take responsibility for their collective process and results.