Build your career with strategy

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today, I'm talking about growing your research skills with strategy. Yes, I'm talking about growing your research skills with strategy, and the emphasis today is on strategy. So when I started at the end of my fellowship to look for jobs, I said, I want to do research.

1:27 And I was going about from institution to institution, and everywhere I went, people would say, oh, it is so hard for clinicians these days. Nobody can make it. The funding lines are so low. This is so hard. Why would anybody even bother? I remember the whole time I kept thinking, I was like, but this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do. And I went to a place where the scientists, the clinicians, were doing research. They were scientists. And I remember thinking, I was like, okay. And I looked around, there were so many people who were doing research and succeeding despite the low funding lines, despite how hard it is for clinicians. So they were succeeding. I remember thinking, if these people are succeeding, there must be strategy involved.

2:10 There must be strategy. People don't succeed by accident, and this may be the whole take-home message of today's talk. Nobody succeeds by accident. People succeed intentionally and strategically. They use intentionality to develop strategy. Okay. So for whatever reason, I used to look around and see people who were successful, and I'd be like, he is so lucky. Well, I would think, oh, he's hardworking. But I have to tell you that luck and hard work are not enough because, hey, you've got plenty of it, and you still have a ways to go. I've got plenty of it, and I still have a ways to go. But what you want is strategy, because strategy allows you to leverage both luck and hard work to actually move forward, because some hard work just allows you to spin in circles.

3:02 For many of us clinicians who don't have research training, that's what we're doing. We're working very hard. We have these big questions, but we just don't know how to stop spinning our wheels. Strategy helps you move forward. So I want to talk to you about seven strategic moves that you can make to build skill in research even as you're starting out as a clinician. Seven strategies to build skill. Number one. Number one strategy is to develop a strategic plan. Yes, number one strategy is strategy. But you got to have a plan, and it's not just a plan to say, oh, I have a manuscript to write, or yeah, there are three manuscripts I have to write.

3:42 It's great, but is it written down? And is there a goal as far as what month of the year of your next few months that actually happens? You can be like, wait, what do you mean? I know I have three manuscripts to write by the end of the year. I don't need to write it down or create a plan. But here's the thing. I had a great talk with one of my clients recently, and I asked, what are all the goals you're trying to accomplish by the end of the year? And they listed out their goals for me. And I said, great, let's now look at your calendar and let's see how much time you actually have to fulfill these goals. And so we look at the calendar and it turns out, oh, there is one week gone for this conference. Okay, great. Oh, two weeks gone for consult service.

4:24 Okay, oh, there's the other two weeks gone for consult service. And oh, of course, Christmas vacation. Let's take that out. Oh, Thanksgiving, though. And you know what? By the time we look at the schedule and look at the commitments and the actual time that's left, it was 27 days, not very many days. But here's the key. Now we were very clear about how much time they had available to be able to move work forward. That's strategic planning. It's not just saying in the next three months, this is what I want to accomplish. And saying, now let's take a hard look at our calendar and see where is that work going to happen?

5:06 And being very realistic and saying, what's the reality? That I am going to finish this big grant while I'm on vacation. Now if you didn't do any work and you get to the deadline and your vacation comes two weeks before the deadline, you might be spending a lot of your vacation doing the grant. But that means that's not strategic planning. Strategic planning is to say, this vacation is coming up, therefore we are not going to let this vacation be swallowed up by the grant and we work up to the deadline. Strategic planning is not just defining what big goals you have, but also being very clear about where in your schedule these goals fit.

5:49 Develop a strategic plan. Everybody who succeeds in research has a strategic plan. They may not call it a strategic plan. I've heard it called many different things. I've heard it called an individualized development plan. I've heard it called an IPDP. I don't even know what the P is. But there are just so many names. But at the end of the day, it is a written list of goals that you want to accomplish. Now here's the thing. This is my personal strategy. When I'm writing my goals, I don't write goals that are not related to my research goals. I mean, I do actually, I take that back. I write goals that are related to my personal well-being. So for example, I have a certain number of exercise minutes that I want to accomplish on a weekly basis, a certain goal that I'm looking for in terms of health.

6:37 And I have those goals. And so they are part of my strategic plan. But what I want to emphasize is you want to put on your strategic plan the things that have no accountability. So don't put the conference presentation because you know what? If you don't do the conference presentation, wow, you're going to get into trouble. In fact, to be honest, the kind of person you are, you're not going to be the person who's not going to do the conference presentation. You're going to pull the all-nighter to get it in. So you could put on your strategic plan, but it's one of those things that you're going to do. The deadline will force you or you'll be embarrassed. And you don't want that. And so you don't have to put that on your strategic plan. But what you should put on the strategic plan is the manuscript that has no deadline.

7:17 And you know what? Five years from now, you still haven't written it. No one's asking you questions. Well, your mentor, your research mentor might be mad, but you know, for the most part, no one's bugging you about it. Those are the kinds of things you want to put on your strategic plan so that you develop a plan to actually do the things that nobody might ask you about. So number one strategy to succeeding as a researcher is developing a strategic plan that's written and that's in a place where you can see it regularly. All right. Number two is to develop the habit of planning your week weekly, every week without fail. Now you might be on vacation and you're like, I don't want to plan my vacation week. I would say consider that it may be that your plan for your vacation week on a weekly and a weekly plan is like, okay, day one, read a book, right?

8:07 You always have a plan. Even when it's not explicit, what you want to do is make explicit your plan. Now that's just vacation because I was trying to explain the fact that you should do it all the time, but let's talk about your regular work week. You're in clinic on Tuesday, you're wrapping up clinic on Wednesday and all of a sudden you're fielding calls on Wednesday and you guys at the end of the week, you're like, wait a minute, oh, I didn't get any writing done because on Monday I started the project, but I was like, well, I'll do it Tuesday. And then everything got away with me. Now it's Friday. I haven't gotten any, made any progress. But when you plan your week, you look at Monday to Friday, because we're not including the weekends because you're getting healthy and you're not doing work over the weekends anymore.

8:48 You look at Monday to Friday and you say, okay, well, let me clinic on Tuesday. How about instead of taking all day Monday to prep my notes and all day Wednesday to finish writing the notes, how about I take Monday in the morning before I start prepping my notes, how about I take an hour and a half for writing and in that hour and a half, this is what I'm going to accomplish. Wow. You've planned your Monday by the end of Monday, guess what's happening? You're going to do that plan because you're a good executor. You look back and say, Monday, I nailed it. Great. Then you're going to look forward and you're going to say Tuesday, I have clinic on Tuesday. I'm not going to be able to get much done, but clinic starts at 1030. I can take 30 minutes and finish that introduction that I started last week.

9:31 I wrote an outline, how about I make the draft and in those 30 minutes before the clinic patients start knocking, you've gone ahead and you've finished that intro. You now made the most out of that window before your clinic because you plan to do it. Now Tuesday is like, not only did I finish my clinic, I also accomplished what I needed to do in my research and writing. Do you see how planning your week can help you move forward? It helps you move forward with intentionality. It's like money. If you don't tell it what to do, it just disappears and does its own thing and you're like, where did all the money go? That's exactly what happens with time.

10:12 I don't even have to tell you, but when you tell time what it will do for you, then you are more likely to be able to get what you need out of that time window. Planning your week is a must. It is an important productivity hack. It's not only limited to clinician scientists. So many people have recognized the importance of planning the week, you should do it too. When I'm talking about planning, there are things on your calendar that are immovable. Put your work, put your writing on the calendar, put your writing meetings on the calendar. You have an hour and a half that you want to devote to your writing.

10:52 It should be on your calendar. Nobody should be able to go in and schedule. When you go in and you plan the week on Friday for the next week, or you start on Monday and plan for the week, then when people are like, hey, I have this urgent meeting that I need to pull you in at, on you're like, oh, I'm looking at my schedule and there's no room. How about you all just email me the minutes and I can join you next week? Because your calendar is already full because you filled it with the priorities you want. Strategic move number two, develop the habit of a weekly planning meeting. Number three, number three is to write consistently. Now, if you are like me, you grew up in a binge writing mode.

11:33 You know, you're like, oh, I have eight hours on Saturday. I'm going to write that paper on Saturday and you, you know, slug your way through Saturday and you maybe got 30 to 40 minutes of writing done because you know what? It took you the first two to three hours just to figure out where you were since you last picked up the paper three months ago. And then finally you started writing and it was like, wow, I've been here four hours. I'm done. But what happens when you are writing consistently is on Monday, you invest all that time trying to figure out where you were from three months ago. Tuesday, you remember what you did on Monday. And so you're able to move the work forward just by a little bit, not by much, but by a little bit. Wednesday, you're able to move it forward a little bit more.

12:14 Thursday, even better. And by Friday, wow, you look back over the week and at a minimum, you've gotten at least two and a half hours of writing done and now you can take a break because you've been consistent in your writing. It's the story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare wins every time. I know you're going to say it's a fable, it's made up, but the reality is that consistent effort over time, it's kind of like compound interest, will always pay off compared to inconsistent, huge efforts sporadically. Because when you think about it, when was the last time you had eight hours to binge write? Those times don't come anymore.

12:55 Yeah, they came. They were very often in college. If you were like me, you binge wrote some term papers and you still made an A. But for the most part, you don't have those eight hour blocks anymore because you've gotten really busy. But what you do have is 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there. What you do have is a 30 minute window here and a one hour window there. And if you're writing consistently, you're able to make the most out of these windows and you're able to really move work forward. So strategy number three, write consistently. Number four is to get accountability. Okay, okay. I want to pause here and say that your mentor, your research mentor, is a great source of accountability because they can sometimes scare the pechesis out of you if you don't get your work done.

13:42 I thought I would use that term. It sounded cool when I started thinking about it. But anyway, let's just say that they might make you a little bit afraid if you show up and you haven't worked on that manuscript, but that's not the kind of accountability I'm talking about. I'm not talking about any kind of accountability that makes you afraid, strikes fear into you, or makes you feel small. And I'm not saying that research mentors are out to do that, but sometimes that hierarchical relationship can make it difficult for you not to feel judged every time you show up in their presence. What you want in your life is non-judgmental accountability. Here's how you get it. You stand up and you declare your intention, preferably to a witness.

14:25 But even if you don't have a witness, you record yourself and be your own witness. You at the beginning of the week on Monday, say to your witness, even if it's you, say to your witness, these are the goals I have planned for this week. And just tell yourself three major goals related to your research, writing, and productivity that you want to accomplish. That's it. Just announce it. Now you've made a plan, right? And you've planned your week. So by the end of the week, hopefully you've been doing it, but maybe you haven't. Maybe on Monday you sat down to write, you got that page from the clinic saying, holy cow, your patient is here. You got to show up. Let's get this done. And then all of a sudden Monday is frittered away with the emergency person who showed up in the ER.

15:10 Okay. So Monday you sat down and you're like, I'm getting this work done just before my clinic is over. And the patient shows up like hours early and they were like, I'm sorry, doc, you got to see this patient right now. Well, there's another amount of writing that went away. Okay. Fast forward to Friday, you go back to your witness and maybe it's just the video that you left for yourself. And you say, oh, let me see what I said I would accomplish on Monday. And your video of you says, hey, I'm going to accomplish these three items. And you look at yourself and you're like, wow, none of these items are accomplished. And that's it. No judgment, just observation, just observation.

15:53 The reason you want to do that is because it allows you the opportunity to reflect and to ask yourself what could be different next time. I had a plan, didn't execute on the plan. What could I do differently? Or maybe it was a great story. Maybe you did execute on the plan. What did you do? Congratulations. And then you ask yourself, well, what helps me succeed? How did I succeed? And then you go and do that again. Wow. Accountability, non-judgmental, just observation. Now, you can get this from yourself. If you record a video of yourself and what you're going to accomplish at the beginning of the week, you can get it from you writing it down and then reviewing.

16:37 So the key is it has to be a review, right? You can't just say, hey, I'm going to do it. And then at the end of the week, you're like, okay, I don't remember what I said I was going to do. You actually have to schedule time to do the review so you can reflect on your goals and what you could do differently next time. So get accountability for your research and writing goals. It doesn't have to come from your primary research mentor. And to be honest, it probably shouldn't come from your primary research mentor because there's that hierarchy that sometimes makes you feel judged. You're thinking you're doing well. And then they're like, when's that paper I talked to you about three months ago? And then you're feeling judged. This accountability needs to be non-judgmental. Okay? Okay.

17:17 Number five is to lean in to your peer mentoring network. Now this goes with the accountability. And actually, honestly, I get my accountability from my peer mentors because they will remind me that, isn't this the same paper you said you were writing the introduction on three weeks ago? They have great memories compared to your memory, but it's also non-judgmental because, hey, your peers. And this is the great thing about your peers. They could be your peers in age, but they're at a different level from you. Maybe they're already associate professor and you're starting out as an instructor or as an assistant professor. They're still your friends. They're still your colleagues. You can get feedback from them because they've already done some things. They've gone ahead a little bit. But there isn't that hierarchical structure that sometimes exists between the big mentor and the early career faculty member.

18:05 So lean in. You have so many peers who are so accomplished in different areas. Maybe you're the master of grant writing, but you're no good when it comes to thinking strategically about when you go out for promotion. But someone else went ahead and got promoted two years early. Guess what? You can be a peer mentor to them as far as grant writing is concerned. And they're a peer mentor to you as far as strategically advancing within the academy. Win-win for both of you. So what you want to do is look around you. Who are your peers? Sometimes people will see your near peers. I just call them your peers and say, well, what did they have that I don't have yet? And how can they help me advance in a way that's non-judgmental, friendly, and really helps me grow?

18:50 So strategy number five is to lean into your peer mentoring network. All right. Strategy number six is to take risks. Okay? Nothing good ever came from not taking a shot. Every shot you don't take is a shot that you definitely miss. You can look at the grant and you can say, oh, wow, this is for someone who is really accomplished. Or you can look at the job posting and you can say, maybe three years from now when I am more senior. Or you can just say, you know what, I probably don't qualify for that, but let's take a shot anyway. Here's the thing. You never lose when you take a shot on goal.

19:32 You never lose. You may miss the shot, but what you've done is you've invested in skill building. For example, there was a role that called for leadership that I applied for. And at the time that I applied for it, I wasn't even sure that I actually was qualified for the role, but I felt like it was something I needed to do. So I went ahead and I applied. And the process of applying what I needed to do in writing my personal statement was to clarify for myself what my expertise was and what my motivations were for coming to that leadership role. And it was beautiful. I wrote it all out. I read it and I was like, oh, this is so good. Guess what? I didn't get the role, but I had the opportunity to practice clarifying for myself what was important to me.

20:17 Another role like that is going to come up because opportunities will always come. And guess what? I will be ready to now use this document that I've already put together and make it better and stronger for the next application. So you never lose. Let's say we're writing a grant and you submit the grant and you don't get it. Well, you've put together all this information. You spent a lot of work. Now when you turn around and resubmit it to the same organization or maybe to a different organization, you already have all the building blocks and therefore you're able to take those building blocks and make them work for you. Taking risks allows you to build.

20:58 It allows you to build skill. It allows you to build confidence. It allows you to grow your networks. Take risks. And people will say, oh my gosh, it's got to be a calculated risk. Just take risks anyway. Start getting used to being a person who just does things that you're not even qualified to do. Someone's like, I had a grant. I was writing recently and someone's like, well, you know, the kind of people who get these grants are really big shots. I don't have to be a big shot to apply for this grant because applying for it helps me get closer to my goal of being a big shot, right? Whatever big shot means, but take risks. Okay. Number seven, which kind of sounds counterintuitive to number six is to conserve your energy.

21:42 One of the greatest coaches of all time, her name is Judith. She was my executive coach for five years. And that's one thing she would always say to me, conserve energy, conserve energy, conserve energy. And it is so important. What does that mean? It means ask yourself, hmm, is this worth the investment of my time? Now what kinds of things should you think about when you're trying to conserve energy? Well, let's just say, for example, there is an announcement that from now on all clinicians are going to have to answer their in-basket messages within 30 minutes. Okay.

22:23 Conserving energy is saying, hmm, is this feasible for me? Hmm, no, it's not. Let's see what I can do to make it happen without breaking my whole life. That's conserving energy. Not conserving energy is to be the one who's going to rouse the entire population of clinicians across all the health system to say, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Let's protest. Let's make sure the administration knows exactly how crazy this is. I'm going to be the one to go around the institution and take up petitions. You make sure that that is not conserving energy because it takes a lot of energy and effort to try to bring an institution to change its mind.

23:08 And all the while you're doing that, expending significant energy, maybe not making a lot of traction in your own goals is that, well, you're not really moving forward. You're exhausting yourself and your own personal goals are left unfulfilled. Now, I am all about crusading. I believe in crusading, but you got to choose your crusading battles very, very strategically. If you're an early career faculty who just started and you don't really have any political capital in the organization, maybe the best use of your time is not going and canvassing for votes to support your petition. Maybe the best use of your time is investing in your own career development because that's where your energy is going to be able to carry the most weight or to really give you the most investment.

24:00 Maybe by the time you finally get promoted and you're now a full professor with tenure, then you can go be the one canvassing votes about the campus. And by then you're probably really savvy, you know enough people, then instead of canvassing votes, you're making those phone calls, those key phone calls that make the right people move forward to make the right things move. Because by the time you get there, you're politically savvy about your organization. So the key principle here, it is strategic. I've seen people use it over and over again, and now it's my strategy too, is a principle of conservation of energy. I will tell you that this podcast is my strategy. There are so many people in the academy, especially who are early career, who don't have the opportunity to really be able to invest in themselves or to be able to grow in the way they want to.

24:49 I want to help all of them, but I can't because I also need to focus on my own career development. And so if I take 20 minutes and I record this podcast episode, it's one way that I can help the next generation without necessarily giving up my time to do it over and over and over again for different groups of people who keep coming to me. It's conserving energy. And so when somebody comes and says, Dr. Lemona, I want to meet with you next week. And then my other colleague wants to meet with you. There are always people who want to meet with me. There are more people who want to meet with me than I have slots on my schedule to meet with them. But I can say, oh, is your question about mentoring? Why don't you listen to this podcast episode I did about mentoring? That is a principle of conservation of energy in action.

25:32 All right. I talked about seven things, seven strategies to grow your research skills. Number one, you ought to have a strategic plan. Number two, make sure to develop the habit of a weekly planning meeting. Number three, write consistently. Number four, get accountability. Number five, lean into your peer mentoring network. Number six, take risks. And number seven, conserve energy. I invite you today to think about your career and ask yourself in what areas do you need to apply strategy so that you can succeed? And then I want you to go ahead and take just one of these strategies and implement them this week. And then I want to hear all about it. Please reach out to me.

26:12 You can find me on LinkedIn. I will respond to your direct message within a week or earlier, depending on how often I'm on LinkedIn. But I'd love to hear from you. Let me know how you are using these strategies to enhance your career. All right. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I look forward to talking with you again next time on the Clinician Researcher Podcast. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.

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