Finding the right leader for your career

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 a pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today I'm talking about how to find the right leader for your career. And I have a feeling that this one's going to be short. Yes, the moment you say it's going to be short, then it's awfully long, but I do have seven things, but I think it'll be really short.

1:25 So how do you find the right leader for your career, and why does it even really matter? And I think back to earlier on in my career where I had no clue what I was supposed to do as an academic faculty, and you could say, well, that's on you. You should have gone to figure it out. I guess I was figuring it out. And in the meantime, I thought my mentors were going to tell me they were going to be the ones to help me. And I really counted on them for so much. And I was disappointed. And I think I was disappointed because I just put so much on people. And at the end of the day, nobody cares about your career like you do. Nobody's thinking about your life like you are thinking about your life. And so there I was thinking, oh, I'm not getting the mentoring I need.

2:07 Oh, people are not really caring about me. Oh, my goodness, they're not helping me move forward. And I think what I didn't recognize is that any gift you get from anybody is a gift, and you just take it as that. And people are just people. And there are some people that they connect with more. Some people they feel like they can see themselves in more than others. You know, your mentor looks at you and they think, wow, that's exactly how I was 10 years ago. Or they look at you and they're like, I can't even imagine what you were like 10 years ago. Right. And so it's just a different experience for different mentors. And mentors are not superhuman. They're only human. And if we have challenges in general, right, as far as like how people move forward in their careers, you know, it just it just also applies to our academic institutions as well.

2:55 So anyway, just saying that mentoring doesn't always get you where you think it should take you because you have expectations that sometimes don't match what is reality for you as far as the mentors you have available to you. So anyway, so I wanted to share with you a couple of things as to how to find the right leader for your career. And the first thing I want to say is that this leader that you find for your career has to really care about you. Like they've got to care. They've got to say, wow, you know, they're going to be thinking about you. They've got to be wondering, OK, how do I make things better for this person? They've got to really, really care about you.

3:35 And why is that relevant? Because, you know, mentoring or leading someone's career is a big deal, right? You're considering what are the challenges that they are running into? What are the things that they really need? You know, you're thinking about them to some extent. It kind of is like having a child. I guess we could call it you're a scientific parent as a leader, as a mentor, helping someone navigate their own career. And it works best when you actually care about the person whose career you're helping to navigate. And so as you're thinking about who's the right leader for my career, you've got to recognize that it's going to be someone who actually cares about you. And I think that there are many people in academia who, you know, they're neutral about you. I mean, you're someone who needs help and they're available to help.

4:18 They're happy to help. But it doesn't mean like they're invested in you or that they really, really are like, I want you to succeed by all means. There are not too many people in life who actually I mean, not that they don't want that for you, but they're not too many people who care that much. You know, it's like, hey, I've got a lot to think about. I've got a lot on my plate. And I'm not really thinking about you beyond just our interaction here. And so you just got to recognize that not everybody deeply cares about you like that. And but but if you're really going to have someone help you lead your career, you do need to find people who actually do care about you. And so you may have mentors or you may have people who help you lead your career who don't care about you like that.

5:00 You know, there are different things that you're getting from them and that's OK. But when you're looking for the one person that you're really going to put your career, you know, you're going to put your career in their hands, you want to make sure that they actually really care about you. OK. The next thing is that this leader actually needs to see your potential where you can't see it. And so the challenge is that we have so many blind spots. When we start out in our academic careers, we don't even know what we what we can and cannot do. Right. We don't know our potential. We don't really recognize how powerful we are. We have no idea who we are. It's like, you know, Superman, who is like, yeah, I'm like, I have all these powers and it's kind of weird, but I just don't think much of myself.

5:44 I think I'm just ordinary like everybody else or maybe better still. It's like the chicken or the eagle that grows up among chickens. I've heard that story before where you don't even know how far how much you can fly or soar because you've been surrounded by chickens who don't fly, who don't soar. And so it takes another person who's like thinking about you and thinking, wow, you have potential. You're an eagle. You can do this. Right. And they've got to see potential where you can't see it. OK. The next thing is that this leader actually needs to have a bird's eye view of your entire career. Now, I'm not just talking about your career as in, you know, your your academic advancement or your patient care.

6:28 They really got to just look at your whole life. Like, where are you in life? Are you in a place where you have small children at home and you're not really able to make the kinds of investments that people who don't are? Or are you in your career and a place in your career where maybe you have parents who are aging and really need your support at this time? Do you are you in a place in your career where you have someone who's a loved one that you're primarily responsible for who's going through a major illness? Right. So this person has really got to be able to take into consideration your stage in life, everything that you're going through. And they've got to really be able to support you through that. Again, you know, it's like what this is so idealistic.

7:10 But this is important because I think in academia, so many times we're so focused on the products of the academy, on papers, on manuscripts, on publications, on grants and presentations and showing up internationally or nationally, you know, all the stuff that helps us move forward and those things are good. It's good that we're focused on them. Where else would we be focused on them? But they've also got to take into account your big life, your big picture. And so if we are focused on these things to the exclusion of the big picture of your life and the challenges that are going on in your life, it puts stress on you because even while nobody else is acknowledging what's going on with you, you know, you're acutely aware you're having to manage it.

7:58 And so this leader has really got to have a bird's eye view, not just of your academic career, but just who you are and where you are in life and what you need at this particular time of your experience. Okay. This leader needs to ride with you through the highs and the lows. So I'd love to say, and you know, that we are not always high, right? You love to say that, oh, my goodness, everything is always so awesome and life is always so good. But there are times when that's not true and things are challenging. You know, there's the unexpected funeral that, you know, you have to deal with. There's an unexpected illness that you weren't preparing for. There's an unexpected accident where now you need to fix your car or there's an unexpected pull out of an au pair and now you're kind of left looking for support for your children.

8:48 And this person has got to be able to go with you through those highs and those lows. Number five is that this leader needs to support you even when doing so is a sacrifice to their own personal lives. So it's like, okay, you need support right now. I'm going to do it even though it costs me. And that's a big deal. It's a big deal to ask people to do things that could potentially cost them. Maybe promoting you may mean that they have to forego like their leadership position. They're like, you know what? I think you should go, you should move into this leadership position. I'm stepping back so that you can step forward. That's a big deal, right? That's a huge deal.

9:29 But really, it's someone putting you forward. It's someone giving you a platform. And for you to really have someone who's the right leader for your career, they've got to really support you even when it's at a personal cost to them. Okay. So I say all of those so I can let you know that I really have just created the picture of an idealistic leader who does not exist in human form. And so you may have a little bit of this in so many different people, but it's a little bit of each thing in so many different people. But what you probably don't have is all of it in one person. So if you think about the person who really cares about you, maybe it's really a parent.

10:13 And they certainly are not in your academic environment. Maybe you work with a family member or maybe your parents are in academia. Good for you. But most of the time, it's not the way it is. And so yes, you have different people who embody these different things, but you don't necessarily have one person who embodies all of it. And so if you are not going to be able to find one person who embodies all of this, then you do have to go to the next best thing. You have to go to option number two. So there's no ideal person. And there might be some people are able to find mentors who they gel with, they connect with, and the mentor is like, I'm like a parent to you.

10:57 I'm going to do everything to promote you. Some people do find that. But I want you to know it's very few. It's less than 20% of people. And so for the rest of us, the next best thing, which is number seven, is to recognize that the next best leader is you. And as I say that, I see people saying, oh, wait a minute, me, haha, don't even really care about myself like that. I totally see no potential in my life. I have a struggle with birds eye view of my entire career because I have no idea where I am right now. And I can't even ride with myself through the highs, much less the lows, right? You look at yourself and you're like, me, definitely not.

11:39 Can we find someone else who will lead my career? And I am sorry to have to break it to you, but it's you. You cannot find the ideal leader who's going to be all things to you. And so the next best thing is that you step up and you take ownership. You take ownership for your experience. You take ownership of your, you take leadership. You take up the leadership mantle for your own career. But what does that mean, though? It means you've got to do things a little bit differently. It means you first of all, got to actually start to really care about yourself. So the whole thing, maybe this is not you, but for somebody hypothetically who doesn't care enough about themselves, right?

12:24 Who is not sleeping enough, not eating right, not exercising, right? Not really caring for themselves as they should. Then what do they do? Well, you got to get there. You've got to do the work to be able to really see yourself as someone you really need to care for. And sometimes it's hard because I think in medicine, our training leads us to kind of put ourselves last and to some extent sacrifice our personal experience on the altar of other people's moving forward, especially patient care. And so sometimes it's hard for us to actually really care for ourselves. And it takes time.

13:04 And it takes work. And for some of us, it takes going to therapy and so that we can do that work and do that work in therapy. Or for some of us, then that's work that we have to do in coaching. And whatever the venue where you do the work, where you learn to care for yourself and take care first of your own oxygen, right? You take care of putting on your mask first before you go on to try to save the universe, right? You really got to do that work so that you can do that well. And the other thing you need to do as you want to become this best leader for yourself is you got to just go get the training needed, right?

13:46 You want to read books, you want to attend professional development, you want to attend career development events. You want to do things that help you grow as a person because when you grow as a person, then you're really able to lead your career as you're supposed to. And so you really, really, really have an opportunity where there's a gap. There's no one to lead. You may have a great mentor, but most people do not. There's an opportunity to lead. There's an opportunity to really lead the people who are helping you lead your experience, right? So you do have mentors. Okay, maybe there's not one of them that's like a superstar mentor leader, as I've just described, but you do have those who are around you and are there to help you.

14:28 And so you get the training you need so that you can help them give you the kind of advice that helps you get where you're going, right? It means disclosing things as needed to say, hey, I know that this next two weeks is crunch time for this abstract, but I'm going to sit this abstract submission out because x, y, z, right? It's you being able to be bold and confident to say, I'm going to take the leadership mantle for my own career because I actually really understand what I'm going through and what needs to be done. But it will take time for you to get the training that's needed to become the leader that you need to be to lead your own career. So the question I want to ask you to consider as you go on to this week is what do you need to do to develop the leader within you?

15:15 How do you move this leader forward? How do you help this leader succeed? How do you help yourself succeed so that you can lead yourself in the way you want to? And it's important because as you learn to lead yourself, then you're really open to leading a lot more other people. And to be honest, we need leaders like you. We need leaders who care for themselves well enough where we know that, well, if you treat yourself well, it's a sign that you're going to treat other people well. But if you treat yourself poorly, then we're suspicious that you're going to treat other people under your leadership poorly too. And so what do you need to do to begin to develop a leader within you so that you can really lead yourself in your experience and then turn around and lead others as well?

15:56 OK, so just to summarize, this leader's got to really care about you. They've got to see potential where you can't see it. They need to have a bird's eye view of your entire career. They need to ride with you through the highs and the lows. They need to support you even when doing so would be a sacrifice to themselves personally. And I list all these things and let you know that this leader probably doesn't exist in human form. And so the next best thing is you is to develop yourself to be the leader that you need to be. All right. I think that is short. I am coming to the end of it. And I just want to thank you for taking the time to listen to today's episode. And I look forward to talking with you again the next time.

16:36 Have a great day. And please share this podcast episode with someone. All right. Bye. 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. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do health care.

17:26 Right now, suit yourself. There.