Do your team assume you to be another unsupportive boss?

By Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development.

These days the escalating academic ‘quit-lit’, is hard to miss, and difficult to read. The stories of leaving research careers in academia are fraught and frustrated, and the accounts of the poor leadership and management practices, bad behaviour, and bullying cultures on top of precarious roles, high pressures and high workload are upsetting to witness, let alone live through. The comments section of such accounts, if you can bear to read it, often combines some empathy with some frustrating denial of someone else’s lived experiences, a roasting for being ‘too negative’, and lots of unsolicited career advice, with varying levels of appropriateness. What this reveals is that career support and career transition are highly personal experiences, and highly variable. It also speaks to the reason for a prevailing sense of anxiousness when it comes to raising the topic of career choice and development with our managers, supervisors, and PIs.

It’s an important part of my job to consider these stories of what is happening in the sector, and to work towards changing the situation for researchers who aren’t feeling supported, or don’t have access to career conversations. It’s also, but less obviously part of the work of a development and culture role, to dig deeper into that variety of real experiences of leaving academia – learning about the circumstances around leaving, the reasons for leaving, the emotional labour of leaving, and even what we mean when we say ‘leaving’.

This was the topic for the annual Researcher Development Scholarship (REDS) Conference last autumn, and Dr James Burford’s keynote ‘Uneasy transitions: The affective work of negotiating a research career’ and the ensuing discussion it brought forth, were illuminating. Dr Burford reminded us, that “…an orientation to careers work which (for example) seeks to provide more accurate information can skate over messy and beyond-rational dimensions of career attachment.” Meaning, a successful career transition is not just about ‘knowing your options’, but about acknowledging the emotional work that it entails. Dr Burford also made a clear point that if someone perceives negative things to be happening to them, and feels that they are in a powerless situation, unsupported, then that is indeed their reality – however many people disagree. Whether it’s objectively the whole story can be irrelevant. Myths about career choices, and the expectations and decisions they provoke do form part of the cultural norms of our universities.

Here’s a true story about the preventative power of assumption. I myself used to be a plant scientist (that’s me in the picture above). Coming to the end of my four-year research contract I dithered, wondering whether to say yes to the next fixed-term project my PI was keen to write me in as ‘named researcher’ for. Really knowing though, that there were probably better careers for me, even though I didn’t know exactly what they might be. I eventually decided I’d only be staying so I didn’t let her down. Because those who’d been in the research group longer than me told me she’d be very unsupportive if I left research science, I was nervous about bringing it up. I did however choose to have the conversation. Her actual response? “Oh that’s exciting, there so much you are good at that this job doesn’t offer you. Look at all your events experience for example. I know someone you can talk to, another ex-post-doc of mine who works in university services, she’ll be really helpful to you. Do you need anything from me?”

Kay one, Mythology nil.

Me being me, I mentioned my hesitation. I let her know that it would surprise our colleagues to hear she was happy to support me. She was taken aback saying “What!? Just because I love my job and focus on it, people though I wanted everyone to be just like me?” This caused me to think. Because as much as she felt supportive, her support was a surprise to us all. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the mythology of ‘angry and unsupportive PIs who are deeply disappointed in you’ had prevailed in our group.

Now, it’s important to pause here and say that there are definitely some angry and unsupportive managers around. I believe the stories I have heard and read across the sector. If you do work with a manager that is unsupportive or antagonistic to your career development, my only advice is to find alternative conversations with someone who is on your side, be that a mentor, a careers consultant, or a trusted colleague.

For this post I want to focus on the idea of managers who are assumed to be unsupportive, due to the absence of obvious support. In my monthly meetings with my PI, she hadn’t actively enquired about my career aspirations, nor suggested that I engage with anything outside the delivery of project goals. But just because these things weren’t being actively encouraged, doesn’t mean they weren’t permitted or weren’t expected. My skills and experience had clearly been noticed; interest had been taken. Me being me, I was always inclined to go along to professional development workshops, join organising committees and attend events. I never hid this, and I often chatted about them in meetings where they formed a normal part of the monthly catch up. I wondered, weren’t my colleagues bringing these things up with our boss? Were they waiting to be given direct instruction? Were they waiting until they were sure what their next destination would be? Were they more afraid of admitting their preferences to themselves, than the boss per se?

I have my own team now, and the same potential for uncertainty applies as much in University Services careers as in research careers. Here are my reflections on actions we as managers (bosses, PIs, Supervisors) can take that don’t leave our PGRs and staff in a state of uncertainty or emotional quandary and thereby get us accidentally labelled as unsupportive. We can:

• Talk about job structures, progression opportunities and challenges. Share how our own Dept. is organised – who reports to whom, all the way up. Discuss what ‘moving up’ looks like in your role and in adjacent roles.
• Organise a mentor for each member of our team to give them a career sounding board. My preference is someone in our specialist field, and external to my own Dept. to provide a bit of professional distance that enables more open discussions. A good time to do this is when new people start in the team, to help them transition into the role, and make themselves a development plan.
• Talk about the importance of career planning, and encourage the joining of career mentoring programmes and careers workshops through the university, or through our professional memberships etc.
• Talk about our own career choices, moments of indecision, how we knew we had outgrown a role, and how we knew what next job to choose. Share career profiles and ideas as you come across them, e.g. the Pathfinder Post-PhD Career Narratives.
• Discuss opportunities that come up in our professional networks. Forward job adverts and be clear that although we’d hate to lose them, we can see how much our colleagues are growing in their role and will be ready for a fresh challenge, in the future.
• But how can we be sure we’re not forwarding irrelevant things? We can get to know what the people we manage aspire to do. Listen to what they love doing, ask what experience they feel they need to build to move forward and find ways to offer that.
• Look for ways to deputise. Support junior colleagues to understand what we do and be prepared to step up for specific opportunities.
• Share the ‘wealth’ of requests for expert input, collaborations, co-authorship, peer review, visiting speaker engagements, etc. Set your team up to succeed.
• Let preferences be. Check our judgy face so we don’t sour someone else’s ambition.
• If we hope someone will apply for a new role or promotion opportunity, tell them directly. We may think it’s obvious they’ll want to go for it, but from their perspective, that fact that we haven’t mentioned it, means we don’t think of them in that way.
• And the hard one: be prepared to let talented people go, when they have outgrown a role or have spotted a secondment.

Being engaged in supporting your team or group’s careers doesn’t mean having all the answers, or knowing every option they might need to consider. Simply taking an interest, and framing career chat as a normal part of work life is enough. Don’t let unspoken assumptions paint you as another unsupportive manager, supervisor or PI.