#170 - Imposter Syndrome, Switching Fields, and Becoming a Manager
Plus: Getting good with AI to improve human communication skills; agile personal development plans; Low morale? Try improving safety; Should you take on a turnaround? And what if you're the problem?
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#130, “Taking On A New Responsibility”
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I think the switch from being someone who directly uses their expertise, someone with a research background, to being a manager can be usefully compared to switching research areas or entire fields.
I went from astrophysical fluid dynamics to genomics, and from researcher to research support roles. Similar shifts from individual contributor to manager and upwards were (and should be) almost as disorienting.
Making these shifts is hard, but they’re also mind-expanding and avenue-opening!
I spent a lot of time my first year+ in genomics smiling a lot, nodding, then running back to my desk and looking up very basic terms on wikipedia. It was humbling, kind of stressful, but also exhilarating, and it worked out fine.
When I’m talking with research trainees who suddenly find themselves in the deep end switching research programs into an unfamiliar field, or even a different area within a field, I always recommend three mutually-reinforcing things.
First, focus a lot of your learning energy on the mental models and the ways of approaching problems in your new field, rather than just trying to cram all the new facts and terms into your head in a rush to catch up.
You’ve spent your academic career thus far honing your skills with a few field-specific favourite tools in your toolbox. Mental models for problems, heuristics about which tools to pull out for which sort of questions, good first guesses about which approach will best yield results for a particular investigation. Those skills and tools will still be very useful in the future! In fact, they’ll be part of what distinguishes you. By all means keep an eye out for opportunities to apply those existing skills and tools.
But they won’t be the go-to skills and models and tools of someone wrestling with the day-to-day problems of this field. Make peace with not knowing all of the terms being used in a talk or in a paper right away. Instead, spend a lot of time trying to observe and adopt the habits of mind, of language, the mental models, and the ways problems are approached in this new discipline. Once you start to see how the work is done, the what - the facts and knowledge and data - become way easier to learn.
Second, and speaking of mental models, try to keep this diagram below in mind: (based on a diagram by David Whittaker)
It’s going to feel overwhelming, like everyone knows vastly more than you. It’s normal to feel that way. Just be aware that it’s a deeply unhelpful lie we tell ourselves.
Everyone in your PhD program (say) will know roughly as much as you do - they’ve been studying for roughly as long - they just know different stuff. And they even know different stuff from each other.
The stuff and skills and habits of mind you bring to the group are going to end up being very valuable and distinguish you - maybe not in the obvious ways or ways you expect, but years from now you will be able to draw the connections. There are some necessary things you don’t know, but that’s ok, you’re smart, you can learn them.
Just remember the goal is not to know exactly the same stuff as another student. And it’s certainly not to know the same stuff as all the other students together. The goal is to learn enough about your new field to be able to contribute meaningfully. And it’s often the case that the knowledge bar for those contributions is often much lower than we think when we’re coming from a new field with different skills.
And third, to help with the first two, it can be very useful to seek out some — really, any — opportunity to contribute to some specific, existing project already underway, sometime soon (and in fact sooner than will feel wise to you). That steers one’s perspective from the overwhelming, unhelpful, “I have to learn this entire field!” to the specific, achievable, “I have to learn enough to add XYZ to section 3 of this paper”. It gives a concrete framework in which to learn some things, build relevant problem-solving skills for the discipline, and apply skills new and old.
It’s important to note that 100% of this applies equally when switching into management (or, for that matter, considering making the shift into a director role), and relatedly that you’ve very likely already made similar shifts.
The path is the same:
Recognize that the mental models of work that you’ve relied on to this point got you here, but won’t serve you as well now. You need to learn new mental models, new approaches - and you do that by watching and talking to others, reading, etc.
Realize that this does not mean you’re “behind” or lost or failing or don’t belong - you came the world of research, you learn new skills for a living. You have lots of expertise and analytical skills already, you’ll master these more basic ones easily over time.
Just start doing something. Pick a small skill to build, and start working on it until it feels comfortable. May I suggest one-on-ones, and then feedback? Then work on the next thing. It’s not, after all, rocket science - you got this.
And with that, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
Five Surprising Lessons Learned from Working with AI -
,Oh, thank heavens.
Wheatley argues that learning to use LLMs and chatbots effectively is good for helping us hone communication skills:
AI, with its need for precise instructions, has become a strict yet effective communication coach. The process of formulating clear, unambiguous commands, like "Help me create a picture of an orchid perched on a window sill of an opulent urban home in the Georgian style that evokes a bygone era of Gilded Age luxury," has honed our ability to articulate thoughts more clearly and succinctly.
I’ve been noodling on this for a while, but my thoughts were too ill-formed to really write out, so I’m relieved to see someone writing this!
Josh Morton at HBR wrote similarly in his article Using Prompt Engineering to Better Communicate with People; but there it’s more of a strained analogy. Wheatley (correctly, I think) argues that developing a facility with LLM chatbot tools pretty much automatically hones communication and delegation skills, in a low-stakes environment, just by their nature.
Wheatley has learned that these tools, in his estimation can be useful with:
Sharpening Communication Skills
Empowering Junior Staff with “Leadership Experience” with chat tools (as with delegation, refining, decision making)
Broadening the Problem-Solving Toolkit with these new tools
Fostering a Culture of Continuous Learning
Enhancing Empathy Through Technology, by outsourcing some of the mundane workaday tasks
And that’s just from using the tools for your own tasks. They can also help improve communication (or delegation, or problem-solving..) or tasks by explicitly coaching or training on those tasks. Back in #151 I gave an example of using Bing Copilot for role-playing challenging feedback conversations; I suspect we’re going to see more and more of this.
I increasingly think of these tools, following Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing, as being like eager-to-please interns from another planet. And so asking them to perform tasks is, well, kind of a form of delegation. And that means developing more of a habit of being very specific about your requests.
In fact, one of the ways I find myself using these tools is to sharpen my own thoughts by repeatedly asking for something and then reacting with “No this is not what I want, I guess I want something more like that. Could you give me that, instead?”
The People-Centric Approach to Personal Development Plans -
I’ve talked about the usefulness of having and routinely updating professional development plans for our team members - in #60 I talked about my process (quarterly, in my experience, is a really nice cadence) and shared a template. Then these plans can be discussed routinely in one-on-ones leading up to the next quarterly revisit.
PeopleStorming has a very kanban-type approach to this, with specific items and a backlog (and a very few Work In Progress items) in their template guide, which looks great.
One thing I particularly appreciate about their guide is that for each item, there’s a what, and a components of that what, but also a why, which is something that my own template doesn’t really have. The whys of a goal — whether it’s a work goal or a personal development goal — really matter, both for motivation and for deciding on next steps.
Managing Teams
Low morale in your team? focus on Safety -
,TBM 223: Why Aren't They Saying Anything? -
,These are two articles which crossed my virtual desk recently that at least touch on the topic of lack of psychological safety - the feeling that speaking up isn’t safe and could have disproportionate consequences, whether that’s Parker arguing back or Kris getting defensive again or someone in authority retaliating for hearing news or getting feedback they don’t like.
The fact is, it is REALLY hard to fix anything if people aren’t comfortable talking about the problems they see. We want intellectual honesty from our team, but if we want that, we have to give people the room and safety to speak their mind.
Visinoni’s article talks about focusing on ourselves first, and then improving things in the team. Visinoni also makes it clear that safety doesn’t mean certainty - things can be wildly uncertain, but people can still feel safe.
Cutler’s article talks about the wide range of reasons people might not speak up - they think it’s just them, they think the problem is unfixable or has just always been this way, or even they’re not sure how fixing the problem might affect them.
My theory is that many more people notice issues than raise issues—even in relatively psychologically safe environments. The more dysfunctional the org gets the lower the ratio. That—along with the fact that people choose to stay at/leave companies (survivorship bias)—means that it is very easy for leaders to discount certain things as fringe, rare, and unimportant.
This level of granularity is really useful - people’s motivations vary, and you often have to really dig (in one-on-ones, or retrospectives) and encourage and model speaking up before people will start to do it. Once people do speak up, it’s important to not only publicly praise, but actually do something about the thing they bring up, even if it wouldn’t otherwise be a priority of yours, if you want to break out of the cycle of not-speaking-up.
Managing Your Own Career
Should you take on a turnaround? -
,In #130 I talked about taking on new responsibilities in general. Here, Donohue talks about a very important special case: taking on a turnaround, and whether you should do it.
Turnarounds are high-risk and (potentially) high-rewards situations: if you pull it off you’ll be a hero, but if the situation is dire enough that it needs turning around, then failure is manifestly very much an option.
For us in particular, not only is there a chance of the project not going well, but the scenario is a perfect storm for burnout for the sort of slightly anxious high-achievers that we STEM PhDs disproportionately are.
Donohue breaks turnaround scenarios into a 2-d map of internal commitment to the effort and internal or external urgency. Each of those quadrants corresponds to an archetype that might do well: Hero (high urgency, low commitment), Prophet (low and low), Maestro (high and high) or Pathbreaker (low urgency, high commitment).
At this stage of my career I’d be very unlikely to take something on without strong internal commitment and executive sponsorship - tilting at windmills isn’t my thing anymore - but as Donohue points out, there are situations where you can still learn a lot from a failure and come out mostly unscathed.
Save this article (heck, save all of these issues!) for reference when you’re thinking of taking on a challenging turnaround project.
What if you're the difficult person? -
,
I give a lot of advice to managers who are struggling with their relationships with team members, peers, or managers. A lot of the time, the other people are clearly causing the problem. But a nontrivial chunk of the time, we ourselves are the problem - or are at least contributing in some way to the problem.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. If you’re reacting to the so-called difficult person’s behaviour, there’s a good chance you’re being difficult yourself.
The good news here is that if our behaviour is contributing to the problem, then at least there’s clear steps we can take that might improve things. They might not, too, but at least our own behaviour is under our control.
Devlin’s article is great. The recommendations are to
Ask yourself the tough questions
Reframe your narrative [IMO, Crucial Conversations is a great book for this - LJD], and
Take proactive action.
And Devlin closes with something that I think is absolutely true:
“Going first” is a sign of strength as a leader
That’s It…
And that’s it for the week! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me, leave a comment, reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox, or schedule a quick Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.
Have a great weekend, and best of luck in the coming weeks with your team,
Jonathan
Thanks for mentioning my post on AI helping focus communication. It great to see others discovering similar lessons! Cheers to a fellow traveler :)