I needed a culture shift in my lab. I’m grateful one student spoke up

From ScienceMag:

I sat at my laptop intending to work, but I couldn’t read, think, or write. Three days earlier, one of my graduate students had come to me wanting to switch research groups. The student was slowly making progress and was on track, so I was confused. What did I do wrong? After taking time to reflect on my path in the 4 years since I became a faculty member, I concluded that I was transferring the stress I was under onto my graduate students—and that wasn’t fair.

When I moved back to my home country, China, to start my faculty position, I was quickly overwhelmed by the relentless pressure to secure competitive grants, publish articles in highprofile journals, and advise students. I was new to the demands of academia and had been trained in the United States, which left me unprepared to work with Chinese funding agencies. China’s funding system underwent constant reforms, raising competition and uncertainty. Funding my small research group required an endless cycle of writing proposals, leaving me short on time and patience.

My tenure hopes added to the pressure. I felt compelled to accelerate my publishing output to compete with the overall speed of Chinese academia. As I brought graduate students into my lab, I put pressure on them to publish articles, too. I scheduled meetings often and left limited time for them to read and think. Sometimes, when their progress was slower than expected, my tone was sharp and didn’t show empathy and understanding. I pushed them relentlessly, overlooking signs that they needed help. This went on for years.

Then came my student’s request to switch groups. She couldn’t take the pressure or my behavior anymore, she told me. I was shocked, because I thought I had made every effort to ensure her academic success, and I only wished she would grow by learning. But I am grateful for her courage to come to me, because it was the wake-up call I needed. Without it, I am not sure how long it would have taken me to figure out the effects of my behavior.

In my reflections, I started reading Peter Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, which advises leaders to focus on opportunities rather than problems. I had been doing exactly the opposite. My energy was always going into trying to notice and fix problems, such as our group’s lack of high-profile research grants. I didn’t pursue opportunities, such as collaborative research with other groups and exploring innovative research direction with my students.

My student’s feedback also prompted me to think back to why I decided to pursue my career in academia in the first place. I recalled the excitement I felt as a postdoc, when curiosity was king for me. I worked in a lab where people were comfortable asking questions regardless of their job titles. They felt free to discuss compelling studies, even when those studies were not directly linked with their projects.

I lost sight of the importance of curiosity when I was consumed by problems and fears under the tenure clock. But I realized that an environment where people would feel free to share their thoughts with me and think creatively, regardless of the power hierarchy, was exactly what I wanted in my lab.

I had meaningful conversations with my students to understand their needs, which led to changes in how I managed my team. I reduced the frequency of check-in meetings and focused more on lab members’ overall progress. I provided basic training sessions to improve my students’ skills and began to grant them more autonomy. I was pleased to see that, after open conversations about the situation, the graduate student who had requested to switch groups decided to stay.

Even though I am still busy, I am happier and more creatively engaged than before. The increased trust seems to be helping my students thrive. Research funding remains a core concern. But because I have enough support for the next couple years, I allow this anxiety to sit quietly, and I leave space for me and my lab members to pursue interesting research ideas. I don’t know whether I will achieve tenure, but I do know that for me and my students, research is a marathon and I have to manage it sustainably.

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