How do you decide how high to set your expectations for the people you train, supervise or mentor? In the past, I have had undergrads, rotation students, technicians, and junior graduate students work with me. In general, I have set my expectations using one of two methods.
When training someone in a position that I have been in before (e.g. undergrad, rotation student, etc.), I usually use the "personal experience" method: When I was an undergrad/roton, how quickly could I grasp new concept X and learn new technique Y? How well could I perform complicated procedure Z?
When training someone in a position that I haven't been in (e.g. technician), I often use the "population average" method: Among all the Technician Level X staff I've worked with, on average how quickly could they learn Y and how well could they do Z?
Each of these methods has its flaws, of course. Not every undergrad, rotation student, or grad student has the same level of prior research experience and/or relevant background. Not to mention the fact that the "personal experience" method is particularly susceptible to the kind of historical revisionism in which I imagine my younger self to be smarter, more hardworking, more productive, and generally much more awesome than I actually was. And for someone at my current career stage, the "population average" method suffers from having teeny-tiny population sizes for any given staff position.
But despite their flaws, I've generally found some combination of these two methods to provide a decent starting point. The problem I'm having now is managing expectations for a Senior Research Scientist (SRS) I am supervising. SRS has a graduate degree from a foreign country and has been working in labs for much longer than I have. I feel that SRS is not meeting expectations, but since I have never supervised an SRS before nor been one myself, I'm not entirely sure whether SRS is underperforming or my expectations are inflated.
To be fair, many aspects of SRS' performance are quite good. He understands the scientific concepts and experimental design, takes initiative in looking up relevant literature, works carefully and tries hard. The problem is that SRS appears to work very slowly and to have a hard time multi-tasking. He seems unable or unwilling to do more than one large experiment at a time and generates a smaller-than-expected amount of data for the amount of time he spends in lab.
Frankly, given SRS' years of lab experience in this subfield, I expect him to be able to get up-to-speed on each new project quickly, and to be able to juggle multiple projects and make progress on all fronts. Given that SRS has at least 10-15 more years of lab experience than I do, I expect him to be at least as good as I am at the bench work, if not better.
So how do I figure out if I need to have a chat with SRS about his productivity, or if I'm being completely unreasonable?
Peer reviewing: then and now
2 hours ago
6 comments:
Frankly, given SRS' years of lab experience in this subfield, I expect him to be able to get up-to-speed on each new project quickly, and to be able to juggle multiple projects and make progress on all fronts. Given that SRS has at least 10-15 more years of lab experience than I do, I expect him to be at least as good as I am at the bench work, if not better.Someone with this amount of experience who either cannot or will not multi-task is not going to respond to anything you try, so it doesn't make any fucking difference whether your expectations are reasonable or not, or whether you "have a chat with" him or not. Sorry, but you're fucked.
I think CPP is right, this doesn't sound like a situation where SRS is suddenly going to change his ways and live up to your expectations. It is only worth having a chat (and a follow up email for documentation) to cover your ass if you have to fire SRS. That way it is clear that he was given warning that expectations were not being met and chose not to change. Without that documented warning you open yourself up to a number of potential problems should you need to fire him from the lab.
If CPP is right and you can't change SRS's habits, can you change how you assign his work? Would it help if you give him projects in a particular order than would improve overall efficiency, or assign shorter projects more often so he doesn't get bogged down with his inability to multi-task?
CPP--That was so not what I wanted to hear. Part of the reason I had such high expectations for SRS is because he came very highly recommended by two PIs who may not give a shit about me, but have good reason not to sell my boss (who pays SRS' salary) a lemon. Fuck.
PLS--I know, it's very difficult to fire anyone at my institution, even with documentation. Most of the time, though, PIs simply ask people to leave voluntarily and many do rather than have the termination process initiated against them.
EGF--Yes, I can make adjustments to SRS' workstream. Whether that would make him more productive is hard to say. But the bottom line is that if I have to micro-manage and schedule all of his tasks for him, then that totally defeats the purpose of hiring a senior scientist with lots of experience. From a lab finances standpoint, I could've hired a fresh-out-of-college technician to micro-manage for 1/3 of the cost.
Ugh. This always seems difficult to deal with. I don't understand why, but some people just cannot or will not multi-task. To me it seems like a complete waste of your day, but some people seem to get really flustered when trying to do more than one thing at a time.
MXX--I wonder why that is and, more importantly, whether those people can be somehow taught to become comfortable doing more than one thing at a time. I think there's also a difference between people who have to get X number of things done in a day, regardless of how long it takes, and people who work X hours a day and however much work fits in those hours is what gets done.
Post a Comment