Broadening our perspective on success and other thoughts about leadership

A few weeks ago I attended the Pump Your Career meeting--a day of workshops organized for female academics to give them a platform to meet and work on professionalization. While the title of the event is a bit stereotypical, the content is usually very good.

The event started by a keynote by Pravini Baboeram which drew everyone's attention to the theme of diversity. While it is known that diversity tends to increase quality of work output, still there is a challenge in making workplaces friendly to a diverse audience. The speaker encouraged us to move from being colour-blind to being colour-brave. One important thing to keep in mind is that equal opportunity does not just involve providing the same opportunities for everyone, but more to provide circumstances such that everyone can make use of these opportunities. For example, having a network is great, but if someone does not know how to network, the network is of no use. In a sense, we need to think from not just our own perspective but from the other person's perspective.

Pravini Baboeram

Rana Dajani

This time I attended a workshop by Roel Breuls from the Centre for Academic Leadership which I enjoyed a lot. The workshop talked about the complicated feelings involved in taking a position of a leader, which I recognized quite well. For example: a leader cannot satisfy all. A very painful conclusion, but very recognizable. An inspiring quote that was shared was by Philip Massinger (1623): "Those who govern others first should be masters of themselves." Consequently, Roel introduced the concept of Personal Leadership, which means that to effectively lead others, you first need to be able to govern yourself, and realize your strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you are strong on vision, you may be weaker on implementing practical details, and if you have a tendency to control others, you find it difficult to go with the flow. Yet leadership tends to require us to go beyond the strong preferences and tendencies we have to endure the discomfort of working with our dominant tendencies such that they are reduced and balanced out by their opposites. It is quite helpful to reflect on your dominant tendencies and to think about which ones need work. Leadership is also a lonely position, because you have to do this work mostly by yourself: your team is not going to do it. However, friends and colleagues can help you power through this.

the leaky pipeline

We also talked about the complicated meaning of a team in academia. Usually a team is a group with a common goal, a common leader, and interdepency. While the common leader and interdependency are satisfied. the common goal is more rare with many different projects happening at any point in time. An insight from this discussion was that the tasks of a leader are to set boundaries and to protect her people. When there is too little nurturing or too little boundaries, disturbances can arise in teams. Leaders should strive to still create some coherence, such as creating a culture for working together. I realized I should probably create such a vision statement for my lab as well, following some wonderful examples from Candice Morey and Maryam Aly.

Other interesting factoids were that females tend to deal with uncertainty in different ways than men (in general, of course). While males tend to resort to hierarchy and competition in the face of uncertainty, females tend to resort to a lack of hierarchy. And guess what the academic world looks like? Pretty male in my book!

Finally, I also found the overview of leadership tasks very helpful. A leader is to endure loneliness, otherwise you cannot set boundaries. Moreover, they have to use power, using language such as "I want you to...", "I don't want you to...". I notice how I find that quite challenging. Also, the leader should leave the fate of the employee with the employee, and not do their work for them. Finally, the leader should be an example of success, which includes the ability to take criticism, which can inspire others to also dare more. While this is challenging, a good message was that "there is nothing great about making yourself too small." Good point.

Presentation of the LNVH monitor on females in senior academic
positions and salary gaps

The day ended with a keynote by a very inspiring woman: Rana Dajani, who presented herself as someone wearing five scarves, after a book she wrote. The five scarves represent her roles as mother, academic, advocate, and more. She mentioned that interestingly, in the middle east and India, there are more women than men in STEM. Why is this? Why is there na absence of leading females in STEM in the Western world? She proposed that this could be because success is defined mostly in male terms: fame and money. What if we redefine the criteria pf success? Maybe we can then have a much more creative and diverse workforce. I resonate quite a bit with those ideas. She encouraged us to persist, because the world needs us, and we can be role models for others. Yet, we also need support, and recommended mentoring. I highly agree--mentoring is incrdibly helpful. She also mentioned a website with resources of mentoring support: the three circles of Alemat. In short, a very inspiring day in which I learnt a lot!

Finding gratitude in happiness and suffering

The thirteenth lojong slogan is "Be grateful to everyone." I think this holiday time is therefore a great time to blog about this in the #lojongchallenge, since I feel the Christmas period is always a time to reflect on what I can be grateful about. As the year draws to a close, I always think about what happened in the past year, and so much has happened. Although I never feel I have enough time to accomplish what I want to, nevertheless stuff happens and papers do get published, data gets collected, and grants get submitted. In this past year, my lab doubled in size, which is quite sobering.

Grateful for the delicious food on the Christmas table (a vegan roast, gravy, loads of veggies...). Picture by Maya Thierens.

Being grateful is a one of the easiest way to enhance your happiness. There is even some research that shows that being grateful is a great way to enhance satisfaction with life and self esteem. I often forget to be grateful for what I have in the mad rush to get stuff done. When things slow down towards the end of the year, gratefulness gets a chance to re-emerge. When you think about it, there is a lot to be grateful about: having a (somewhat) healthy body, having a roof over your head, food to eat, friends and family, a sense of purpose in life...

Image of my injured knee

Some of the aspects of gratefulness that are emphasized in Lojong are also worth a mention: we usually have the habit to think that all the good things that befall us are our own merits. But actually when you think about it, a lot of the good things that happen are due to many causes and conditions that make those emerge. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche writes in The Intelligent Heart:"it is a gift from other sentient beings". Without the care of your parents, you would not be able to grow up into a functioning adult. Without the care of colleagues, you would be able to succeed and get promotion in your job. Without food to eat you would not be able to be healthy and survive. In this way, contemplating the kindness of others in acquiring what we enjoy can open our hearts to these others, instead of being oblivious to them. One thing that I was particularly grateful for in the past days is a chance to be a dancing angel in a Christmas mass/celebration for patients in the hospital. Such a gift to be able to give something to those suffering with my dancing!

Grateful for the chance to be a dancing angel for patients in the hospital

But there is more: we can even be grateful for the challenges provided by others. An example I got to work with this month was that another bicyclist hit me one morning as I was cycling to work. I fell on the pavement and my whole left side was scraped, blue and bloody (see picture for an impression). Even now, my knee is still a bit swollen, although it does not hurt anymore. While I was definitely not happy (especially about the fact that I had to skip several ballet classes because of my injured knee), this was my chance to practise "being grateful to everyone." I was definitely not very successful at appreciating this, but every so often I managed to use my injury as a tool to develop compassion for everyone else who was suffering as well. Feeling the pain in my own body somehow made other's suffering much more real, and I did the healing practices of Vajrasattva for both myself and others. So, in the end, there was benefit in the suffering, and looking back upon it, I can be grateful to the bicyclist who hit me. I feel that for every bit of suffering that I can transform, I become a bit less fearful, and acquire some wisdom that no-one will be able to take away from me.

Finally, for another reflection on gratitude, see this article by Salmaan Sana.

Finding freedom from criticism

Another #lojongchallenge slogan is "drive all blames into one". That sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? However, actually I found that here too the counter-intuitive slogan could help me find some freedom. The slogan refers to the ego, which according to the Buddhist teachings is the source of all suffering. How does this work? Well, in my understanding the ego is this part of yourself that tends to easily feel a victim when criticized, and the part of yourself that continually seeks praise. Neither of these things feels particularly good, does it? In the last weeks, I have been experimenting with my response to criticism. My normal reaction when someone criticises me is to go all in defensive mode, or to hide away. Basically I try to do everything to avoid feeling the criticism. However, Sogyal Rinpoche would always say that "a haircut is not a skin cut". In our minds the criticism may feel like a skin cut, but it's just someone trying to tell you something. In fact, very often the person is simply trying to teach you something. So can you approach the criticism with an attitude of curiosity and appreciation for the things they are trying to teach you rather than one of fear or defensiveness? One of my friends says that people who are very critical are actually very good because they keep you on your toes, where otherwise you may have gone into a comfortable lull and overlooked important issues. Moreover, the people who criticise you also help you with a bit of self-control. By being afraid of criticism we behave better. I found that when I am able to remember these things and simply face criticism as an opportunity to learn then it feels so much better (and probably is more useful too).

Picture by Dubravka Knezic

The other context where ego plays up is that it seeks continuous praise. However, if there is one thing true about life, then it is that you won't be praised all the time. And probably if you were, you would become a very arrogant and ill-tempered person. So, what to do? A very smart approach is to realize that all praise is not really that helpful: it makes you feel good on the short term, but then it does not teach you so much. Of course it teaches you a little about what behaviors should be cultivated, but probably people's opinions are quite biased. So, looking for praise is not really the recipe for becoming happy. I must confess that I am quite terrible at this, but I think that by contemplating this over and over may make me less dependent on praise, and less fearful of criticism. And in the end, that will most certainly make me happier.