Moving away from trendiness

It's strange to admit it, but in a work world defined by new business trends, constant change and the stress of constantly having to adjust, I find myself longing for and retreating to a personal world defined by constancy, predictability, and permanence. My circle of friends has narrowed; I find myself wanting to spend time with my closest and dearest friends. Big parties no longer hold much appeal. I look forward to dinners in quiet restaurants where I can have a decent conversation with my husband or my friends without us screaming to make ourselves heard. Or I look forward to dinners at home, in the comfort of my kitchen. Trendy restaurants no longer hold much appeal for me; they never really did. I don't mind trying them from time to time, but when the bill arrives, I often discover that the meal is overpriced and often not worth it. I find myself thinking that I could have made the meal better myself. I also don't like being forced to buy small meals that I must share with my dinner companions, one of the newer trends at present. I was at one of the new Michelin star restaurants recently with some friends, and we had to buy small meals to share, which I found irritating. We could not purchase a single individual meal. Why do restaurants do this? All it does is make me want to frequent restaurants that focus on serving decent and good food at reasonable prices. If I never step foot into another trendy restaurant, it will be fine with me.

Trendy anything no longer holds much appeal for me. I see no point in following a trend just because everyone else is doing so; I never really did, but earlier I might have paid some attention to them. Now I just ignore trends in general. I have no idea what type of clothing is popular or not; I just buy what I like and what fits comfortably. I bought a pair of bell-bottom jeans a few years ago, and I'm still wearing them (I have no idea whether or not that trend came and went--I like them in any case so I'll wear them until they fall apart). I do follow a lot of new music, but that's because I like all kinds of music, not just what's trendy. I will never go rock climbing, or tandem parachuting, or paragliding, or do any extreme sport. It's fine with me if others want to do these sports, but I won't be doing them. I will ride my bike, hike, or go for long walks. Or you'll find me in my garden, on my hands and knees, weeding or planting. I can spend hours doing that. At work, I do my job, try to think creatively, but in the final analysis, I am who I am--a decent scientist who does the best job she can do with the challenges given her. I step up to the plate and I deliver. If given responsibility, I do something with it and take the job seriously. I expect feedback and a real outcome (don't give me busy work). I'm an old-fashioned worker and an old-fashioned leader. I treat others as I would like to be treated--with respect, fairness, and kindness. I don't play mind games and I'm not interested in keeping others down or in inflating my own importance. I won't foist fancy buzzwords or trendy bureaucracy or leadership jargon on you. I may joke about them and share a laugh with you. I answer my emails, address email recipients by name, and make an honest attempt to really provide an answer or solution to someone's question. I am always surprised when recipients write back to thank me for answering them quickly, for being effective, for giving good advice, and for caring. There is a tone of surprise in their emails, and I am surprised by their surprise, because I was raised to behave this way. This is who I am. It often seems to me that the current business trend as a leader is to constantly inform your employees how busy you are--so busy that you cannot answer your emails, cannot address recipients by name, and cannot provide the answers necessary for your employees to do their jobs. I have gotten emails from leaders that consist of one line, and not even a whole sentence--and they have not addressed me personally. If that's the new trend, then to hell with it.

Getting older has its advantages. You know who you are and just how much bullshit you'll tolerate. You walk away from/advise against the 'hip' ways of doing things when you know that 'tried and true' works just as well. You walk away from 'change for the sake of change'. You listen more and talk less. You continue to listen and learn from others, but you trust yourself more. You know your worth. You are not easily knocked over or knocked down by anyone. You can tell off those who need telling off, make hard decisions when necessary, deal with conflict, and not look back in regret. There's a certain satisfaction in being able to do that, and in trusting oneself.

Defining academic productivity

At the end of Saturday’s post, I said that I would discuss productivity in a future post. I decided to write a short post about academic productivity today.

I found a useful definition of productivity at the following website, at least in terms of how it can be measured: http://www.investorwords.com/3876/productivity.html

‘The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital). There are many different ways of measuring productivity. For example, in a factory productivity might be measured based on the number of hours it takes to produce a good, while in the service sector productivity might be measured based on the revenue generated by an employee divided by his/her salary.’

Another definition comes from the Merriam Webster online dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/productive:

‘yielding results, benefits, or profits’.

There are difficulties in applying the first definition in its entirety to an academic researcher, because it is very difficult to directly measure a researcher’s economic productivity. The number of publications and grant funding (money given to the research organization where the academic works) are the standard ways of measuring an researcher’s productivity. A good number of publications often leads to more grant funding. And more grant funding in turn draws in more students. But all of this depends on the hierarchical level of the academic. It stands to reason that a staff scientist without a research group (students) cannot be as ‘productive’ as a professor with a large group of students around him or her. Can they even be compared? Yet they often are, especially when it comes to the numbers of publications produced. This is unfair, because in principle a large research group can produce many more publications than one scientist alone. Whether that is in fact true is another discussion. In any case, not all researchers get grants, which doesn’t mean that they are necessarily bad researchers. It simply means that they didn’t get funded this time around. But is that acceptable to the business administrators who control the research institutes and who insist on measuring productivity on an annual basis?

Most other research activities--e.g. advising, teaching, designing experiments, having meetings with students, and writing--don’t generate revenue. If a researcher/advisor spends several hours per week helping one graduate student who is clueless about how to proceed with his or her research article and data interpretation, how do we measure productivity in this situation? The advisor has invested time, energy and intellectual focus in these activities--meeting, advising, and discussing. What is the tangible product? Over time, the product may be (emphasis on the may) an article or two from a student. Or perhaps not, as this can depend on the whim of the involved student as to whether he or she will write those articles. There is no guarantee of a publishable article for all the hard work invested in the student. If graduate students aren’t productive and won't write articles, it can reflect poorly on the advisor because there will be no papers to publish unless the adviser ends up writing them himself. A lack of articles can lead to not getting grants. Published papers are proof that an academic is productive; proof that an academic has done his or her job, which is to do science and to train graduate students how to do science, as well as to write/help to write the articles resulting from research activity. But how many published articles are enough, and how many are too few? Is it quantity or quality that counts?

And what should be done about the academic researchers whose graduate students leave research for the greener pastures of the business world without finishing their PhD degrees? Who don’t stick around despite the huge investment of the researchers’ time and money for lab consumables, conferences and travel? Is this the fault of these researchers? Was it a waste of time and money to train them? The point is that these graduate students got valuable research training before leaving academia. It has to be accepted that whatever they do with that training afterwards is their business. If they leave the research world, well, then they leave it. No one can stop them from doing so. So here’s the rub. Should academic researchers’ productivity be measured by how many of the trained students go on to become academics themselves? If that is the case, it will take years before productivity can be assessed correctly.

The second definition talks about yielding results, benefits or profits. Research activities such as doing lab work, generating data, reading, advising, teaching and writing articles do yield results, but not necessarily profits, unless ideas are patentable, leading to collaborations with big business, e.g. pharmaceutical firms that can produce a profitable drug to treat a specific illness. But getting a patent approved can take many years. So it’s difficult for me to understand the emphasis on increasing academic productivity. I'm not sure what this really means. Again I ask, who will define this adequately, and will it be fair? It strikes me as rather naïve on the part of business administrators to not even make an attempt to understand the complexities of the academic research world, and yet this is the current situation—administrators who have no real idea of what academics do, yet who insist that academics increase their productivity so that the organizations for which they work can get their 'money’s worth' out of them. 

Changing jobs

So many people I know both here and in the USA are switching jobs or would like to. It’s not easy these days to get a new job in either country; there are usually hundreds of applicants for one position and the interview rate is abysmally low. Perhaps five people get called in to an interview out of fifty applicants; ten percent in other words. It may sound like a high percentage, but if you’re not one of the lucky five people, it doesn’t matter. I am so happy for the few people I know who have just found out that they will be starting new jobs and will be leaving my workplace. They deserve their new positions after years spent working hard and getting nowhere fast. Because my workplace does not really reward hard work and professional competence; it rewards other things—political savvy and a broad belief in the power of administrators and a balanced budget (a pipe dream). So again, if you’re not one of the lucky few who ‘makes’ it based on these characteristics, you don’t make it. I would need to write a book to explain why this is so; suffice it to say that if you are a doctor or a nurse or an administrator you are worth something to the hospital. If you are a scientific researcher, you are worth less these days simply because budgets have to be balanced and there is no direct ‘product’ from your work that can be measured in the same way as the hospital can measure the number of patients admitted, treated and released. The hospital wants numbers; scientists know that research takes time and that the results of research will be published eventually, but they have no control over how fast that process occurs. It can sometimes take two years to publish an article. This is not good for the bottom line of an accounting sheet. Why does it take so long? Because you can get an article rejected the first time around, also the second time around, and then perhaps it will be published on the third try. It can thus take up to one year to get an article accepted by a journal and another six months to a year before it is actually in print. Effective? No. Frustrating? Yes. Because the administrators want evidence of ‘production’ and it doesn’t go fast enough for them. We are not considered productive in the same way as a doctor or nurse would be. We are therefore expendable, and if it wasn’t for the fact that scientists working in the public sector are organized in this country, we would be the first to go, of that I have no doubt.

I know there is no such thing as the perfect job. But I know too that there are better workplaces than the one I work in; workplaces that are focused on their employees’ wellbeing, that want them to thrive and to succeed. Why is this important? Because these workplaces know that a happy motivated employee will do a good job for his or her workplace. It’s only to do the math. None of this is very complicated to figure out, and I’m surprised that more workplaces haven’t figured it out. I wish my workplace would figure it out. But I know they won’t and it’s time to just stop talking about it. I’m done, as one of my friends in New York often says. And she means it. I mean it too.

I know people in the USA who have been without a job for several years now. They have applied for food stamps in order to buy food and they ask family and friends for financial help. I know it’s not easy there to find a job or to keep it. I don’t know though if this is just the corporate world, or if this is true for the public sector as well. I don’t know how it is these days generally in the USA anymore where workplaces are concerned; I’ve been away from the country too long. I just know how it is here in Norway. A recent article stated that over fifty-five percent of workers want to retire when they are sixty-two years old. I am one of them. The article focused on the fact that most of these people are in for a shock when they find out how little their monthly pensions will actually be, and that they will find it difficult to live. I am taking steps to prepare myself for this eventuality. One of them is to sock away as much money each month as possible to make early retirement possible. Other possibilities include acknowledging that one may end up working part-time—two or three days a week. So many people tell me that I will be bored or that I will miss full-time work if I retire early. I already know that I won’t. I am looking forward to changing my life (and would love to change it now), to having time to do volunteer work, to read, to do consulting work, to write, and so many other things. I won’t be bored. Retirement could not be more boring than being stuck in a job where one is invisible, unused and unappreciated. Apparently fifty-five percent of all workers agree on one thing—by sixty-two they will have had enough of their workplaces. The problem of course is what they’re (we’re) all going to do with our newfound free time. As I said, I am making plans already. If plan A doesn’t work there will be plan B, and so forth. I am planning for retirement the way I never planned my career or my retirement investments when I was younger. But it’s never too late to start. And who knows, maybe I will be one of the lucky ones that ends my work life in a job that is fulfilling and that makes me happy--the way I felt ten to fifteen years ago about my job. Nothing beats that feeling of loving your work. But time changes things and the ways things are done, and you cannot hang onto the past or dwell there. It’s just to accept how the present is and plan from there.

Musings about change and depression

Nearly a year has gone by since I began writing this blog. I began writing it to help me deal with the many changes that were occurring in my workplace, among other things. The changes themselves would have been difficult enough to deal with in my home country (USA), but the fact that they happened here in Norway made them even tougher. That is because it has been nearly impossible to ‘crack the code’ in terms of understanding how my workplace functions, what leaders want (or don’t want), how to get ahead, how to ‘get around’ some of the ancient rules that govern it, and so forth. It has made me feel somewhat better to know that many Norwegians in my workplace haven’t been able to make sense of the changes either. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Because unless you’ve lived in another country for a number of years, you have no idea of what can happen to you and your sense of judgment in a different culture. No matter what happens, you will always question yourself and your sense of judgment first when things don’t go as planned. Did I interpret this wrong, was I to blame, did I misunderstand the other person or the conclusions from a meeting, and so on. I have spent many years trying to fit in ‘career-wise’, trying to understand the Scandinavian corporate/business/academic mentality, doing my best, giving my all, in the quest to do a great job and to succeed as a research scientist. It has not been easy. It would not have been easy anywhere else either, but it was doubly hard here to succeed in any way because of the extra effort that had to go into trying to figure out the system. I have not been fortunate enough to have had mentors or sponsors. My husband has been a wonderful support system but he has also had difficulties of his own trying to figure out his workplace (we now work for the same hospital conglomerate, just in different locations of the city).

During the past year I have written a lot about my work life in an attempt to understand what happened to my workplace and by extension, to me and my colleagues during that time. The past three to four years have been transition years involving a lot of reorganization and restructuring associated with a huge merger of four major city hospitals, and when the dust settled, it was time to start the process over again since the powers that be who organized the first restructuring were not satisfied. And so it goes. I’ve written about colleagues who have had difficulty adjusting to all the changes; I’ve written about my own struggles adjusting to so many changes. Not all the changes have affected us directly, but even if they have not, they affect workplace morale generally, because budgets have been cut, the quality of patient care is always being questioned, research grant support has been reduced, and there is a lot of talk about the good old days when there was more money available and less bureaucracy and administration. But there is no point in talking about the old days. They are gone. There is much more bureaucratic control now, and a hierarchy of leadership that did not exist before. Is it a better system? Only time will tell. If it works out, it will be because employees made a concerted effort to make it work. There is no guarantee that it will work out, however, and that is the big gamble. The politicians who decided on this huge merger can be voted out, and the new ones who come in can in principle decide to reverse some of what has happened if they don’t like what they see. Plus there is always something new on the horizon, some new social trend or policy that can be implemented so that the legacies of different politicians will be ensured. In the meantime, huge social experiments go unremarked. I wonder if there are sociologists studying the effects of huge mergers on employees. I am waiting for the data from those studies. But so far, I haven’t heard of any such studies.  

 

Massive changes can make workers unhappy and even depressed, especially when they do not really understand what is happening around them. To be fair, despite considerable effort to keep employees informed, it is nearly impossible for a workplace to prepare them for all eventualities. But what employees want to know is not how fantastic everything is going to be once the dust settles; they want to know how the changes are going to affect them personally. They need reassurance that their jobs are not in danger. They need to hear that they are more than just chess pawns who can be pushed around on the chess board, plucked up from one area of the board and set down on another. They want to hear that they are doing a good job; they want to know that their projects can proceed as usual; they want some normalcy and stability in a highly unstable situation. There are always employees who thrive on continual change. The majority of employees thrive on stability, and that has to be recognized and accepted by workplace leaders. You cannot demand loyalty and obedience from your employees while telling them that their jobs might be in danger. You cannot tell them to ‘get out’ if they don’t like what is happening around them. This was essentially the message from one of my workplace leaders in a lecture she gave prior to a Christmas party (of all things) several years ago. Some people may have liked her style. I found it unappealing and rather tactless, because she was stating the obvious and didn’t need to. It’s aggressive and unnecessarily so. It’s not how you win friends and influence people. A better approach might have been to have said that there will be changes and that some of them may be difficult, but that we are a team and that if we all pull together, we can get through the changes and perhaps come out stronger. But she is a pawn herself in a long line of pawns that have to spout the company line. I doubt she felt comfortable spouting the rhetoric. If I am representative of the average worker, all I can say at this point in time is that the vagueness and ambiguity that existed prior to the merger have gotten larger, not smaller. It is not possible to get an overview, no matter how hard one tries. I find it difficult in any case. Do I need the overview? I don’t know. I’ve been told that I do, that it’s important to understand the workplace and management structure. Some people I know wonder who their bosses are, because in some cases, people now have three or more bosses—some who have administrative responsibility for employees, some who have the professional responsibility. But when employees ask who their new boss is, they don’t get an answer. So is it any wonder that employees get depressed?

Depression, according to the psychiatrist and author Rollo May, is the “inability to construct a future”. For some reason this definition resonated with me. I responded to it viscerally and intuitively. Why? Because it felt true. When you are depressed, you are stuck. You don’t know which way to turn, because you don’t have a clue about the future. You cannot envision your future nor can you see how to go about building or creating it. In order to create anything, you must be able to visualize it first. With depression you lose the ability to visualize the future. You are stuck in the now. All your creative and mental energy goes into figuring out the ‘now’.  It’s as though a fog settles over your head, blocking your forward view. You are forced to stop driving and to sit on the side of the road. You become passive, waiting for instructions or a road map for how to proceed further. Your energy flow gets blocked. Or you may drive around the same area over and over, stopping at the same stop sign, and not getting any further, because you have lost your sense of direction. Depression may not be a bad thing if you manage to deal with it eventually, if you get frustrated enough with being stuck. It is harmful when you give up and give in and those approaches become a permanent way of dealing with the trials that life deals out.

The Chinese talk about chi (qi), the energy flow in a person, as being an important aspect of a person’s health and life situation. It makes sense to me. If that energy flow is blocked, it will affect the health and energy level of a person. Again, I respond to this intuitively; it just makes sense. The blockage must be dealt with in order for the energy to flow. The goal is harmony for the mind and body. Sometimes it is enough just to read an inspirational text; the blockage may dissipate once the mind understands the situation in a new way. That is the beauty and the power of the written word. In other situations, a good film or conversation may achieve the same thing. The important thing is to free the energy. 

Progress report

I don’t know what I would do without all the faceless bureaucrats and administrators to keep me in line at work. They’re just unknown names to me--anonymous. They send out their numerous emails and reminder emails to look at the first emails and all I can think of is—thank God someone is watching over me. What would I do without them? They remind me to fill out this or that progress report, to download this or that form, and I wonder how I survived and managed ten years ago without all this ‘follow-up’. I guess some of it is good and even necessary. But the amount of email I get now is incredible—too much in other words—and the amount of regular post has dwindled to nothing. I check the regular mailbox I have at work and it is nearly always empty. I wonder how the post office survives these days. I wonder how come postal workers are not being laid off in record numbers. The same is true for home mail; I get very little mail and I miss it. I used to like opening the mailbox and seeing cards and letters from friends and family, as well as the occasional advertisements and catalogs. It was something to look forward to. I guess it’s cheaper for clothing stores and electronics stores to send emails with attachments, but I don’t see the savings passed on to us, the customers. I’m waiting for that day.

But back to my emails. Today was one of those Mondays that started well. I decided to focus on my work—on a lecture that I am preparing. I was actually gaining momentum and getting into it, when suddenly I remembered the email from last Thursday, reminding me to fill out and send in a progress report having to do with how I have spent the twelve thousand dollars in grant support for consumables that was awarded me in December 2010. This is how the grant application process proceeded last year. I wrote the grant in May, sent it to the granting agency in June and it came back with a reply in December. The money was transferred to my hospital account in January 2011. The granting agency wants to know how I have spent twelve thousand dollars in the space of two to three months. I have stretched this amount of money to last up to one year many times before, because it’s not often one gets grant support of any kind. So it’s highly unlikely that I would have used it up already. So I wrote this on my progress report. I was honest. I wrote that my work was dependent upon this particular sum of money and that since it was just made available to me in January of this year, that I have not had a chance to spend it, which is true, because I have been busy planning and designing the experiments that will require purchase of specific reagents to complete them. So I found it almost amusing that they wanted me to report on my progress already. I would have thought it sufficient to ask how I was doing in August or September. Then I might have been able to tell them that my experiments were going well or that they were going to hell. One or the other. Additionally, ordering necessary items has become a lengthy process, so that it is also unlikely that I could have ordered everything I needed in the space of a couple of months. So this is my progress report anno 2011.

I have to wonder what happens to all the progress reports. Who keeps track of them, and who reads them? Do they get stapled to your file and get perused by the grant reviewers who will look at all the new grant applications this year? Will they appreciate my honesty, or will they think I’m playing a game with them? I’m not. Honesty is not a game. Political correctness is, and I’m not very good at it. So let the chips fall where they may. At least I got my progress report in on time. I hope that counts in my favor. Now I’m trying to remember how many other progress reports I have to fill out before I can get back to what I really am paid to do—work. 

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.  

Small is better

Many years ago, my sister and my father read a book called Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher. Both of them recommended the book to me, but I did not read it at that time, and still haven’t done so. I could imagine doing so now. It’s taken me an entire work life to get to the point where I viscerally understand that bigger is not better, growth is not necessarily good, and productivity without humanity is soulless and demoralizing. I no longer see the point of huge corporations and conglomerates. I have to admit that when I was younger, I looked forward to joining a large company, to becoming loyal to it, to representing it, and to feeling safe within its walls. I looked forward to becoming part of a corporate family. I viewed small companies or self-driven businesses as risky places to work, because there was no guarantee of a stable income or even of a future. And maybe at the time I began my work career, large companies were stable and humanistic organizations for the most part, but thirty years later, it is clear to me that this is not the case. But considering the employment problems my father had working for large corporations during the 1960s and 70s, I’d have to say that I was just naïve thirty years ago, and thought perhaps that my traverse through the business world would be a much different experience than his was. To some extent that has been true. I have not suffered unemployment the way my father did. But I have experienced firsthand what it is like to be a number in a huge system that does not really care about its employees. I did not end up in the business world per se. Although I briefly considered a business career, science won out and I ended up as a scientist working in large hospitals, first in New York City and now in Oslo. The seven years I spent working for the research institute at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, a private hospital, were among the best work years I have ever had. I was proud to work there and I will always have those memories. I never felt like just a number in a system or like a nameless employee. I work now as a staff scientist in a medical department at a large hospital corporation in Oslo, which became a huge conglomerate following the merger of four separate city hospitals, all of which are public sector institutions at different locations. This was a political directive—of course the politicians know best. I don’t know if the private versus public sector aspect is the major difference between the two hospitals in terms of my experience of them. Both of them are large hospitals. All I can say is that working for a huge public hospital has become an exercise in dealing with an organization that is so huge that it no longer has any overview over individual employees nor does it really care about them. We are numbers in a huge system and we got lost in it a long time ago. The merger of four city hospitals was supposed to improve patient services and care, cut costs, centralize competence to specific areas, and reduce administration. It has not accomplished any of these things. Perhaps it is too soon to try to measure the success of the merger, I don’t really know. All I know is that hospital administration has grown by leaps and bounds. Costs have soared. Everything has gotten bigger. There has been growth. We measure productivity and effectiveness. We write progress reports. We will be required to participate in psychosocial evaluations of our workplace environment that will result in more reports that will be filed with the personnel department and perhaps studied by a doctoral student at some point. When we need to order an item for the lab, the actual ordering process requires the involvement of at least three to four people, whereas ten years ago we could pick up the phone and order it directly or send a fax to do the same (exactly one person was involved, the person doing the ordering). We receive monthly overviews of our budgets now that very few people actually understand. I don’t understand them. Negative values in one column mean that we have unused money and positive values in another column mean that we have spent money. But the reverse is true if we look at another section of the table. My budget deficit grows larger each month due to the fact that money appropriated for my salary has been coming from the wrong account. I have reported this mistake to my superiors at least three times, and each time they have tried to correct the mistake with the accounting department. But the mistake is still there each month. There is growth; my budget deficit gets larger. But I’m not doing anything to make it larger; it’s growing by itself. I’m not ordering anything because I don’t know how much money I actually have anymore. The other day I noticed another mistake, this time having to do with my job classification. I am a scientist with professor competence (since November 2007); this corresponds to competence class 9. I informed my superiors in 2007 that I had achieved professor competence. I should be in competence class 9. But no, I am in competence class 8, scientist with a PhD. This mistake was corrected in January 2011 and then uncorrected in February 2011. No one informed me why it was changed. No one cares enough to do so. I don’t know who to inform about it anymore, since I’m not sure that anyone even cares about a ‘miniscule’ little problem like this. The problem is that a lot of us have been placed in the wrong competence classes and this affects salary levels. No one seems to care. When I was a board member for my scientists’ union, these were the issues I was trying to correct and deal with, until the union leader for the hospital conglomerate decided to harass his board members to the point where half of the board quit, myself included. He worked against us instead of for us. And so I ask, with ‘friends’ like this, who needs enemies? It is yet another example of how the system is imploding.

Everything feels too big now, and all I feel is miniscule. I am insignificant to the system. It doesn’t care about me, and I no longer care about it. I don’t know what it stands for anymore, and I have no idea of its goal. If someone could tell me that I’d be glad. But it wouldn’t change my views. I want a smaller environment now, a more personal one. If I was going to work for another company, I’d want one boss to relate to, not three or four and I’d want to have one name or at most two names of people who could help me when I had a problem or a question. I wouldn’t want to be just a number in a soulless organization. The problem is that I’ve run out of steam. I don’t want to start over somewhere else, unless it was to start my own little company. And it would be a little company. At this point, I’d be happiest being my own boss, maybe working with one or two other people, happily being of service to whoever needed my help. I wouldn’t have to delude myself that my loyalty to a conglomerate would be rewarded, because my loyalty would be to myself and my little organization. Small is better. I’m convinced of that now. It’s better because then people matter. I would matter, the few people I worked with would matter, and that would be enough. Maybe this will happen, who knows. In the meantime, I try in the best possible way to be human in an inhuman system. I help those who need my help. I am honest when asked for advice. I don’t spout the politically-correct rhetoric. I support those who are lower than me in the system. But I wonder what will happen when the implosion is complete. I hope I’m somewhere else when it happens. Somewhere where those around me believe in small is beautiful, small is better. 

Watershed years

I was writing to a friend the other day and used the term ’watershed year’ to describe the effect that 2010 has had on me. 2010 was a watershed year for me. It simply means that it was a turning point in my life. So many things happened that were out of my control, and the more I tried to control the chaos, the worse it got. So I let go. There are years like that, and for me, the years 1985, 2001 and 2010 have been those types of years. 1985 was a year that was filled with loss— people I thought I could trust betrayed me, and my father and my cat passed away. It was also a wake-up call to pay attention to my life, to ‘not cast my pearls before swine’ as the New Testament so aptly puts it. 2001 was another watershed year. I woke up to the fact that there really are people in the world who hate the USA and who hate Americans so intensely that they will do whatever it takes to destroy them. I watched the Towers come down on September 11 and a part of me died that day. My belief in the goodness of the world died that day. Watching so many people die in that manner was horrific, and it was made all the more horrific by the fact that I experienced it from Europe and could not be in my country at that time to help or to serve. I cannot watch video footage of that day without reliving the horror. So now I understand in a small way how it must be for war veterans, who actually fought the battles and dealt with the daily horrors, and who try to forget them and go on with their lives. How can you ever really truly forget? My experience is miniscule by comparison, a drop in the bucket of suffering. I learned what empathy means in a whole new way. And I also learned that people could suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome years after the fact, and that it is a real condition that causes continuous suffering to good people. 2001 was the year I became an American for real, to my core. I never knew what that meant before. It was also the year I lost my mother, another intense blow.

2010 was not like these years; it was the year I truly woke up to the treachery of the work world and to what it meant to worship at the altar of a false god. I finally understood what that means after many years of hearing that expression. And I did not lose my job as did others I know who have been treated like cast-offs by their workplaces. Michael Moore hit the nail on the head in ‘Capitalism, A Love Story’ when he accuses Wall Street firms of crimes against the people. He has mega-guts. And he tells it like it is. I had already begun to suspect that the work world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be a few years ago when I wrote a book about passive-aggressive bosses and their negative impact on workers and workplaces. But even after writing my book I still had the ‘belief’ (or hope?) that it could all work out given the right set of circumstances. Now I know, just like I know that it is right that some relationships should end because they are hazardous for a person to continue to be in, that it is also right that some beliefs should wither and die, because to hang onto them serves no one. But like letting go of a bad personal relationship, letting go of a bad work relationship involves a grieving process. It means dealing with the loss of your belief in what you have devoted yourself to for years on end. It means changing your focus and giving up loyalty to your workplace and giving up caring about and nurturing your workplace goal. It means redefining yourself, and as one of my unemployed friends in the USA said to me recently, “if I hear from one more person that you should just ‘redefine yourself’ once more, I’m going to vomit”. Why? Because it’s not easy to ‘just’ redefine yourself. It’s not a magic process whereby you snap your fingers and whoosh, you’re a new and improved person, like Samantha could do in ‘Bewitched’. How cool would that be, to be able to do that? No, for us mortals, it involves tears, sorrow, bitching, more tears, more bitching, ranting, and raving. And those who can do all these things, who can get their feelings out, are the lucky ones, ultimately. What about the people who keep it all bottled up inside? How do they deal with it? If one is lucky, over the course of some months or even years, acceptance begins to rear its head. Resignation also enters the picture. A pragmatic view of personal expectations versus how realistic the outcome of those expectations will be in your workplace emerges. You realize that some people win and others lose. That’s how it works. We cannot all be winners. But you also learn that looking at the world in terms of who wins and who loses is a pointless effort. Who cares ultimately? It reminds me of grammar school all over again; those who got the A’s were the winners. But all these years later, who really remembers that or cares? It’s what you’ve done in the meantime with your life that counts. And even if your workplace deems you to be a person it no longer needs or cares about, it cannot take from you your accomplishments, successes, contributions or service to that workplace. In short, it cannot destroy what you meant for them, and if it tries, it should be destroyed in turn. No workplace should be allowed to re-write its history in a vacuum. It cannot just wipe the slate and start over after getting rid of those it no longer wants or needs. It should also be forced to ‘deal’ with loss, to grieve over those losses, and to learn from them, just like the employees who worked for them have had to do.

So what have I learned from all that happened in 2010? What have I learned from all my conversations with others in my position or from those who have lost their jobs? To start with, learn to develop a thick skin. Try not to take it all personally, even though it may feel like a personal attack. But learn to wean yourself off the ‘loyalty’ addiction. Don’t cast your pearls before swine. Be very careful to whom you give your loyalty, your focus, your devotion, your time, and your energy. If this is good advice on the personal relationship front, it’s good advice on the workplace front. Like some people, some workplaces are simply not worth your efforts. And that’s worth finding out, even if you find out the hard way.

Being of service to others

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."    

(Buddha)

"It’s been said that you cannot give away what you do not have. One of the most spiritual important insights or secrets in life is that you already have, and always have had, what you need to give away! If you impart the message that ’I am not worthy’ the universe will send it straight back in many shapes, forms and circumstances. When we say ’give me’ we are imparting this message. We are saying we think we need to get something to complete ourselves or prove our worth. Most of us are taught to live a life of gimmie gimmie gimmie - always striving, desiring, wanting, struggling. We do so only because we think that when we get what we want we will be fulfilled and esteemed by others. But it’s an illusion. We are all already complete and worthy but we cannot know it and experience it, until we give it away! Only giving allows us to know what we are and what we have within. Ask the question - how can I serve? The intention to serve will point you towards what you need to give. If the intention is real it also generates the will. The most successful people in life are not go getters, but go givers!"    

(Innerspace)

These are two small gifts that I want to share on my birthday which is today. I came upon them randomly but I know by now that nothing comes my way without a reason. I wondered about the connection between the two quotes and why both struck me as relevant right now in my life. And then I realized that perhaps one can feel anger when one is not doing what one should be doing, which is being of service to others. This is something I want to think more about. 

School of hard knocks

For those of you who have been following this blog since May, I just want to say that many of the recent posts have had a lot to do with my work situation. My focus these past few months has been on trying to understand what the hell happened this year at work, to me and to those around me and to the work environment. I apologize for my work focus but I am finding it so hard to believe (and to accept) that the merger of four hospitals could have the impact it has had on us, but it has. The only word that comes to mind these days is implosion—I just feel that everything around us is imploding, despite everyone’s best efforts (presumably) to prevent it. Or is it just a gut feeling that doesn’t have to come true? Am I just glooming and dooming? I hope so. All I know is that whatever happens to ‘little me’ has got to be happening to others—accounting mishaps and gross errors, an ordering system that defies logic, a leadership structure that also defies logic (no one knows who their real boss is and even the bosses are not sure who they are responsible for—I report to three people but I try to limit it to one person to keep my sanity). We are expected to inform the chain of command about most things, so I do, in order not to cause problems. There has been a large loss of ‘freedom’, which bothers me because I have never abused any of the freedoms I have had before as a scientist. We have office managers who force us to deal with problems that we are not trained for or equipped to handle, e.g., complicated accounting practices that we as scientists have no chance in hell of understanding. We are expected to be administrators and to like it. I don’t mind office work but it wasn’t exactly what I signed on for when I decided I was going to do science. But I’m moving in the direction of more office work. It’s easier to give in so as not to make waves.

This year I was offered the same leadership position twice and twice it was retracted. The reason given was that I could not officially report to my husband, which would have been the case had I become leader. Ok, I can accept that. What I cannot understand is why the whole idea of offering it to me was ok at the beginning of January but not by the end of April. So I let go of wanting that to happen. I was told that my staff scientist job had to be ‘defended’ to the clinic leaders so it was obviously in danger of being phased out. Luckily it wasn’t. I got my PhD student through this past year and was told that I could not receive any money for this (as is usually the case) because I was not a professor at the university. This seems strange to me. I am professor competent but that was apparently not good enough. I have eighty-four peer-reviewed scientific publications, I review grants for external international institutes, and I am a peer reviewer for over eight journals. My boss told me that I should be happy with the articles that my student and I have published together—that this was reward enough. That’s fine except that if the same happened to him he would be pretty pissed off about it. But it will never happen to him. I was told that my job was to be re-defined back in May, but as of this date it has not been. So I wait. Inertia rules.

I shifted my focus toward doing some secretarial work for my union board and helping them with salary negotiations during this autumn. And so began other problems. My union leader, a man with very little respect for professional women, began to cause problems for the board. Then he began to cause problems for me. I am still dealing with the repercussions of his unprofessional and idiotic behavior. I decided I had to blow the whistle on some of his behavior and I did. It is not easy to do this and I know now why people would rather avoid sticking their head up or their neck out. You don’t know what you’re in for before it happens. And then it takes on a life of its own. Inertia rules.

The final straw for this year was finding out that my salary has been coming from the wrong account and that this account has incurred a deficit of over 120,000 USD since I was hired as a permanent full-time employee by my hospital in January 2008. Another boss refers to this money as Excel money because the accountants just shift money around like they were playing Monopoly, but whatever the case, this makes me nervous. I reported the situation to this boss almost two years ago and he reported it further to the accounting department and nothing has happened, just that the deficit grows larger since they don’t seem to understand the problem. I find it hard to believe that this can go on and that this can bode well for the future of an enterprise. People around me tell me not to take it personally (I don’t) but the level of incompetence I see around me bothers me. For every person who is trying to make sense of his or her job, there are five administrators who are just complicating everything exponentially.

So this is the school of hard knocks. I haven’t taken any courses at any university this year but I have learned an incredible amount about incompetence, unprofessional behavior, lack of a work ethic, avoidance of responsibility, shifting the blame onto others as often as possible, not doing anything about a problem or a conflict, not leaving a paper trail (no emails), not showing up at important meetings and covering your ass in case it’s necessary to do so. I have learned that passive-aggressive behavior in workplace leaders is fairly commonplace. At present I am fairly black and blue from all the pummeling that has been going on. But I have learned that I need to get better at punching back. I need to learn to become a better fighter. 2011 will be an interesting year in such regard.  

The lowly pawns

I played two games of chess with my computer last week and I actually won one game, surprisingly enough. It was my pawns that gave me the advantage, and it got me thinking about life and how it can surprise you at times. Pawns have the lowest value compared to the other chess pieces, and it was somehow fitting that it was the pawns that helped me win. I couldn’t help but find some symbolism in this little achievement. The pawns can advance only one square at a time and they can be used to capture your opponent’s pieces on the diagonal. If you are so lucky as to have your pawns reach the farthest rank of the board, they can be exchanged for your captured pieces. So a pawn can become your queen that was captured, and so on. Slow and steady wins the race, at least sometimes.

I used to play chess with my father a lot when I was a teenager. I think it was he who taught me the game. It must be said that he was not a good loser. But that didn’t stop us from playing chess together. I learned so much from chess, and my rediscovery of how interesting the game really is made me think about why I like it. It is very cool to be able to ‘see’ ahead in terms of planning your moves. There is a cold hard logic involved that I like. And that has absolute relevance to life too. It is essential to be able to see the repercussions of a decision one makes, or to evaluate several options and to wander down the mental roads that each option could lead to. There is certainty and lack of certainty contained within each option, and that is the feeling I feel when I play chess. You can plan your moves and anticipate how your opponent may move, but you may overlook something and your opponent may surprise you. Thus the excitement and the anxiety of the game—it feels like high stakes are involved—even if you are a lowly amateur to the game.

There are so many plays for power and control around me these days, especially at work. The words of a former colleague ring in my ears at times—'your work environment is mostly characterized by ruthless power struggles'. Naïve as I am, I don’t think I ever really totally internalized this fact. Or perhaps I thought I was outside the realm of power so that it would never affect me. Little me—who would have thought I would be a threat to anyone? But apparently I am, just because I have opinions and because I open my mouth and state them. You shouldn’t do that these days—you should keep your mouth shut and your head down and do as you’re told.

The word ‘checkmate’ has been popping into my head here and there the past few weeks. Not surprising perhaps, because during the past two weeks I have been witness to some of the most ruthless power struggles in my work life thus far and for some reason that has triggered the chess symbolism. Because some of those power struggles involve me indirectly (roundabout efforts to keep me from gaining any power whatsoever), I feel like a pawn that keeps advancing slowly, one step at a time. Most of the time the pawns get pushed out of the way, but every now and then one of them can make it possible for the other pieces to corner the king. Checkmate. It’s about seeing the moves your opponents may make and acting accordingly. I realize that I have been pushed out of the way for a while now. I haven’t understood the game until now. I’m keeping my cool and planning my moves, one step at a time, and who knows how it will turn out. 

Wake me when it's time to retire!

Just thought I'd share a comic with you today that kind of describes how I feel most days about working........Thank God for humor, for irony, for self-irony, for the ability to laugh. Without it, I'd be sunk.......

http://www.gocomics.com/getalife/2010/11/19/

New Public Management in a Nutshell

I don't know where this cartoon originally came from, but it's a good one. It demonstrates the system of New Public Management in a nutshell.

"In this economic crisis, we unfortunately have no option but to terminate Andre".

The Emperor's New Clothes--New Public Management

I attended a breakfast seminar yesterday morning sponsored by Forskerforbundet--my union. Yes, scientists here are unionized (you don’t have to join a union but it is encouraged and smart to do so for a lot of reasons), and Forskerforbundet is definitely one of the largest unions. It is quite an active group and keeps its members well-informed about what is happening on the scientific, political and economic fronts in this country and internationally. The topic of the seminar—‘Have current government politics led to a better everyday life for employees in academia?’--was the reason I decided to attend. The resounding answer for most of the attendees was no. There were four speakers who had brief presentations and then the floor was open for debate. One of the lectures was entitled—‘Accounting as Politics’; it was very enlightening. It was essentially a presentation of New Public Management (NPM), how this management style is defined, and its impact on the public sector when it is implemented. Afterwards it was interesting to hear university and college employees—scientists, teachers and educational administrators—talk about how bad the current situation has become under NPM. NPM in the public sector is the big topic of discussion these days. I found the seminar interesting because the speakers managed to crystallize, explain and confirm the feelings I have had about the changes in my workplace during the past few years. Things just don’t feel right anymore, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what is wrong either. What I do know is that finances and budgets are the only things that interest upper-level management these days; also that scientists are expected to understand complicated accounting practices and are reprimanded if they do not make an effort to understand them. A few years ago I remember telling an accountant in my workplace who called me about some mistake he thought I had made that if he wanted me to spend a lot of time learning his job, then he needed to come into my lab and learn how to do my job while I was busy learning his, because someone had to fill in the gap. There was silence on the other end of the phone and then a click as he hung up on me. I am certain that he made a note somewhere that ‘this woman is difficult’ or something similar. I am difficult—I question authority. I ask-- ‘who made these (new) rules’. We are expected to drop whatever we are doing on a moment’s notice to focus on some monetary or budget issue that is suddenly of prime importance today, but of course we know that tomorrow it will be something else again. It surprises me that no one in upper management has made the connection that the lack of focus on the actual job that a scientist was hired to do (research) due to constant administrative distractions and paper-pushing leads to a fragmented work approach that in turn leads to loss of productivity and reduced efficiency. This never seems to get discussed.

What is NPM, you may ask. A few years ago none of us knew what it was, let alone its impact on our daily work lives. NPM is a management theory that has already seen its day, as far as I can ascertain from the little I have read about it. It is already considered passé in other countries that fell willingly into its snares and then managed to free themselves from it. But Norway appears to have welcomed it with open arms, putting its unique twist on it as only socialist democrats can do. In theory, its tenet is that optimal management of the public budget results in better economic outcomes and increased efficiency (due to competition). It is rather utopian in its quest for perfect efficiency and a perfectly-balanced budget. We all know that in the real world, and especially in the health care system, perfect efficiency and a perfectly-balanced budget are impossible to achieve as long as patients are involved. But this system treats patients as commodities. And it treats the employees in these systems as commodities as well. It’s a cold management style. You are only as valuable to your workplace as your productivity deems you to be. In other words, you are measured by what you produce. The problem with this way of looking at things in the healthcare system and in academia/education is the following—what are doctors and nurses ‘producing’? Hospitals are not factories. Cancer research institutes are not factories. Colleges and universities are not factories. What are academicians, researchers and educators ‘producing’? Looked at in the NPM way, researchers are producing articles about their work. They are being measured by their output. The production of more articles and the production of more PhD and Masters students means more money for the institution one works for and for the individual researcher. The scientists and academicians who survive and who are rewarded in the current environment are those who are well-funded with large research groups. If you are a small research group, the idea of real competition with a large research group is a joke. How can large and small research groups compete on equal playing ground? They are not well-matched from the start point. But this is what we deal with now. We are told that ‘we are good, but not good enough’, and if we only do so-and-so, that we will suddenly get more money and more students. We are encouraged to ‘compete’ and to live up to our ‘potential’ even though most of us realize that the world is such that only a few people ever reach the top or become the best. Those of us who come from non-socialist systems understand this from the start point. But understanding this does not mean that you cannot do good work and find your niche in the system. Accepting that you are not the best in a particular field does not mean that you cannot work in and do good work in that field. But there is little room for that sort of thinking in NPM.

So what is a ‘good employee’ in an NPM system? As far as I can determine, a good employee is obedient, subservient to the goals of a balanced budget and perfect efficiency, and one that does not combat the system in any way. A good employee does not make waves, does not stick his or her head up, and does not state his or her opinion about particular issues. Conflict resolution and negotiation are key words in how to deal with employee problems if you are a leader, and as far as I can see, it mostly means sweeping those problems under the rug and forgetting about them. The rewards for this obedience are many—promotions to higher administrative positions with emphasis on leadership qualities (that promote the further spread of NPM), an automatic network of NPM supporters, and the feeling that you are part of something much bigger than yourself—that you are promoting change and helping your employees ‘reach their potential’ and become more efficient producers. If it wasn’t that this system has been unreservedly and unabashedly adopted as important to the future of public sector workplaces, I would dismiss it as more ‘new age’ thinking like EST and all those self-help philosophies that made their founders unbelievably wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, I can accept that some of those philosophies have helped some people. But by and large, I tend to be suspicious of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ way of thinking. I don’t hop on the bandwagon just because a million other people are doing so. I like to think for myself and to be able to observe and judge for myself whether something works or not. I am inherently suspicious of anything that promotes utopian thinking. We are imperfect humans. We are not machines or robots. We will never ever manage to achieve perfect efficiency and perfect productivity on this earth. If NPM supporters start by accepting that tenet, we can work from there. It would mean that they would have to reverse their current approaches. That would be best. And then you’ll possibly have me on your side. 

In defense of good leaders

I have been interested in the topic of good leadership for some time, and will be writing more about it in the months to come. I want to write about it because I think it is something that is sorely lacking in most workplaces these days. And the few good leaders who are left are having a tough time of it. It is interesting that there appears to be no correlation between good leadership and the number of management courses one can take to help one become a good leader, but nevertheless, these types of courses are increasing in frequency and workplaces are becoming more insistent that their leaders take these courses. I am open to the idea that people can become good leaders, but I think it has more to do with the type of workplace environment one finds oneself in as a leader plus the type of values a potential leader has. Is the potential leader an ethical person who believes in fairness and in rewarding hard work? Or is the potential leader only interested in promoting himself or herself at the expense of his or her employees, and what type of behavior does the workplace support and reward? These are all relevant questions for discussion. The conclusion may be that good leaders are born that way, not made, but I don’t necessarily believe this either. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but that fact does not diminish my interest in the subject.

I bring up the subject of good leadership because I have been witness to, and experienced myself, poor leadership or lack of leadership in the workplace. I have also experienced good leadership and the differences are viscerally clear to me. I have written a book about passive-aggressive leadership in the workplace and how demoralizing that can be for employees http://www.amazon.com/Blindsided-Recognizing-Dealing-Passive-Aggressive-Leadership-Workplace/dp/1442159200. My feeling is that many workplaces these days promote and support passive-aggressive leadership--that it is a management strategy for systemic procrastination and effective employee control because most of this kind of behavior is always right on the edge of what can be considered ethical, correct or true. In other words, management cannot be taken for this type of behavior toward employees and they get away with quite a lot in this way. Employees suffer, but leaders who are trying to be good effective and empathic leaders also suffer because the system does not support their efficiency, honesty or empathy. Leaders who do not side with the passive-aggressive approach will find themselves at the mercy of bureaucrats and administrators higher up in the system that will make their work lives miserable for not conforming to the current system.

There are many ways to bring down (or at least attempt do so) good leaders in a passive-aggressive work environment. In my book about passive-aggressive workplace leaders, I did not discuss this particular aspect in any detail, but rather focused on the effects this type of environment has on its employees. But much of what I brought up in that book in terms of how to keep ordinary employees (not in management positions) down can also be applied to keeping good leaders down. If passive-aggressive management identifies one or two good leaders (by my definition—ethical, honest, empathetic—and not very adept at playing political games) as ‘problem-people’ in the system, it won’t be too long before those people are ‘silenced’ in some way because they represent a threat. They may find themselves ‘frozen out’ of the popular clique, may be demoted, may be ignored or overlooked for new projects or promotions, or may be the recipients of a new type of behavior that I find quite disturbing. This type of behavior utilizes the employees who work for good leaders who for many reasons may be dissatisfied with that person’s structured approach or expectations or demands on them. If these employees feel stressed or put-upon, or if they feel that the demands of the job are too great or overwhelming, they can now accuse their leader(s) of harassment, which puts the burden of proof not on the employee making the accusation but immediately on the leader (and eventually the workplace) to refute the accusation. The accusation of harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature. In fact, in the instances I have been witness to, with one exception, the accusations have had to do with that the leader(s) were perceived as too tough, too demanding or too strict. In other words, the leaders could say no to these women if it was deemed necessary and this didn’t sit well with them. Why would employees do this to their boss, one might ask? I asked the same question. I have now seen this happen several times in the past few years, and I asked the same question each time. Young women have been the instigators in all of these situations—they have charged middle-aged male leaders with harassment because they have not been able to measure up to the demands of the jobs they were asked to do by these men. Or they were denied something they wanted and instead of waiting to see if the answer could in fact be yes the next time they asked, they took matters into their own hands. Who informed these women that this was a potential strategy for dealing with their situation? The only answer I could come up with was that the bureaucrats and administrators higher-up in the system who did not like these leaders suggested this to these women as a way of causing trouble for those leaders. And these women followed that advice. The result? Management informed these leaders that so-and-so had filed harassment charges against them, resulting in the women being moved into another department or group, which is what they wanted in the first place. The accused leader had no choice but to accept this outcome, and if he or she wished to ‘fight’ to refute the accusation, was informed that one was of course free to do so. But it is common knowledge that this involves using a lot of time to ‘clear’ one’s name and possibly getting a hold of a lawyer or a union representative or both to take the case or look at the situation, which could cause the workplace some grief. If the accused leaders do not have the support of their own leaders, then the likelihood of clearing their good names is very slight. For all intents and purposes this means that these leaders will have unfounded ‘harassment’ charges against them that will remain on their records indefinitely. As long as these leaders do not fight back or raise a ruckus, the passive-aggressive strategy of systemic procrastination levels the conflict to a status quo situation—the women get what they want, which was to get out from under that particular leader and to prevent that leader from having any contact with them whatsoever, and passive-aggressive management gets what it wants—the silencing of what they consider to be a problematic leader. This is what has happened in all the instances I have been witness to. The accused leader is caught between a rock and a hard place; fight the accusing employee or fight management. It is mostly a lose-lose situation. Over time, rumors travel and reputations can be destroyed. It is horrendous that such things can happen in 2010 without repercussions for either the accuser or for management that support them blindly. Things just continue as before at the workplace. But what about those who are unjustly accused? What happens to them? Why is this fair? What about the families of the accused? Have these women doing the accusing taken into account the stress that such situations cause the families of these men? Do these women ever realize that their false accusations cause problems for women who really have been harassed? I doubt it, and this makes them disloyal employees in my book, because if they can do it to one leader they can do it again to another, and in this way they always get what they want in an already tainted workplace. I have to wonder how they live with themselves. It might be worthwhile for the accused leaders to pursue the situations to their ends, because if no one ever does then injustice will always win out.

Women and careers in science

I attended a seminar entitled ’Young Women and Science’ this past Monday afternoon at the Science Library at the University of Oslo that began with an excellent lecture about the topic by a woman named Ellen K. Henriksen who is an associate professor of physics at the University of Oslo. Her talk was followed by an hour-long panel debate about the topic that was very interesting and that touched on a number of issues that could explain why young women are not choosing to pursue science studies or careers in science generally. Dr. Henriksen focused on several research studies that have shown that there are two areas that preoccupy women when it comes to choosing to pursue science studies. The first is that many of them feel that they simply are not smart enough to pursue a career in science—that they will not be good at it or master what they need to master, and the second has to do with the fact that many women want their careers to be meaningful—to feel that they are helping others in society by their work. Many of them thus move away from pursuing the harder sciences like mathematics, chemistry and physics that often lead to academic careers, into medicine and health-related studies. The panel debate focused quite a bit on the importance of smart and enthusiastic teachers in helping to get students hooked on math and science. The lack of such teachers in grade school and high school was held up as a contributing factor for why students (girls and boys) simply don’t choose science these days. The other aspect that was brought up was the lack of role models for women in science. Some of the women scientists in the audience meant that there were no role models, or only one or two when they were younger and wondering what path to take, but that they chose to pursue a career in science despite this lack, but that for many women, the prospect of working in a male-dominated profession for the rest of their working lives was simply not attractive from a professional standpoint. The men on the panel, both in their sixties, also bemoaned the lack of women in their fields and meant that it was important to have a gender balance if it could be achieved. The debate created more questions than it answered, as always with a good debate; it was interesting to listen to and to think about afterwards.

I was lucky to have had two very smart female teachers in high school, one of whom taught math (geometry and trigonometry) and the other who taught advanced biology. Both teachers were inspiring and both encouraged their students to do the best job they could. The advanced biology course ended up being mostly independent study because the teacher was also the assistant principal and was quite busy. She gave us the structure we needed but left us mostly alone to pursue the studies she had set out for us. They consisted of three different projects that we had to complete over the course of one year: learning the anatomy of the cat using a full skeleton to learn the arrangement and names of the different bones; learning basic Mendelian genetics by breeding and crossing fruit flies to get progeny that we could observe and classify; and learning how to map gene loci on different chromosomes. I loved this course and it led to my choosing to major in biology in college. Besides basic biology, I took zoology, microbiology, histology and embryology/developmental biology in college (Fordham University), and advanced cell biology and molecular biology in graduate school (New York University). I did quite well in undergraduate chemistry (inorganic and organic; I loved organic chemistry), but was not so comfortable with either physics or calculus, possibly because the teachers were rather uninspired. I decided fairly early on during college that I did not want to pursue a career in medicine. And even though I loved studying literature as much as science, I knew that I would earn more money in a scientific career of some sort, which was important at that time because I had to be able to support myself once I got out of college. I started my first job as a research technician at a research institute in Manhattan while I was still in graduate school. The research institute was not far from New York University medical school where many of the institute researchers taught. In graduate school I took not only biology courses but computer science courses: one to learn Fortran, an advanced computer programming language; and the other to learn machine language, which is the most basic language that the computer ‘understands’. It was fascinating because we learned about addresses and memory and registers and how to ‘talk’ directly to the computer’s CPU. While I have forgotten most of it, I remember thinking it was such a cool thing to study when I was in my twenties. After one year of classes and lab work in graduate school I started working full-time at the research institute and finished my degree (writing my thesis) at night and on weekends. I mention all of this because at the time I studied science and computer science, I don’t remember that I worried all that much about whether or not I could master this or that subject. Thus, when I was younger, I didn’t worry about the first of the two considerations that young women at present have when choosing whether or not to pursue science. I took the courses I had to take to get my degrees and got good enough grades for the most part. I did hit the wall once with an advanced biochemistry course (that I dropped out of) taught by a particularly boring teacher who disappeared halfway through the semester and then returned for the final exam. No one knew where he had gone and the university did not fire him because he gotten a prize or two and that is a prestigious thing for a university. Prizes bring fame, attention and money in the form of grants and endowments.  And universities often keep bad teachers on staff because they may be good researchers.

Recently, I started to think about the higher-academic level women (PhD and beyond) I’ve met and gotten to know since I first started working in science. There aren’t all that many, to be sure. There were only two women with professor positions in my first job (one was close to eighty years old at that time and the other woman worked for her); the majority of such positions were filled by men at that institute. The three women who worked together in the lab with me in my second job at a top cancer research institute were all post-docs when I started working there. Only one went on to become a professor at a nearby university; eventually all three left academic science. One went on to medical school and became a radiologist, the other moved into industry and became head of global marketing for an international scientific company, and the other moved into university administration and is currently the president of a large city college. They were my role models at the time that I worked together with them, because they were dynamic women with doctorates in their respective fields and because they were enthusiastic about what they did. I remember sitting in taxis together with them on our way to one or another conference, talking about our careers and what we wanted to do and how the sky was the limit. We were young and the world was our oyster. It was an inspiring time that I am grateful to have experienced.

Ironically enough, at the same time that the sciences are having problems recruiting new students, academic science is becoming more difficult to get a foothold in or to remain in, for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with lack of funding, smaller budgets, more ruthless competition, and so on. I have reached a certain plateau—senior scientist with professor competence. I have been a project leader, a section leader, and am now considered a group leader even though I have no real group to lead! Besides myself, there is one other woman at my workplace who could be considered my peer. She is a formal professor and a group leader, but she not very interested in supporting, encouraging, or offering advice to women generally or to younger women who may be wondering about a career in science. Her sole focus is on promoting herself, and I guess I have to wonder if her approach isn’t the smartest given the current conditions. But had I met her earlier on or worked for her type when I was young, I think I would never have pursued academic science. The reason I pursued it at all is mostly due to the positive experience I had working together with the men and women in my second job who were professional, respectful of others, and supportive.

So what are the problems with choosing a career in science these days if you are a woman? Most scientific fields are male-dominated. While that doesn’t have to be a problem, it often is because men tend to network with other men in order to help them get ahead. In the twenty years I’ve been here in Norway, that is the rule, not the exception. Additionally women don’t often attempt to network with other women, so women (especially younger scientists) lose out. Some men I know have turned out to be snakes in the grass—they talk a good game (that they support you) but don’t really do so in practice. They ‘forget’ to mention your name when they could, or they work against you by questioning your qualifications even after you’ve proven that you are qualified for a position or status (professor competence, for example). But they do this too to some of the men I know as well. I miss camaraderie with other scientists, be they men or women, but more women wouldn’t hurt. Academic science is for the most part a lonely profession. I have a collaborator in Italy (a woman about my age) who has the same problems I have, getting new students, little funding and a tiny network of collaborators. We stick together, share our joys and woes, and try to come up with decent projects that we can work on together in order to keep our collaboration viable. She is a nice woman and a smart one—a good combination for the younger people in her research institute to see and to look up to. You might want to choose academic science as a career if you met her. She is a good role model, but she is more the exception than the rule, unfortunately. And she, like me, is honest with the younger generation, women especially. It’s difficult to make it in academic science these days whether you are a man or a woman. So if I was younger, I would probably choose another way to use my love of science, perhaps science journalism or working as an editor for a scientific journal. I know I could have been satisfied in those careers as I have been up to this point in academic science. It remains to be seen what the future has in store for those of us who see the major changes, can do little about them, and who wonder where it all will end.