Transcript—Providing Difficult Feedback
Debra Zabloudil: Welcome everyone. This is Debra Zabloudil with The Learning Studio. I am here today with Dr. Jane Reckelhoff from the University of Mississippi Medical Center. I am so thrilled to be talking with you, Dr. Reckelhoff, about providing difficult feedback. So welcome and thank you for being here today.
Jane F. Reckelhoff: Thank you for inviting me, Debra.
Debra Zabloudil: This is a tough conversation to have. It's difficult to have conversations about tough conversations and I would like you to share with the group your thoughts and your experiences in this arena, when this is not the easiest thing for most of us to do. So maybe we can start by having you tell us a little bit about why do you think it's important for leaders to provide constructive and sometimes even negative feedback to their employees and their team members?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: Yeah. It's important for a leader to be able to discuss shortcomings and issues with their faculty members or with their team members. And the reason why it's important for you to do that is because as a leader, whether that's a team leader or whether that is a chair of a department or a dean, is you care. At least I care very much about my faculty and I want them to be as successful as possible. And so the way that I can help them be successful is by giving them feedback. And that's feedback about their research, feedback about their behavior sometimes, but it's not always easy to do that.
I think as leaders, certainly for me, I want to be liked. And so having difficult conversations, I may worry that I'm not going to be liked because of those difficult conversations, but if you think about the big picture as a leader, you want your team members to be as successful as possible in their research and in their work. And so that's why it's important to give sometimes negative feedback along with the positive.
Debra Zabloudil: Absolutely. And have you ever been in a situation where you've given feedback and it hasn't been well received, and then what happened from there?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: Yes. I was in a situation where I had to give some negative feedback and it didn't go well. A faculty member was arguing with me and I had to just be very firm about it. And so I had a plan for what I was going to discuss with them. And one thing that I do when I'm developing this plan, in addition to the negative things, I try and bring in the positives, the positive aspects that they have about their work, about their behavior, things like that. So that it's not completely negative. I like to have things a little bit on the positive and then this is what you need to do to continue doing a good job or doing the things that you need to do. And I try and be as specific as possible. I don't want them to misconstrue what I'm saying. I try to be as specific as possible.
Debra Zabloudil: You mentioned that you prepared. Are there other things that you do to prepare? What kinds of things are you thinking about or making note of before you're going into one of these conversations?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: Particularly if it's a junior faculty member, I have a mentoring team for each of my junior faculty and I make sure that the mentoring team meets with them every couple of months or every three months, so that they have good feedback from their mentoring committee. And I don't sit in on all of those committee meetings, but I do sit in on some of them. And then I ask the mentors to get back with me about how things are going. And so, depending on how those mentoring committee meetings go, that gives me more information about how the faculty member is doing. So it's not just my opinion, it's actually a committee's opinion about how the faculty member is doing. And so, as I say, I always try and have positive feedback for them, but then I provide the negative feedback as well, because I think constructive criticism is very important for all of us.
Debra Zabloudil: Absolutely. You mentioned having conversations every couple of months. I know that a lot of the literature would suggest that you don't just have those conversations once a year at the performance review time, but it's got to be an ongoing process. And so, what are your thoughts about that and the performance itself? How do you structure all of that?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: For junior faculty, I think it's much more important ... when I started as a faculty member, I didn't have a mentoring committee. I didn't even have a mentor. I had my chairman who would review my grants and he wasn't exactly going over every detail of the grant with a fine tooth comb either. And we didn't even really have at that time ... now we're talking a while ago, we didn't have faculty performance reviews. It's just if you messed up, then you got called into the principal's office. But other than that, you were just sort of on your own. And so over the years, I have developed relationships with people that are my mentors that I go to routinely. Also, as a chair, I have a mentor that I discuss issues like having to do these constructive criticism talks with my faculty before I do it. And I run my ideas by this person and they give me positive or negative feedback on my own presentation essentially and what I'm going to talk to the faculty member about.
So I do think, particularly for a junior faculty, it's important to have mentoring committees and these people would help them not only with their research, but also grant writing, also any other faculty development issues that they have. Navigating, for example, getting involved with their professional society so that they get their names out there, so that people know who they are, so that the people who review their grants know who they are, the people that are reviewing their manuscripts will know who they are.
Also, if a junior faculty member gets involved with their society, it allows them to develop their own leadership skills by getting involved with committee work and things like that. So it's very important, I think, to start young, young in your career, I should say, to get involved with your society and to do these things. I think it's better almost to do it nationally than doing it locally, because you're going to get a bigger bang for the buck if you do it nationally. Because like I say, the people who review your grants, people who review your manuscripts are national figures. They're not at your institution. So that's why I'm a little bit hesitant about suggesting that faculty get, particularly junior faculty, get involved in local leadership roles. I'd rather see them do national leadership roles.
Debra Zabloudil: Great. You talked about mentors, which is such an important thing it seems in today's business world, academic world, scientific world. And that's something that maybe some of us didn't have as much of when we were coming up. But do you think it's important to have mentors both inside the organization and outside of the organization, or what are your thoughts on that?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: Yes, I think it is. I think it's important to have people that you can run to, run down the hall to and bounce something off of them. But I also think ... and one of the things that we do is particularly for grant writing, if you write a grant and you want some input from an expert in the area, you may send the grant out to that expert to have them review it for you. And we actually pay the experts to do that. And so that's a paid kind of mentoring thing, but I also think that it gives you a different perspective. You develop a different perspective if you have mentors from out outside your institution who can help you and give you an idea of what's going on—on the national level—which I think is very important. So yes, definitely.
I think that regardless of where you are in your career level, you always need mentors. You always need someone to bounce your ideas off of. You're not isolated when you're doing science, because the problem is that science is so complicated now, the methods are so complicated and you can't possibly in your lab either financially buy all the equipment that you need or have the expertise to do everything that you would like to do to address the questions in your grants. I think that's part of the reason why you develop mentorship relationships or collaboration relationships, things like that. And the sooner that you do that as a junior faculty member, the better.
Debra Zabloudil: You mentioned before, a lot of feedback and from different angles, et cetera. There's a lot of literature that would also suggest that younger generations crave feedback more, that they're asking for it more. Do you agree with that or do you think we've always wanted a lot of feedback, but maybe this generation is more vocal? What are your thoughts there?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: I don't know. The junior faculty that I have and I've been working with them, we're submitting a large university grant and it's to help junior faculty get enough preliminary data to submit for national grants. And so in working with them, they are very amenable to suggestions, but I think I would have been too. It's just that I wasn't offered that at the time and I was too shy really to ask someone to do that for me. I did a lot of hit-and-miss grant writing when I was a junior faculty and I don't want to see my junior faculty doing that. I want them to submit the best quality grants they can so that they don't waste their time writing like I did, five or six grants a year, and maybe getting one funded.
Debra Zabloudil: Absolutely. Understand. These are such good suggestions and such great thoughts. And as we conclude today, I'd like to ask you, what advice would you give to those who are reluctant to deliver difficult news? Which many of us are out there in the world. So how would you tell them to think about it or what would you suggest they do?
Jane F. Reckelhoff: In fact, I was just having a discussion with our head of HR the other day, because I had a difficult discussion that I needed to have with one of my faculty members. What I told her was I just have to put my big boy pants on and get out there and do it. I think that as a leader, as I said before, your most important thing is to help your faculty members or your team members be the best scientists, the best educators, the best investigators, whatever they want to do. This is not what I want to, this is what they want to do. And having their goals in mind, it's how I help them do the best job that they can. And so part of doing that is that I am very honest with them about how well they're doing in those different areas.
And if I have to deliver bad news, then I do that, but I do it in a way that gives them ... I make suggestions for them to look in different directions, things like that. I think any leader has to do that. You may have a postdoc that is just not working out and it's obvious to you that they are not happy in what they're doing. And so sometimes you need to point out that they don't look happy in what they're doing and maybe they need to consider something else. And so again, it's helping them do what they want to do with their careers, not what you want. And sometimes that's hard.
I was teaching a class on mentoring the other day and I said, one of my postdocs who was wonderful, he was a physician. And so he came and he was from South America. He was coming, he did a postdoc with me, and he was going on to Mayo Clinic to do a residency. And I'm a renal physiologist. I wanted him to be a nephrologist. Well, he's a very happy dermatologist. Thank you very much. But he's very happy, he's doing what he wants to do, he is doing research. So at least I know that his postdoc did some good and I'm very happy for him. But again, it's what the trainee, it's what the junior faculty, even your senior faculty, it's what they want to do with their careers, not what you want. You just need to help them get there. And sometimes these difficult conversations are necessary to get them there.
Debra Zabloudil: Thank you so much. I think that's a great note to end on and I would like to thank you Dr. Reckelhoff for being with us today. This was really an illuminating conversation and I hope that everyone will benefit from it. I'm sure they will. Appreciate your time and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Jane F. Reckelhoff: Thank you, Debra.