{"id":1818,"date":"2025-01-11T11:32:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-11T10:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/the7.io\/nutritionist\/?p=1818"},"modified":"2025-01-12T09:16:56","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T08:16:56","slug":"alexandra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/?p=1818","title":{"rendered":"New year, new strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Happy New Year, Team Leader! May it be a productive, successful, but most of all fulfilling, and joyful year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most frequently asked questions that I receive is:<\/span><\/p>\n

What are your systems and strategies to keep your team on track?<\/span><\/p>\n

Since this is the time of year when people tend to think about making a few changes, I figured now is an excellent\u00a0time to answer this question:<\/span><\/p>\n

Because I am an internal person, who gains clarity by sitting in silence with her thoughts, I need to balance spending time with people and having time by myself to process the information.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because I\u00a0best process information when I see it in written format, I am using a mix of different formats to get information from my team and provide feedback.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are the details on our process:<\/span><\/p>\n

1)<\/span> At the beginning of the year, I meet with the entire team to lay out team goals for the year. Each trainee shares their project and career goals. This team meeting is followed by an individual meeting during which we refine the long-term vision and adapt goals for the year accordingly. At the end of the year, our overall progress is assessed against the yearly plan.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is usually the time when we paradoxically realize that 1) we were hopelessly overambitious and 2) we are super achievers who get to celebrate a lot of accomplishments. \ud83d\ude42<\/span><\/p>\n

2)<\/span> At the beginning of every quarter, we have one-on-one or team meetings dedicated to defining measurable objectives and key results (OKRs) for the upcoming quarter. You can learn more about the method here<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 It’s used in corporations and I adopted it for our purposes in research. In a nutshell, people pick three objectives for the quarter. These meetings set parameters for evaluating productivity because the key results are measurable metrics. Importantly, the objective captures the purpose of the work however\u00a0and is inspirational and aspirational.\u00a0Typically, two of three objectives are aligned with scholarly and technical development activities while one of the three is dedicated to personal and professional development.<\/span><\/p>\n

To minimize the amount of time needed to explain the process, I developed a worksheet for my team, that allows them to define their super-objective (a deeper driving force or purpose that is motivating them) and quarterly OKRs. So when a new member joins the team, we give them the worksheet and off they go.<\/span><\/p>\n

3)<\/span>\u00a0On Fridays, team members submit written quick\u00a0updates about their week on Slack. This exercise isn’t supposed to take longer than 10 minutes. It keeps me in the loop when I am traveling – or lately sitting in my home office. It helps the team especially right now to appreciate all that their colleagues do and helps anticipate crunch times and stressed team mates \ud83d\ude42<\/span><\/p>\n

It hasn’t been easy to keep peeps accountable for submitting those check-ins but I maintain that they are invaluable.<\/span><\/p>\n

4)<\/span> Apropos, Slack: We use it for team communication. Like this my email inbox stays somewhat sane and I don’t have to be glued to my inbox. I am glued to Slack instead. \ud83d\ude09<\/span><\/p>\n

5)<\/span> Team members work on\u00a0a monthly extensive report, which includes data in figure format to practice preparing figures for scientific publications but also to make possible challenges and lack of quality in data collection and presentation obvious quickly.\u00a0I used to provide feedback in writing. For some students\u00a0written feedback is more effective that makes it easier to double-check what we discussed. But with a 10 person team, the amount of time required to provide feedback got out of hand. That is why we now have a monthly meeting during which people present their extended reports and receive feedback from me and other team members.<\/span><\/p>\n

6)<\/span> During the second week, my team meets for a full retreat day. We mostly cover personal and\u00a0professional development topics. Part of the day is dedicated to the practice of upcoming presentations and to discussion of things going on in the lab.<\/span><\/p>\n

At these retreats, we came up with our team vision and mission, and designed our lab values. They are super helpful for team building and creating a great team culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

7)<\/span> During the third week of the month, we meet individually. Meetings involve us discussing hypothesis generation, experimental design, data analysis and interpretation, productivity, specific skills such as statistical analysis, and challenges – all the things you typically discuss during meetings. I also use this time to get a sense of where the team member is mentally and emotionally, to provide support and to learn more about their purpose in life.<\/span><\/p>\n

8)<\/span> Aside from meetings in my presence, lab members also meet once per week among themselves for \u201ctroubleshooting meetings\u201d, which have been extremely effective in encouraging newer trainees to speak up, think independently, and to develop superior data analysis approaches that benefit the entire team.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’d say that these meetings have been key to driving up the independence of my team members.<\/span><\/p>\n

9)<\/span> Depending on what is going on in the lab,\u00a0I schedule time to teach professional skills including scientific writing or grant writing. Currently, one of my superwoman postdocs leads “Glial Club” once per month – we use it to teach our trainees field-specific knowledge, also to people interested outside of our lab. Because it is trainee-organized, it is little or no work for me. It is a great opportunity for grad students to learn more about hot topics and to prepare for committee meetings, thesis defense and such.<\/span><\/p>\n

10)<\/span> We are now starting a “Midweek Growth Sprint” – a 45 min quick session covering inspirational topics\u00a0to keep everyone on track and energized\u00a0when motivation tends to dip toward the end of the week. I will let you know how it goes once we collected some data on its usefulness.<\/span><\/p>\n

11)\u00a0<\/span>Also experimental: Every two weeks I put time blocks on my calendar to work with team members on manuscripts, fellowship applications, presentations, etc. People book these slots on Friday the week prior. If nobody shows up, I use them for my own writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

All in all, this might read like a lot but I can assure you that it is less time than meeting 1:1 with everyone on the team weekly or biweekly. I tried that too – doesn’t work for me. I would leave these meetings exhausted and not necessarily more informed about the status of the lab research.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bI see so many people copy what they saw their mentors do without ever asking if this is the approach that works best for themselves and their trainees. The bottomline is If it doesn’t work for you, it isn’t useful for your team.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you needed permission to do it differently, here it is.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy New Year, Team Leader! May it be a productive, successful, but most of all fulfilling, and joyful year.\u00a0 One of the most frequently asked questions that I receive is: What are your systems and strategies to keep your team on track? Since this is the time of year when people tend to think about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2717,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1818"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4518,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions\/4518"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glia-leadership.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}