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My guest for Episode #262 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Jennifer Heemstra. She is Chair and Professor of Chemistry, the Charles Allen Thomas Professor of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis.
Her research makes use of the ability of nucleic acids to self-assemble and recognize other molecules. Alongside her research, Heemstra is a science communicator and writes a regular column for Chemical & Engineering News. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
In this episode, Jen discusses the iterative process of failure and success in her lab, emphasizing the importance of creating a psychologically safe space for her team to experiment and learn. Jen also highlights the critical role of leadership in academic settings and how her unexpected transition into a leadership role has become one of the most rewarding aspects of her career — an “accidental leader” (the theme of a book she's writing).
Jennifer's “favorite mistake” concerns a significant misunderstanding of her career path. Initially believing that her role as a professor would be purely research-focused, she quickly realized that it encompassed much more, including leadership and mentorship. This revelation, although initially seen as a mistake, turned out to be the best possible outcome. It fueled her passion for leadership and inspired her to focus on developing a positive and empowering lab culture. Her story underscores the importance of embracing unexpected turns in one's career and finding value in professional growth.
Questions and Topics:
- The failures and mistakes we make in research
- Advising students about their career paths, and if they want to really focus on research?
- Is it rare for a professor to love all aspects of their job? Research, teaching, getting funding, publishing, leading?
- As chair – have an employer but not a boss – but autonomy?
- “The Only People Who Never Make Mistakes and Never Experience Failure Are Those Who Never Try”
- What types of failures are made by students and researchers in your field – and your lab?
- Amy Edmondson’s three types of failures?
- A hypothesis that’s disproven vs a technical mistake?
- Making sure you learn from mistakes?
- Helping people not beat themselves up?
- Why and How do you share YOUR failures? And Why is it more important for those with more POWER to share their mistakes?
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- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban:
Welcome to my favorite mistake. I'm Mark Graban. Our guest today is Jennifer Heemstra. She is the chair and professor of chemistry. She's a Charles Allen Thomas professor of chemistry at Washington University in St.
Mark Graban:
Louis. Her research. I'm going to let her talk about her research a little bit, because I don't know if I can say all these words, but she's also a science communicator. She writes a regular column for chemical engineering news and earned her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. So, Jen, thank you so much for being here on the podcast.
Mark Graban:
How are you?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Thanks for having me. It's great to talk with you. And I will say you could learn all of those words if you're willing to fail a few times at it.
Mark Graban:
The ability of nucleic acids. Okay, but I'll let you explain. I wanted to hear a little bit first an overview of the work that you do and your team does in the Heemstra lab.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, I can absolutely talk about that. So, my research interests have always been centered on a field called supramolecular chemistry, and I have explored that in a lot of different realms. In fact, in my public bio, I have the word phenylene ethinoline oligomers, because people use that to introduce me often. And it's fun to hear people pronounce that because they probably struggle with it as much as I did when I was a graduate student myself. But what supermolecular chemistry means is that we are basically building with Lego bricks, but where those Lego bricks are molecules.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And in our lab, we just happen to think that biomolecules, like the proteins and the nucleic acids that are in our bodies and everywhere in nature, that those are just like the coolest Lego bricks ever. Right? So we've got 4 billion years of evolution has delivered us these molecules that have these absolutely exquisite functions. And then what we get to do is to look outward and say, where is there an unmet need? Often something in biomedicine or the environment or a need for research tools?
Jennifer Heemstra:
And then we have a really interdisciplinary team of researchers, and we get around the problem. We kind of dig into our figurative box of biomolecular lego bricks, and we say, how do we solve this problem? And we build and test, and then we fail, and then we rebuild and we retest and we fail some more. But through that iterative process, then we're able to harness the capabilities of these molecules in order to create technologies that can benefit society. And because we fail a lot usually happens because we don't understand something about how these molecules are working or how they're supposed to work.
Jennifer Heemstra:
So then there's a lot of opportunities to just gain fundamental knowledge as well.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Well, regular listeners have already figured out your comfort in talking about failure, and I will give a quick plug, and we'll probably come back to this later. To the listener, I learned about Jen's work in Amy Edmondson's book right kind of wrong. So we'll come back and talk about that. It was great to have Amy previously on the podcast.
Mark Graban:
And after reading about what you said, I had to reach out.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And I will say that it all comes full circle, because then Amy has been one of my heroes and someone I've looked up to for so long because of her work in leadership. And that's kind of the. The gap that I had to fill with my greatest mistake.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So before we get back to all of that, I want to hear your story, looking at your career, whatever aspect of that work it might come from. What would you say is your favorite mistake?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, I had to think about this one for quite a while, actually, because my most frequent mistake was just all of the mistakes and failures that we have in research, as I alluded to, and as I'm sure you know so well after writing your book, when we work in research labs as scientists, we walk into this place every day where we know that mistakes and failure are not going to be like a. Maybe they're going to be the default mode. It is almost certain. And so sometimes when I talk with my classes about this or talk with people in my research lab, I start doing the math and I think, oh, my goodness. Okay, I worked in a lab as a researcher for this many years, so this many days a year, and I probably made this many mistakes every day or had this many failures every day.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I'm like, I am a professional failer because I have failed, like, literally tens of thousands of times in my life. But the greatest mistake that I made actually is almost orthogonal to that, or almost the reverse of that, because it was the mistake I made in when I was choosing my career path, because I chose this career path of being a professor at a major research university, because I thought that it was a research job. But what I realized is that it is actually not a research job. I was very wrong about what this career would be all about, but that turned out to actually be the best possible thing, because it is not only a career path that I love way more than what I thought I was getting, but in fact, realizing that gap between what I thought I had signed up for and the job that I actually have and realizing that I wasn't alone in that mistake has, in fact, fueled a lot of the work that I do and the things that I'm really, really passionate about now.
Mark Graban:
So what would you say the biggest gaps were between expectation and reality? Was it a matter of, like, how your time gets allocated, what you're allowed or need to focus on?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, it definitely comes down to that. And I think it's really the overarching theme of the job that in order to end up as a professor in chemistry at a research university or really any of the sciences, you know, you start out at some point working in a lab doing research. Often when you're an undergrad, you kind of say, oh, I like this. This is fun. I want to keep doing this.
Jennifer Heemstra:
So then you go off to graduate school and you earn your PhD, and that's really all about a little bit of teaching and a little bit of classes, but most of what you're doing is working in a lab or doing research. And then if you like that enough that you think you want to be a faculty member, well, then you go do a postdoctoral fellowship, and that's, you know, guess what? More. More research and a little bit of other things. And along the way, people say, okay, there's lots of great paths you can pursue, right?
Jennifer Heemstra:
You can go to industry, you can go into policy or government, or you can stay in academia and be a. Be a professor. And what people say is, oh, yeah, that's a research job. You're a professor, you're a scientist, you're a researcher. And I took this job.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I actually took the job because I love science, but also I do not love having a boss. I am really, really bad at having a boss. And so this is a unique job where I have an employer, but I don't have a boss. And that's pretty great. But what I realized when I got into this job is that, you know, surprise, I have a leadership job, and that is inherently a people job, because now I lead a team of people who are graduate students and postdocs and undergraduate students.
Jennifer Heemstra:
You know, all of those career stages I had come through. Now I'm leading a team of people who are making their way through those career stages. And so that actually should have been more evident. But I think I didn't realize everything that comes with leadership. And that has actually turned out to be, by far, the best part of this job.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Like when my group and I sit down, and we talk about motivation. We drill down each individually into, you know, I think I frame it as, like, why do you show up here every day? Dot, dot, dot. Really? Like, what really gets you out of bed in the morning?
Jennifer Heemstra:
And for me, that comes down to, I get to come here and work with this ever evolving group of early career researchers, and I get to see them grow and learn and develop their skills and persist through failures and become experts. And then I get to see them go out into the world and do all of these amazing things. But while the science is something I have to know and be good at, really, my job is all about helping people be their best, and it's about leading. And I've had some painful experiences where I realized it was about conflict resolution. I had no idea what to do in those times.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But it's also led to some really, really fulfilling aspects of my career.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, how much did that change? Like, did the job and the allocation of time evolve as there's a typical path? Right, from what? Assistant professor, associate professor, full tenured professor? How much of it was, it sounds like your comfort level grew.
Mark Graban:
Is that as the job evolved or just as you kind of leaned into what the job entailed?
Jennifer Heemstra:
You know, that's a really wonderful question. And then for me, we can dig into this, too. I've added on the step of being a department chair, which is a whole other change in time allocation, as you put it, is a brilliant way of saying that. I will say that it has shifted. The ways that I spend my time have shifted over all of those career stages.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But the thing that's been pretty constant is the leadership piece that, yes, in the first, literally six months on the job, it was mostly me ordering supplies, getting the shipments in. But then pretty quickly, you recruit a group of 34567 people, and now what you realize is that I can go into lab and I can do things, but that's not how all of this is going to get done. If we're going to be successful, it's going to be because I'm there empowering all of those other individuals in order to get our research done very quickly. I realize I'm the least efficacious person in my lab for doing research. I go in there and things get broken.
Jennifer Heemstra:
In fact, I say we wear these lab coats, and I liken it to the residents in the hospitals. And everyone has these long lab coats and they should give me the short one because I'm the person who is, like, the least, maybe not the least experienced, but that I go into lab and I'm trying to do something between three meetings and thinking about my email. And I'm just, I've been out of it for so long that the people in my group are really the experts. And so how I spend my time has changed because there's all of these other, as you probably know, there's all these other things beyond then leading that research lab that are also part of the job. But I will say that leadership being at the front and center has been pretty constant since even the first year.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So as you moved into these leadership roles, did you have to seek out leadership education, mentoring? Was it a matter of reading books and or meeting people like Amy Edmondson and other great teachers of their own?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, that's also a really good question because one of the toughest parts about this, I'll say, is that there isn't even a realization or an acknowledgement that it's a leadership job. It's, you know, no one at any point did anyone pull me aside and say, hey, I know you probably thought you were getting this research job, but I've got something to tell you. Right. You're going to need all of these skills to run your lab. Nobody ever really tells you that.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Instead they just, you get thrown in. A lot of people who are in this job would maybe still not even necessarily acknowledge that it's a leadership job, even though that is obviously a huge part of what we do. And so I had to learn this in very, very painful ways. In fact, I say that the day I realized conflict resolution was a part of my job was the first day that there was a major conflict in my group. And I'll never forget it.
Jennifer Heemstra:
My colleague, my students, had gone to talk to my colleague, who thankfully was also a newish faculty member member. So I didn't have one of the really senior faculty knowing about this. And she walked in my office and told me what was happening and said, you know, yeah, if there's this big conflict, if you don't deal with it, there's going to be like a huge war that's going to tear your group apart. And I don't think she said, like, good luck, but something equivalent to that, and walked away and figured out, yeah, figure it out. Like, okay, that's on you now.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And I shut my door and I thought, what do I do? I just wanted to crawl under my desk and, like, rock slowly back and forth, right? I had no idea what to do. And I literally opened up my browser and Google searched conflict resolution. That was my and then I realized, I'm like, oh, wow, there actually are resources out there.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And it was actually a conversation. I had started kind of reading some books. I read creativity, Inc. By Ed Catmull, and that really got me thinking about how to foster creativity and thinking about a culture of candor. And then I was starting to do some what I thought were innovative things and how I led my lab.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And I'll never forget one of my friends who's a leadership expert. I was telling him about it. I'm like, oh, my gosh, really doing this. And it's so exciting, and it's so innovative. And he looks at me and he goes, Jen, that's just organizational leadership.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And it might sound kind of pejorative, but it was actually eye opening for me because I realized, like, oh, that's how I then went on and discovered people like Amy and your work and the work of so many folks who are writing books about this that can then help us think about the culture we're creating, think about how we're leading teams, think about achieving the results we wanted. And I just, like, started voraciously listening to podcasts and reading books and reading articles and Ted talks and the whole deal because I realized, oh, that's it. I have a job I wasn't trained for, but there are people out there who can help.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, and then it sounds like there's an opportunity for you to lead, to educate, to mentor students as they're thinking about careers. Like, if they really want to focus on the research, are there jobs in the private sector that would really allow them to do more of that without the other parts of academia?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes. You know, it's a really interesting question, because no matter where they go, often leadership skills are going to be part of it. That, especially for the students who are getting a PhD in chemistry, it's a chemistry degree, but in a lot of ways, it's really a leadership degree. It's really about being able to lead projects and be the person out front strategizing and troubleshooting. So whether they go into government or doing policy work or if they head to industry to be a researcher or academia or wherever, usually they're going to find themselves leading a team of people.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And so this is actually something I've become very passionate about, is not only how do we, as faculty and other leaders out there, how do we lead better, but then for those of us who are also training the next generation of scientists, how do we teach them how to be leaders so that we kind of break the cycle that when they get there, they could be like, oh, I actually was trained in conflict resolution. I'm ready for this. I don't need a Google search to help me get through today.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And I think there's similar discussions that have taken place in medicine, in medical education, coming out of school, and doctors who I've known and talked to going through their residency. And then if, you know, they may very well end up in a leadership position with or without formal leadership training. It seems like, you know, there's more of that happening now, how to operate well in teams, how to lead and get along more constructively and in complex workplace scenarios.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah. You know, I think something that is really encouraging and uplifts me as I think about the future of science and medicine, really stem in general and the future of academia is that you're right, these conversations are happening a lot more often than they used to. It's a lot more frequent than when I was starting as a faculty. I'll go give seminars places, and I'll go out to dinner with early career faculty, and I'll say, oh, you know what? How can I help?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Like, what do you want to know? And they say, how can we be great mentors and leaders to people in our lab? I'm like, oh, my gosh, yes, this is the future of our field, and that future is very, very bright that we're having those conversations now.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. I want to ask two other questions about, you know, your work as a professor and a department chair. And then, you know, I would love to talk more about mistakes and failures in research, but, you know, I stopped after a master's degree. I considered maybe getting a PhD. I talked to a couple of my master's advisors about academic life, and, you know, they would tell me about, you know, one in particular, I think hated going to get funding.
Mark Graban:
And so the question to you is, like, is it rare for a professor to love all of the aspects of their work which as an outsider seem to include, you know, research, teaching, getting funding, publishing, leading others? I mean, there are a lot of different responsibilities.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, that's a really interesting point and a very, very good question, because you're right, that is a very multifaceted job. I like to say that running a science lab in academia, it's a little bit like being a small business owner in that you have to, if you want to be able to run your shop, you have to go out and get funding. And yes, it's in the form of federal grants instead of, say, VC funding for a startup. And yes, our plan is to never be making money. In fact, when we submit grants, we have to almost promise that we're not going to make money because of that grant or if we do have to disclose it.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But in a lot of ways, you know, you're your own HR department in a way, you're your own financial planning department, you're your own strategic management department and you have to do all these things. And I don't know that there is any one person out there who just absolutely loves all of that and loves the teaching and loves the science and loves the mentoring. I think we all come to it with different strengths and different preferences. And in fact, for me then going on to be a department chair was saying, I love the problem solving. I love thinking about how we advance, how we work together as a department to advance towards these goals that we have.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I love that every hour of my day is different and I can go from talking research with my group to doing a podcast with you to hearing about a facilities issue that we need to deal with and figuring out how we're going to move forward to being in a budget meeting. That's really, really fun and exciting for me. But it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. But I will say that the one thing that I think should be more standard is to love the aspect, you know, if you're going to be in academia and have a research group, I think it should be pretty non negotiable that you enjoy training and mentoring and teaching researchers and leading that group because for folks who don't enjoy that, then the students are the ones who bear the brunt of that.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. One other thing you said interest earlier, Jen, that was interesting one to follow up on. You know, said as a department chair running a lab, you have an employer but not a boss. Now I'm trying to think like, well, there's probably a dean, there's certainly a university president, but is it a matter of like the amount of autonomy that you have when you say I don't have a boss, like, it doesn't feel like you have a boss, is what I hear you saying. Or.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, I will say, you know, it's really interesting what you just spotted because I said I don't like having a boss. I'm found from my time in industry I'm especially bad at having a boss where I think that I could be doing their job better than them, though I'm sure we all think that and we're often, I'm sure I'm incorrect often in that, but it's interesting because I was drawn to this job by not wanting to have a boss. But now, as a chair, you are right that I have a dean who is actually my boss. But I like to say, and I hope my dean isn't listening to this, but I have a boss, but it's a boss for a job that I could quit and still have my job, so I could quit being department chair, and eventually my term will end and I will no longer be department chair, and I still have my job as a tenured faculty member, and I can still do all of the things I love doing. But I really like my dean, and we get along great, and it's really, really fun to work with him.
Jennifer Heemstra:
So I have no. No visions of quitting. But I often say, you know, I have a boss, but I can quit that job and still have my job. So it's okay.
Mark Graban:
It comes through. The key takeaway is that, yes, you like your dean. Well, we'll highlight that. We'll send that clip out.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Mark Graban:
I mean, I think people don't like being, you know, micromanaged or nitpicked or. It sounds like there's not just academic. There's a tradition, for good reason, of academic freedom in academia. But it sounds like maybe you might even say professional freedom to lead your lab the way you want to lead it.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, that's really huge. That I often tell folks who are thinking about different careers. You know, I often say, there isn't one perfect. You know, there's no perfect job out there, and there's no perfect job for everyone. There's no best job for everyone.
Jennifer Heemstra:
It's, every job has good things and not so great things. And it's about looking at your own personal preferences and your style and your personality and saying, what are the good things that are most important to me, and what are the bad things that I find most palatable? And then go with that. And so, for me, I don't enjoy waking up at 02:00 a.m. and thinking, oh, my goodness, what happens if we never get another grant funded and I won't be able to do my research?
Jennifer Heemstra:
And is my career gonna be over? Right. I don't enjoy that living on the edge of always having to be seeking funding, and my friends in industry will say, yeah, that's why I'm not in academia. But then, on the flip side of that, if I want to take my group and have a three day group retreat every year where we go rent a big cabin and buy a bunch of food, and we do professional development and we brainstorm on projects. I just do that.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Once I had someone ask me, who told you you could do that? I'm like, nobody told me I can't. That's why that's kind of the academic freedom. It's not just about your research. It's about you controlling your schedule and you controlling a lot, how you spend that money within the bounds of what's legal to spend it on.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But you can choose who you hire, you can choose how you lead your team. And really the very, very important thing in there for me is to be able to choose the culture that you're going to create that you might have seen in the press. There's a lot of press right now about academic culture and research lab culture not being so great, and it is not great in a lot of places, and that's a big problem. But we can make it something fantastic that my career goal is to be part of the group of people who are shifting academic culture everywhere, which is why I want to be a department chair and might want other career stages beyond that. But in your research group, my group and I can sit down and say, what do we wish all of academia looked like?
Jennifer Heemstra:
And then we can just say, okay, let's create that right here, right now. And we're just going to do that. And what policies do we need, what practices do we need? And we're not going to get perfect, but we're going to keep getting it better and better and better, and let's just do that, because then that's a place that upholds human dignity, and that's a place we want to make a reality for us.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's great. So let's talk more about, like, life in a lab, and you talk about failures and mistakes and, you know, I think of Amy Edmondson's framework that she's taught, you know, in previous books of different types of failures, basic failures, complex failures, and innovation failures. So, I mean, it seems like they're in a lab, there's innovation failures of, like, well, we just proved a hypothesis, and that's science. Let's say a technical mistake. I don't know, like, adding the wrong chemical into an experiment.
Mark Graban:
I mean, I'm thinking of high school chemistry lab. Forgive me.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, no, no, that's very accurate. That's very accurate. And so how do those play into our life in the lab every day?
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I'm just curious, like, is it mostly, you know, things that, you know, Amy Edmondson and others would teach, that we should celebrate of those innovation failures, or they're sometimes just like, oh, that was just a slip up.
Jennifer Heemstra:
You know, I will say that it runs the whole gamut, and sometimes you don't even know what kind of failure it is. And so, really, we have to be, while some failures are more desirable than others, we have to be okay with every piece of failure, because the things that we're doing are often really complicated. You know, you have to go into lab and you have these cells that are growing, and if you, like, look at them wrong, they'll die or somehow not be doing what you want them to do. And then you have these reagents that could go bad, and you've got all these different types of reagents you have to add at very specific time points and very specific orders and under very specific conditions to get it to work. And it's almost a little bit like a choreographed dance.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I will tell people this, that, you know, if you. I'm not a dancer. I've actually got, like, no rhythm whatsoever. My group will tell you, but I've watched dancers enough to know that if you showed them a routine and then said, okay, you have to go perform it perfectly the first time, it's just not possible. And so I think even those more basic mistakes of, oh, I added the wrong reagent, or I did it the wrong time.
Jennifer Heemstra:
We have to be okay with making those mistakes, but then we have to be able to move on and say, okay, I won't do that again. I'll do better next time. But then, yeah, the bigger mistakes, we say in our lab when we start a new project, like, how do I make this fail? What's the experiment that I'm going to not want to do? Because in the back of my head, I know that's what's going to make it fail.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And so instead, my tendency will be to tiptoe around that and only get to it at the very end. But that's not serving me, and it's not serving anyone well. And how do we just head, you know, headlong into those failures? And actually, that's why I love the literature on psychological safety so much, because as a leader, that's one of the more powerful things that you can do, is to create a safe space for people to fail and to even reward those really good failures. We kind of, like, throw a party when someone kills their project.
Mark Graban:
And that's because you throw the party because to celebrate the learning, or at least learning that this isn't worth pursuing further. And that's of value yeah.
Jennifer Heemstra:
It's celebrating the courage to say, I've invested to overcome the sunk cost fallacy. Right. It's celebrating the courage to say, wow, I have invested my blood, sweat and tears in this, you know, often literally sweat and tears. Not literally blood, thankfully, but I've invested in this, my time and my life and my drive and all of those days of working, and for a year, a year and a half, sometimes two years. And now to hit a point where you say, based on what I have figured out and what I know, I don't think that this is feasible, or I don't think we're going to be able to do this in a way that makes it worth doing anymore.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And so to walk away from that is a really painful but yet very courageous thing and has usually happened because someone has done really fantastic science in order to get them to that knowledge and realization. And so we. We haven't literally thrown a party for that in a while. A lot of things haven't come back since COVID But we. As I say that, I'm like, we might need to start doing that again.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And, you know, I'm with you. Amy quoted you in the book as saying, you know, people, we need a culture. Speaking of the culture you want to create, people can be open about their failures without consequences. I am kind of a radical, I think, compared to the business world as a whole, where I'm like, well, it's counterproductive to punish even basic failures.
Mark Graban:
Well, that shouldn't have happened. Well, clearly we didn't know as a team how to prevent it. And punishment interferes with learning and progress. So what do you do to help emphasize the need to make sure that we learn from the mistakes that we can accept? Okay.
Mark Graban:
You know, we're human. We made what might be considered a basic failure. And I know Amy Edmondson isn't saying you should punish those failures, but the business world tends to leap to punishment. What do you do to keep the focus on the learning and maybe prevention of that same mistake or failure in the future?
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes. You are very enlightened on this. And what you're able to do, what you just described is brilliant. Right? That is stellar leadership, but it somewhat flies in the face of our human nature, at least as a lot of us experience it.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And I think that this really highlights, actually, one of the instances where the lack of leadership training in academia, for those of us who are running labs really bumps up against the needs of the people that we work with and causes a lot of pain and a lot of toxicity and a lot of people leaving science for not the right reasons, because on one side, you are absolutely right that punishing failure is counterproductive. But then on the flip side of it, I often say, you know, if you look at what we're doing as academic scientists, we're taking people who haven't been trained formally to any great extent, you know, and if so, only a small, tiny, tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the science training we've got. And then you're throwing them into the situation where they're leading a team of early career researchers, people who are still making all those mistakes, learning how to do these things. But then there's very little oversight, and we put people in a really high pressure situation. You know, that in your first five years, you're trying to get tenure.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Literally, you having a job five years from now is depending on people succeeding and getting results and you being able to get papers, and then it continues on that you being able to keep getting funded relies on you having successes. And so in a really radical way, what I would love to see is that we need to upend the entire reward structure in the research community, or at least on the academic side, and we need to rewrite a reward structure that is based, that is less reliant on the value judgment of a success over a failure. And actually, I was just in a really interesting conversation about this, because as folks lean more and more on AI to create models, when we look at our scientific data, we only publish the successful data. And what's missing is all the things that didn't work.
Mark Graban:
And I was like, huh, that is interesting.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Now that's interesting. And so somebody along the line is going to have to figure out how to incentivize publishing all of those failures we've talked about. It comes up, you know, every few years in academia. Oh, we need a journal to publish all of our failures in. And I think that the justification for that is really starting to hit home more than ever.
Mark Graban:
Wow. So there's the. I think the technical reaction to a failure that, you know, the analytical side, and then, you know, there's, there's the human side. So as a leader, how do you help students or people working in your lab, you know, not beat themselves up over a failure or a mistake? I think that also tends to be human nature.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah. And that's one of the hard things about leadership that I had to learn, because when someone fails at something, and especially if it was a preventable failure as leaders, something we need but we're not taught, is how to take all of that stress we're feeling, you know, the pressure of the grant deadlines and tenure and everything, and just hold that bay over here and to just deal with and say the most compassionate, helpful, empowering thing to the person who's in front of us. And one of the other hard things about this job is that what you say is going to be different for every person, right. That in some cases, some people are just beating themselves up so much over a tiny failure. And your whole job as a leader and mentor is to say, it's not a big deal.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Forget about it. Just don't even think about it. Go into lab today and try to fail, because, you know, you're so afraid of failure that, like, you know, this was my boss when I was a grad student, had told me, he's like, go out there and try to get a b or try to make your experiment fail. Just don't worry about it. But then there are times where someone has a personality that might be a little bit blase about failure, and you're like, okay, so the same thing has happened three times now.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And we need to talk about why this isn't changing. And, like, maybe I need to help you understand why this is really, really important for our lab. You know, that if you're not getting these results, it's hurting the future of our ability to keep doing research. And so it's finding that right thing that some people feel very little about failing. Some people feel a lot about failing and need to dial everyone to the middle of.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Let's get to a place where we. It bothers us enough that we want to learn and we want to grow and we want to do our best and not make that mistake again. But we're able to use that as a motivator to do better rather than as something that just crushes us psychologically.
Mark Graban:
Hmm. Yeah. No, I love that. Trying to dial people to the middle, that's a good way of saying that. And recognizing.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. With the different personalities in a team. Yeah. Figuring out what makes each person tick and what's the right approach or the right thing to say back to one.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Of those skills we're never taught. Nobody took me to side and was.
Mark Graban:
Like, hey, jen, figure that out.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Here's how you do this. Yeah. I had to figure it out by failing a lot. I still fail often at this.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Well, so that. That leads me to another question I was going to ask you. This is talked about in Amy's book, but I would love to talk about it here of why you share your failures, and to paraphrase what was in the book, why it's more important for those with more power to share their mistakes.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes, it absolutely is more important, the more power we get. And that is because largely, we have more privilege. I think it's healthy for everyone to share their failures. I think the impact of sharing your failures is independent of career stage, that it is just as powerful for someone who is a high schooler or an undergrad or whatever career stage to be sharing their failures as a university president to be doing that. But I also think that there's a lot of.
Jennifer Heemstra:
It takes some privilege to fail, and it takes some privilege to be able to share your failures. And so the more privilege people have, the more they're able to share a mistake without that fear of being judged or having their capabilities questioned or having it impact their future job prospects. The further up you are, the more you can do that, and so the more responsibility we have. And now I got at this in a little bit of a sideways way, because I actually had a massive failure in that I mentioned tenure in that whole thing, and my tenure vote did not go well. I ended up getting tenure, but it was.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I had a vote that should not have. I had a moment in my career where I had to sit there and say, yep, based on these data I'm looking at, this is probably the end of the road for me, and I need to find a new job. And I had to go and talk to my group about that. And, you know, long story short, it was the best thing that ever happened in my career because, boy, it was the worst day of my life. But then our group got through it together.
Jennifer Heemstra:
We thrived out of it, and it just made me completely fearless. It made me not care what other people thought about me. I was like, yeah, I've been so worried about, like, what will people think of me if I don't get to tenure? And now I'm sitting here staring at it, and so, you know, there's just no margin. I'm just trying to go on in my career and have a job and have this career path I want so badly.
Jennifer Heemstra:
There's no margin to worry what people think about me. And I think that that kind of shot me out of a cannon in a way that will never hopefully change or go back to what it was before. But I also. I think it's really personal, and no one owes anything to anyone else as far as what we decide to share or our vulnerability. It should always be something that we choose to do because we see an opportunity to benefit someone else.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And I totally agree with what you said about privilege. That comes from position, seniority, reputation, what have you. A founder of a business has certain privilege where they can admit a mistake, and their employees probably aren't. They're not going to get fired for it.
Mark Graban:
But when it comes to what you have to lose, like, what's the risk of speaking up? What's that vulnerability? There's often a lot of pride where people could admit their failure, but I'm not a psychologist, but people are complicated, and there's that pride factor that's part of human nature, too. They could admit it, they just don't want to. And that's maybe more internal than it is external.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah. I think some of that is a cognitive distortion, though, right? Don't you think that it's. I often say this with feedback, that we're afraid of negative feedback because it's a little bit like a failure. You know, we failed to live up to our own standards, but what hurts about it is that when we get that feedback, that's the moment when we become aware that someone else thinks that we've failed.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But they know we've failed for a long time. Right? They know we've failed to live up to a standard in a certain way, and all of us do this, and it feels in that moment like that person is losing respect for us. But if we can get past the cognitive distortion and say, no, no, they've known that for a while. Yeah, they probably knew I failed in that way, and rather, if I can own it, rather than, oh, my respect.
Jennifer Heemstra:
The respect I have with them is dropping. It's like, no, no, it's at a level. And now I have an opportunity to make this right, to admit it, to talk about how I'm going to fix it, to change whatever it is that I'm getting feedback on, and it's really an opportunity to grow and to gain respect, but.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Of course, our brains, like, don't see that, and so we have to be like, no, no, pause, you know? Like, let's. Let's think about. Let's. Let's plow through the cognitive distortion and think about what's really going on here.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. You know, a leader who doesn't want to admit that they're imperfect might think they're protecting their team. They're probably more likely protecting their own sense of something, because, like you said, if you've worked with anyone long enough, look, I mean, none of us are perfect. And I don't. You know, I think it would be rare for a team to think their boss was perfect and that they're going to.
Mark Graban:
You're going to burst that bubble and they're all going to quit because they thought worked for perfection.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, but it's so hard, right? For a long time, I used to, when I would go work out in the middle of the day, I would, like, sneak to the locker, to the bathroom that has the changing room, like, change in my running clothes and sneak outside because I was worried people would think I wasn't working hard enough. I was going for a run at.
Mark Graban:
02:00 p.m. that's back when you cared.
Jennifer Heemstra:
That's back when I. Well, I still feel that. And then I realized, no, if I want people in my lab to feel like they can really do this because we have a flexible work hours policy. Right. Science does not work on a nine to five schedule, and so we often don't either.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And I realize, gosh, if I'm not openly following this policy, then nobody else is going to feel like they can. So I think we set a model for it. But I'm sure you've seen this done poorly, too, though, right? You know, if I show up the first time our grant got rejected and say, well, that's it, the reviewers hated our grant. It's all a total loss, I guess.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Our research, it's terrible, and I don't know what we do from here. Have a good day. Right. Like, that's. That's not a good way to do it.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But obviously, if you can show up and be hopeful and say, okay, this is what it was, we failed, but we're gonna. We're gonna get through it, then.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Then there's. There's good and bad ways to do this as well. I'm sure you've seen your shape of both of those.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. You want to try to help create a vision for a future where things will work out, and it's more of a Silicon Valley expression, maybe, but, you know, failing forward, as opposed to failing and saying, okay, we're not going to try getting up.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Well, Jen, this has been such a great conversation here. Thank you for your story and your insights. You have a book that you're working on.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I do.
Mark Graban:
Tell us about that. I know just a little bit. I would love to hear more, and I'm sure the listeners would, too.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes. So I will use the line that actually opens my acknowledgments, which is that chemistry professors don't typically write leadership books. But that's what I did. And it was really this realization that we've talked about in this podcast of, you know, gosh, I have this job I wasn't trained for. And the people I lead, those early career researchers, they're really counting on me to get it right.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And there's a whole lot of us out there who are living the same story. I would come to appreciate that as I travel around and talk to other faculty. And so the book is called Accidental Leadership, subtitled, tentatively being great, how to be outstanding at the job you were never trained for. And I know it's a shared experience, because when I tell other faculty or other leaders my title, often they will laugh. And it's like, okay, yes, you get it.
Jennifer Heemstra:
That's a great title. Yeah. It's basically a leadership guide for anyone who wasn't trained to be a leader but has found themselves in that position. And it's centered around leading a research lab. But it really applies to just about any domain.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Whether you're navigating conflict or modeling failure or thinking about how you set vision and goals, it's got something for you.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, it'll have a lot of applications. Again, I think physicians who become accidental leaders and see this might benefit you. They might go and Google something like, I've accidentally become a leader. Yes.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And then hopefully they find my book. Yes.
Mark Graban:
Yes. And then a potential follow up. While I'm goofing around about all this, I'm excited to hear about the book. So. But I can't help but say, well, maybe a follow up is accidental author.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes.
Mark Graban:
About how to write a leadership book.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Oh, my goodness, yes. Well, that's where it was so fortuitous that Amy Edmondson had reached out to me. I think it was summer of 2021, and I had started writing my book, actually at the start of 2020, and I was going along a chapter a month, and that went great for the first three chapters.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And then. Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And then March 2020 hit, and so I was just digging my way back towards starting to write again. And she reached out to me, and I had just finished writing a chapter that talked a lot about psychological safety. I was talking about giving and receiving feedback. And so I'm sitting there. I was actually on family vacation, which is like, don't tell.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I, like, check my email on family vacation, and I see this email pop up, and I'm totally fangirling in the car as we're driving back from our family hike. And, like, to my spouse, like, John. John. Amy Edmondson, like, emailed me, and, like, we're gonna talk, and it's gonna be amazing. And she was actually someone who gave me a lot of encouragement then about being able to finish writing a book, because there's not a lot of that around when you're a science professor, people teaching you how to write a leadership book.
Jennifer Heemstra:
But that's where being in a university is really fun, too. You've got friends who do all sorts of different things. Things. And a lot of them have given me now advice to kind of push it across the line. And so, yeah, it still, it still feels a long way off because it'll come out next summer, but it is off to production and copy editing and all of those happy things right now.
Jennifer Heemstra:
So I'm very excited.
Mark Graban:
Well, good. Well, I want to keep in touch with you about the book. And I've been doing a series of, I've interviewed people, and then they had a book come out of doing, like, just a short follow up to say, hey, the book's available now, so we'll hopefully get to do that next summer.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I would absolutely love to do that. And, yes, I can talk about accidental authorship as well, because it was, it was definitely that. It started over a glass of wine. Well, a few glasses of wine with my spouse. And I admitted that people had been telling me I should write a book.
Jennifer Heemstra:
And I said, nah, but I can never do it. And he said, well, what would it look like to try?
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I was like, oh, that was, like, the perfect, best, worst thing you could have said to me right now. And that set it off.
Mark Graban:
The best way to write a good book is to start by writing a bad first draft.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yes. Yeah, I think I said, I'm gonna, okay, I will outline for a year. I said, my travels bonkers. This year, if I need to do is I have to cut back my travels. So this year I won't write.
Jennifer Heemstra:
I'll just outline. And then at some point, I said, ah, got an outline with, like, 25,000 words. I should probably write a book.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. That's beyond outline. Yeah.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Yeah.
Mark Graban:
Well, I'm glad you carried that forward and looked forward to the book coming out next summer. So again, we've been joined by Jennifer Heemstra from Washington University in St. Louis, author of the upcoming book. See, we can say that now. The upcoming book, Accidental Leadership.
Mark Graban:
So thank you so much for accepting the invitation to be here today.
Jennifer Heemstra:
Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun to talk.