Faculty Development: Building Leaders In The Medical Field With Dr. Kimberly Skarupski
Who you are says so much about who you will be as a leader. That is why the more you can identify what motivates you, the more you’ll be able to understand how to work with others and vice versa. In this interview, Scott Wagers talks with Dr. Kimberly Skarupski from Johns Hopkins University about faculty development, more specifically about developing as a leader. This includes being aware of personality types and topics that you don't typically associate with the medical field, like design thinking. Scott and Dr. Skrapuski provide so many insights in this conversation, especially for those looking to develop as a leader in life science and healthcare. Join them to not miss out!
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Faculty Development: Building Leaders In The Medical Field With Dr. Kimberly Skarupski
Today we have an interview with Kimberly Skarupski. Dr. Skarupski is the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development in The Office of Faculty Development, the OFD, Professor and Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology in the School of Medicine, and Professor of Epidemiology at The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
She has focused her career in faculty development efforts on building communities and engagement. One of the interesting things which we step into a bit are Writing Accountability Groups, as well as Grant Review Investigator Groups, Specific Aims Speed Sessions, Late-Career, and Senior Faculty Transitions. It's a very interesting conversation that we have.
She's also focused on the development, teaching, and evaluation of various faculty leadership programs. She is a certified professional coach and has developed group coaching and career development coaching camps for the Hopkins School of Medicine faculty. She also hosts the Faculty Factory podcast which is an international forum for academic affairs and faculty development conversations as well as a repository of faculty development snippets for academic medical faculty members.
This is a very rich conversation. There are lots of great leadership development tidbits and insights. We go into lots of different topics. Particularly interesting, we talk about design thinking and how they use that in their faculty development. I've often encountered design thinking as a term people don't understand, so I found that very interesting. Also, about different personality types and why it's important to think about them. Sit back, have a read, and learn something about developing your leadership skills.
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I'm Kimberly Skarupski. I'm the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. I'm also a Professor of Medicine in Geriatrics and Gerontology and a Professor of Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Kimberly, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on.
Thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to have our conversation.
It's quite interesting because you're a referral from somebody whom I've spent a lot of my early career with, Charlie Irvin who we had on earlier. I infinitely trust his referral. I'm looking forward to what you have to say. Before we start, to give it a bit of color, is there something around you where you're sitting right now that you can describe for the audience?
Yes. Thanks for asking, Scott. No one's ever asked me about that, but I purposely put on the wall behind me a picture of a tree. I love trees. I speak to trees. I hug trees. I'm one of these literal tree-huggers. I found this print in a little shop, and it says, "As above, so below." It's a mirror image. Imagine a beautiful full tree, and then the picture is cut in half, and then the bottom half of the picture is the root system.
When I saw that, it made me think of the stories each of us has and how every human being, every faculty member has a backstory. There's so much more depth that we don't see and so much history. We only see the top, like the iceberg, but we don't sometimes recognize that there's so much below. It's always a good reminder for me to be conscious of, mindful of, and patient with people and myself. Recognize that I'm only seeing on a surface level and remind myself, we have to dig a little bit more deeply.
It also gets to that point of, don't make assumptions about why people are doing what they're doing. There may be a whole lot of other reasons below than you may know.
You're so right. I'm all about testing assumptions. I've been thinking about literally that word a lot. I was recently certified as a professional coach. I'm doing a lot more coaching in my role as a Senior Associate Dean for faculty development with our faculty here at Johns Hopkins, and also externally. That is the big thread I'm seeing is that a lot of assumptions we all make about.
We're so quick to look at patterns, identify patterns, look for trends, and try to figure out, "This is that disease. This requires that intervention. This requires that solution," versus stepping back and testing the assumptions. I'm recalling back when I taught statistics. You're going to do ordinary least squares regression.
What are those assumptions? Normality, linearity, no homoscedasticity, no multicollinearity. All those assumptions before you then do the thing. I'm always reminding myself, clients, and faculty, "How do we know that's true?" What else? What if? Maybe. That opens and broadens up our scope of thinking about solutions. As leaders, that's a good life skill. Don't trust everything we think, don't trust everything we feel, and test all of our assumptions. That requires, for someone like me and a lot of us, in academic medicine slowing down. Which is so counterintuitive because we're always running around like we're on fire.
“Don’t trust everything we think; don’t trust everything we feel; test all of our assumptions.”
When you're testing those assumptions, if you're in a conversation with somebody that you're trying to solve a problem together, is it about asking questions?
It's asking questions of the other person or people or the team, and also asking questions of ourselves. It's both. It's a conversation internally and externally. Someone says, "We've got a problem in the OR. They're not turning it around quickly enough." Let's stop right there. What do we mean by problem? What do we mean by they? What do we mean by turnover?
Let's make sure we're all on the same page. I've seen so many times, and I'm sure so many of us have been in situations where twenty minutes into a situation, conversation, or meeting, you realize you're talking about something completely different. That's where I think, "Are we all agreeing this?" Establishing a culture that someone could say, "That's not what I was thinking. That's not what I was talking about. I was referring to this."
Are we on the right page? Avoiding group think. I'm going back to when I taught sociology back to John F. Kennedy in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs. The group think or the ten angry men, who has the courage to say, " time out. I think we've forgotten something." In Myers-Briggs parlance, the people who are high J, the judgers, like me who want to close the loop, finish it, put a period at the end of it.
Thank the Lord for our people and perceivers, who are like, " Let's slow your role. We didn't explore that alley because you all were rushing down to the end of the block. We didn't snoop around there."" To me, that's the value in diversity in its fullest, broadest sense, of our own opinions, questioning our own minds, and testing your assumptions.
Why do you think that way? Why do you feel that way? Is there an alternative ending? Is there a different way? Is there something below as above that you've not uncovered adequately? Is the team rushing to fix it? Putting a Band-Aid on it rather than going upstream and saying, "We can scoop up all the litter we want downstream, but who's throwing the litter in the stream? Let's go up and pick where the root is."
I'm a big fan of design thinking. Design thinking always begins with the problem. Even when you're talking to people about something, everyone thinks they know the problem. You step back and say, "What's the problem? What are the causes of the problem? What are the effects of the problem?" It always changes the tone of the conversation. I think that's what you're getting at there.
It's so interesting that you say that, Scott, because here at Johns Hopkins, like in many of our academic medicine colleagues and institutions around North America, we have leadership programs. In our final of ten sessions coming up soon here, it's design thinking. It's being led by one of our colleagues in the Carey Business School. That leads me to leadership that interests the topic of your interest.
It's helpful if we broaden our teams and invite more people who have diverse opinions and schools of thought, training, and backgrounds. That makes our own careers, projects, ideas, and everything better. That's another example with of the design thinking that we in the School of Medicine said, "We're not trained in this stuff. How can we fill out and beef up our leadership program? What do people want? What do people need? What do our faculty say that could help them?"
That's where we look for the expertise in other fields. That concept, in general, the newer generations, the early career faculty members are good at that. They're used to building diverse community and being open to ideas and alternative ways of thinking versus the tried and true, "This is the way we've always done things."
Why can't I go into the school of education or the industry? Why can't I go down to Under Armour and get somebody there, an engineer to talk to me or help me think about this. Quality control and quality improvement. That's one of the best things I love about academic medicine in this industry. Working with the smartest people who are also the most generous and collaborative.
Faculty Development: One of the best things about academic medicine in this industry is working with the smartest people who are also the most generous and collaborative.
They're not in it to make money. God knows nobody's making money in academic medicine, at least faculty aren't. They're kind and good people who want to make things better. We see the best success of that. The best stories come from the faculty members who are building teams of getting all these brains in the room to identify the problem, fix a problem, and come up with creative, innovative solutions that maybe don't fit into the standard traditional publications. It's beyond publication. Maybe it's completely alternative, yet it's making a difference.
That completely resonates with some of the things I've experienced in working with multiple different types of stakeholders and disciplines in large cross-institutional collaborations. That's interesting to hear. You mentioned the Myers-Briggs personality types. Do you think about that when you're bringing people together or is that something people should learn about?
Yes, it's helpful. It's one of the many tools we have. We typically start with the Myers-Briggs. There are so many tools, the CliftonStrengths inventory, where you come up with your five top strengths. The Myers-Briggs. All these different Color Enneagram. The Myers-Briggs is one of the most externally validated, internationally translated in many languages for decades.
It's a tool. It's certainly not a magic bullet that once you know your four-letter code, then you've unlocked the key to success. The way reintroduce the Myers-Briggs is that it goes back to knowing yourself to better manage yourself. It's Socrates or Aristotle, I can never remember how far back we're going into the archives. Know yourself to better manage yourself.
That leads to emotional intelligence, which is knowing self, managing self, knowing others, and managing those relationships. If I don't have a good appreciation for the fact that, "The reason why Scott and I maybe are like oil and vinegar is because I'm an off the charts extrovert and pretend Scott is an off the charts introvert."
"It's not that he doesn't like me, it's not a personal thing. It's just a matter of, when I'm around him, I am sucking all the life from him and I drain him physically. When I'm with people, my balloon gets bigger. My battery gets filled up. When I'm alone, I get depleted and deflated." Introverts are exactly the opposite. When they're around people, they get tired and completely depleted.
When there's an appreciation for, maybe that's why in my lab, or with my colleagues, or with my boss, I'm a high sensor. I shove in all kinds of spreadsheets, data, odds ratios, and patient charts in front of them. My boss is maybe an intuitive, and he's a big picture thinker. That's how he likes to get information. He wants to see an abstract picture of something, talking about metaphors, and what could be versus this hardcore data or making a good decision.
Maybe the lead in my clinic with my patients is a feeler, and I'm a hard thinker. She's all about, "We need to cut the budget. We need to do this. We need to do that." She makes decisions from her heart and she's thinking, "How is that going to affect our patients? How's that going to affect the families? The staff aren't going to like that," and I'm all in my head thinking, "How come she can't see this?"
It's a recognition of the different components or facets of us that the high Js want a schedule. They want a calendar, a list, and cross things off the list. They want to have an agenda and schedule free time into the vacation. The perceivers are like, "Deadlines are optional." They want to explore all those avenues and they don't want to be rushed to close. They like the process. That's how we tee up the Myers-Briggs as a tool to help figure out, "That explains a lot about my sibling rivalries, my partner or my kids." When you appreciate other's predisposed tendencies, we can all flex to the other sides.
I can shut my mouth for more than five minutes, believe it or not. That's when you have that appreciation for maybe I need to pivot and change my message, back up, speak more slowly, or come in with a spreadsheet, if I'm not a spreadsheet person. That thoughtfulness that leaders employ, that signifies high emotional intelligence. That's embedded in all of our leadership programs.
“The thoughtfulness that leaders employ signifies high emotional intelligence.”
It's some tool that increases awareness of our predisposed tendencies and then others. How we can maximize that diversity on a team. You want someone on your team who's going to be the feeler, abstract thinker, or someone who's keeping track of details. You want all that. If everyone's like you, you're missing a lot of opportunities.
Like Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals, you're going to want to have people around the table who are going to poke you, push back and do the things that you're not good at. Those are our best leaders. The most successful people are the ones who realize, "I could read a book on that. I could take a course on that. I can get another degree in that. I could hire somebody or partner with somebody who's good at that stuff. That's their gift. Let them do their gift and I'll do mine." That's how we think about that.
Do you actively encourage people to build teams based upon the different personality types as best as possible?
We start off with that personal knowledge. Kim Skarupsli, you're an ENTJ. You're an Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging person. What does that mean? They get a whole portfolio, a whole package that describes you, "What are my strengths as an ENTJ? Where are my blind spots? When I'm going to mess up, when I'm in the grip, when I'm stressed out, what am I going to do?"
Sure enough, that's exactly what I do. I get uber-controlling, I get really abrasive. People find me very offensive because I'm just steamrolling through. I have to be aware of that and then think. In this grant situation, this lab I'm trying to build, this patient experience room, this educational classroom, or this curriculum I'm trying to build, how can I amplify what I'm doing?
What's the best way? Who are the team members? If you're going to build a car, I need someone who knows how to do the engine and how to design the body. I need someone who can do the interior or make it all look nice. I want someone who's going to be the painting. You have to have all the people who love and are good at doing the things that need to do that.
That's what we try to think. Now that you know yourself and you have an appreciation for maybe you, your partner, your kids, or a couple other people, envision and build that out. If you're trying to diagnose, treat, cure, or phenotype some certain disease, what would you need to get that done? What thinking? Do you have all that expertise? No.
That's why some of us have consultants, contractors, or subcontractor. "Is that process the same thing of finding someone who's going to be my statistician, lab manager, patient recruiter, the database manager, or the scientific editor?" You think of all those positions the same way if you have that mindset of, "We're missing someone who's going to be the front-facing high-touch person to then make sure people feel like they're part of the team."
"Who on the group does that? We don't have that. We're going to be in trouble because someone needs to keep the group together." We like to raise awareness and that aha-moment of, "I see." The best teams are, you get the best people, you give them the tools they need, and you get out of their way. That is a formula of success. When you have someone who has that awareness of, "I don't know how to do everything. I'm not the keeper of all truth, but I'm going to get people around me who are smarter than me, better than me, and I'm going to let them go."
It reminds me of an example and I just saw this, but I see it all the time. Mostly it's an online meeting these days, but trying to solve a problem or come up with a new concept or idea. The discussion will be going on and there's one person who's not saying anything. If you go to them, they're probably more of an introvert, processing, analyzing, and more often than not, they have the solution that integrates what everybody else has been saying. That's a great example of what you were talking about.
That's exactly an example we give when we think and when we broach the topic of the different types. How might you intervene and try to get the best juice from that grape? In those instances, when you envision or look at your calendar and you know, "I've got this meeting coming up in two weeks. Who's going to be at that meeting? What do I want to accomplish?"
If you're smart, you're going to have pre-meetings. If you're really smart, you're going to say, "Kim's an introvert." Introverts like to think before they talk. Extroverts talk to think. As an extrovert, I will put a lot of words out there and eventually, I'm going to make sense and come up with an idea. I just do all this verbal dumping. We just talk. That's how we think.
“Introverts like to think before they talk. Extroverts talk to think.”
If you have introverts, they need to process, think, and then they speak very carefully. God bless them. In that instance then, you can't dump something on an introvert and expect them to say, "What do you say, Scott? Come on. What's your point? What do you think?" You have to preload or front load that information for your introverts.
In that instance, two weeks before the meeting, "Scott, can I have five minutes of your time? We got that meeting two Fridays from now. Our goal is to get this in good shape that they're going to approve it. I need your help on this component because you're the expert here. Could you help us think about these things? Maybe come up with three possible solutions or three things we're not thinking about. At the meeting, I hope you'll share that with the group."
Now I've given Scott two weeks. He's got something to look at. I've sent him something to read. I've asked him. He's thinking, and then that will allow him the space he needs to then come to the meeting prepared. These extroverts, you just say something and we'll talk and usually take over the whole meeting. We'll maybe come up with a solution at the end of all the talking.
That leadership skill is the awareness of the environment. Who is going to be at that party? What do I want to accomplish? How do I get the best from them? How do I maybe offset or prevent any snafus at the party as you go through the list of, "Who's going to be there. Do we have to keep them separated? Do we have enough drinks?" All that list-making and thinking about an event.
Think about a meeting or an event. You just don't show up. All that pre-meeting stuff is how we talk to our faculty here at Hopkins about, "There's a pre-meeting and then don't forget, there's a debrief, a post meeting." A lot of faculty don't get that. They think they just show up. It's a lot of work that happens. A lot of times, you think, "That was a well-run meeting. I can't believe it. What a great leader. She's a great meeting leader." What you don't realize is that she's done so much work to get consensus and compromise. It's like politics, getting people to come and say, "Can I count on your vote, Scott?" All those conversations. That's how that happens before the meeting and then after the meeting.
That's a very interesting strategy. Picking the pre-meetings based upon personality types, and structuring it that way, that's something to think about. What I've learned is sometimes having questions ahead of time is helpful. At least people in agendas have a bunch of questions, not just topics. That way, people have something to think about. Taking that strategy go to one to one. That's a very interesting tip regardless. Even if you're running a lab meeting, that's probably valuable, or any meeting.
You're right, Scott. For someone like me who is an ENTJ, the Js are the judging. We like an agenda. I'm one of these people who annoys a lot of people because my agendas are literally to the minute. I'll say, "10:34 to 10:37, we're going to be talking about this." Somewhere along my career, I believe it was when I was back in Chicago at Rush University Medical Center. I was so controlling. "This is what we're going to do." I was the most junior-ranking person at this meeting.
It was so funny now looking back at it, to think I'm going to have this room of people. I was an assistant professor and they're all professors, directors, deans, and trustees. I was going to run this meeting. In the first twenty minutes, I couldn't get people to shut up. They were just talking to each other. That was when the light bulb hit me because I can see myself going, "Kim, this is the important stuff. Close your mouth. Pause. Look at what's happening around here."
My whole goal when we were building the research mentoring program at Rush was to build a team of supporters who were going to buy into it, who got it, who believed in it. Who were going to support it, not only emotionally, verbally, but monetarily or financially? The goal was to build a team and supporters, and they were doing that organically.
That's when I realized this awareness. I was grateful to have it hit me over the head like a hammer. Since that time, I've realized that is my tendency. My tendency is to control things. That's who I am as a personality, and because I know that now, I also have an acute awareness. I have my inner tribe and people on different teams who will remind me, "This is good. This may happen and this is a good thing."
When people go rogue, first of all, you realize that you create that space to have that honest relationship conversation, especially on the heels of this pandemic on all the isolation we've been having. Sometimes it's important for leaders to realize when you have to say, "We're going to go off-script here." Sometimes going off-script can be valuable, not only for the socio-emotional bonding, but also other ideas can percolate and germinate. As above, so below. Sometimes these things that are below need to be unearthed. Those will happen by human beings talking to each other.
Faculty Development: Sometimes, going off-script can be valuable, not only for the socio-emotional bonding but also for other ideas to percolate and germinate.
I was reading something about the fact that even the simple question, "How's the weather?" seems incredibly boring, it's a way of priming the conversation to say that it's okay to talk to each other. The answers are always the same, but it's like a dance, and that's what's happening. What impact do you intend to make in your role? Maybe you can explain a bit about your role as well.
As the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development, we have an office of faculty development in the School of Medicine. Every school of medicine is different, but in Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, there's a dean, an executive vice dean, and then a couple of handfuls almost of vice deans. There a vice dean for education, clinical research, basic research, operations, graduate education, and education. There's a vice dean for faculty.
Think of everything in an academic medical institution around faculty. Here at Hopkins, we have over 3,100 full-time faculty members and over 1,700 part-time faculty members. There are appointment letters. When you hire someone, you appoint them. There's promotions from assistant to associate to professor, other titles, research associate, and clinical associates.
There are all these appointments and promotions. There's research, education, clinical, and program building. There are many facets of a faculty member's life even to exit interviews at the very end, or retirement, or late career retirement, thinking about next chapters. The whole life cycle of a faculty member is what we are privileged to walk with our faculty members in the Office of Faculty Development.
The Office of Faculty Development is under the Office of Faculty writ large. In the Office of Faculty, we have lots of women. We have the office of part-time faculty. We have an opposite faculty information, diversity, and inclusion. We are faculty development. I have the best job in the world where I can be walking alongside all of our brilliant faculty members.
Charlie Irvin, my buddy from the AAMC, the Association of American Medical Colleges Group on Faculty Affairs, and I have known each other for almost a decade. We first gave a talk together in Chicago on precision faculty development. I was thinking, "There's precision medicine and precision education. We need precision faculty development."
Charlie and I do similar work. We look at faculty members and try to help them elevate their game to be the best they can be. That is everything around how to write better grants, how to grow their clinical practice, how to communicate, how to negotiate, how to be a better leader, how to write better, and how to generate scholarship and all those kinds of endeavors that faculty members try to grow their careers.
The opposite faculty development does all that. We have leadership programs. We have workshops and seminars on time management and how to be a good mentee, and how to be a good mentor. You name it. I wish people would name more things. We get to work together to build those kinds of offerings to give to our faculty.
I'm excited about a lot of things that I brought to Hopkins. I'll mention three things that I'm excited about. The first is WAGS. It stands for Writing Accountability Groups. I started that here at Hopkins. A colleague of mine back at Rush University Medical Center, Dr. Kharma Foucher, brought the concept to me in my new program.
She said, "I need to generate more papers. How do I do that?" She started the writing group and then we formalized it and now, we're on for several years. There's a paper. There's a book. There's WAGYourWork.com. There are learning modules. It's a little tool to get into a sustainable habit of writing where you have a small group of people who get together and they write.
You're not writing the same thing, but you're holding like an exercise group or a running group. People meet once a week for an hour. It's a whole formula to again establish a sustainable writing practice. That WAGs was good. That's taken off globally, so I'm proud of that. I'm all about building community. That's my first foray into formalizing how to build community was through WAGs.
The second thing was our Faculty Factory podcast. I've just finished the fourth year of the Faculty Factory. That's FacultyFactory.org. The Faculty Factory is a community of faculty affairs and faculty development leaders sharing tools to build leaders in academic medicine. We've been doing the podcast. We just finished four years. It drops weekly.
Like you, Scott, talking to these wonderful huge-hearted genius people around the world on how their habits, hacks, what they do in their offices, their institutions. All kinds of great advice and tools to help build our community around developing faculty leaders. The Faculty Factory has been a wonderful joy. We've published two free eBooks that condensed, aggregate, and compile all the interviews from years 2 and 3. FacultyFactory.org has been something we're proud of here at Hopkins.
The third thing is, I mentioned earlier, Scott, that I was certified in coaching. Coaching is like mentoring years ago. Everybody was mentoring. We know mentoring is very important. Coaching trickled down from industry that everybody wants to be coached. I started coaching groups. We've been piloting small groups of faculty members in a coaching group environment.
I have figured out how to disseminate it more broadly because you can imagine institutions going, "Oh, my gosh." You just mentioned you've got over 5,000 faculty members and you want to coach all of them. It's impossible. How are you going to do it? How can you sustain that? What's that financial model?
My idea was that there would be a peer get-to goal. People can't all be certified as a coach. I'm not going to call it a coaching, but it can be peer-led getting to goal, helping each other get to goal. Just like the writing accountability groups, it's small groups of faculty members who get together and hold each other accountable for their goals.
Faculty Development: People can't all be certified as a coach, but they can peer-lead others towards getting to goal.
That's something else I'm excited about. We do also fun things like mid-career malaise. I'm working on a mid-career malaise summer retreat program with another one of my colleagues, Heather Brod. Heather Brod is a great coach. She's been doing these weekend retreat boot camps. She used to be at Ohio State University. She's doing her own coaching business now. There are a lot of cool things happening around coaching. Those are some of the things I'm excited about.
There's a lot we can go into there. I would like to hear your perspective when you're developing the different faculty. What does it mean to be an innovation leader?" If you had a chance to think about that, what would you define? Do you try to think about that with your faculty?
I don't have on my agenda a program called being an innovation leader, but we do the design thinking. Certainly, innovation or being innovative is part of the language of the NIH for decades. If things are innovative or novel. That word is certainly familiar in science.
Innovation in some definitions is not finding something novel, but bringing it to the clinic. It's being concerned with making it happen. That's the context of when I say innovation leader.
There are these implementation models. We hear that all the time here at Hopkins as well. It's one thing to have the theoretical idea, but if you can't apply it, bring it into the clinic, and have a direct application for the classroom or the lab or the space, that's where it falls apart. You're exactly right. A lot of faculty struggle with that.
Like many things deeply layered, one of the frustrations I see when I work with faculty now over twenty years is this sense of frustration that they don't get it. They could be NIH. They're not scoring my grant. The foundation isn't supporting this anymore. My mentors are trying to steer me away from that. The students don't get it.
There's always this sense of me versus they. When I hear that and when I hear myself, thinking that and saying that, and getting frustrated, that disconnect, that to me is always an opportunity of, " How come they aren't getting it?" If it's consistently, I keep and they aren't buying it, I'm not doing a good job communicating it. It's before its time. It's too confusing. It's too far outside of the box.
When you fail with anything, you've got to take a step back. Let's go back to design thinking. What's the problem here? There's probably not one problem. It could be that based on what this idea has been percolating or has been planted in you in a seed for years, you know it and you feel it is right. Now it is your obligation to find the right people to help actualize this.
Maybe you're struggling because you're not meant to be carrying this burden on your shoulders. If you had a team of people around you, there could be some subtle tweaks to your idea, or you could carve off little pieces of your idea until people get the palette to enjoy it and then go, "I see." That's happened to me many times where I've been told, "You can't do that. That's not going to fly here. We don't do that around here. You need to slow down." I thought, "Okay."
“Maybe you’re struggling because you’re not meant to be carrying this burden on your shoulders.”
That's when my frustration gets in because I feel it in my bones. Whatever the it is, I know it's going to work. People and my bosses throughout my career said, "How do you know it? Where's the data?" I'm a scientist, too, so I get it. There's also some things that you just know. It's frustrating to know when I can't do it.
When you can't do it, if you have an idea, an invention, a process, a model, or a theory, and it's not happening, we must interrogate it. It's like the detective work. You'll figure it out if you talk to the most heterogeneous group of people you can think of. Here's a situation. What am I not seeing? I remember talking to my grandma and my mom. They're not scientists. What am I not seeing here?
It could start like, "I don't know what you're talking about. I have no idea what these words are, but have you thought about this? Why didn't you do that? I would've done this." It's a forest trees kind of thing. When we are so enamored of our ideas or convicted of this, we can see the end. What we don't see sometimes is all the middle steps.
We need to humble ourselves and consider backing up and bringing more people with us. It's going to be more successful than jumping out in front and just trying to, "Come on. This way." People are like, "I'm not going to follow you. That's crazy pants. I need more data." Bringing something to fruition comes after some frustration. When you feel the frustration, that's where all the light bulbs and the sparking happens at that moment of frustration. That's where it's fun to discover how I can make my thing happen.
Feeling that frustration might be the sign that you're on the right track. One thing that I want to bring out that you mentioned in there is to take a step back and doing small bits of things. Behind me, as you can see on the wall, it says, "No dialogue, no meeting." That's inspired from IDEO. I don't know if you know about IDEO. It's one of the famous design thinking.
You might want to look into it because they're also doing healthcare service design, so they might have some relevance. At IDEO, in their meeting wall, supposedly it says on the wall, "No prototype, no meeting." A prototype, that small little thing is a way to communicate. That's what you're getting at. I want to see what your thoughts are about that.
I don't know IDEO. It's like the proof of concept is what I'm thinking.
Yeah, proof of concept. Sometimes, if it's too complex, I've found that just by getting it out there in some way and saying, "This is what it looks like." It could just be an outline. It could be the first draft of a paper or first draft of, "This is what the project looks like." People go, "Now I see what you mean," and then they get warmer to it.
You're into something there. When I was trying to pitch WAGS, the Writing Accountability Group or the Faculty Factory podcast, I realized that I could see in my mind what the it was. I could see WAGs. I could see the faculty members together. The energy in the room, the support, the we-ness, and the like, "I got you."
I could see the sense of isolation going down. The feeling that people see me, they miss me, and they want me to come to the group. We celebrate. I could feel and see. I can envision all that. When I talk to people about WAGs, they're like, "We are Hopkins. We don't need WAGs, Writing Accountability Groups. What? That sounds too touchy-feely." I felt it and I knew it.
When I would describe and go to faculty meetings and meetings with my bosses and leaders, I would use that technique of being mindful of, "How do people like to get information?" Some people want the big picture, the abstract, the feeling. Some people want the nitty-gritty of, "What's this going to cost us? How much time is this? What is our faculty member's time? Who's going to run it? Who's going to organize it?" They want to know details.
I'd have to be prepared to present both sides, the detail, the nitty-gritty, the how, the what, why, when, and where. That is the being thoughtful of, "Kim, slow your role. Who's in the audience? To whom am I speaking? What are the politics here? What motivates them? Do they want their faculty members to be happy, more productive, engaged, and welcoming? What is it they're trying to get?"
I can pitch this as a tool to help them meet their goals. Also, to what you said, carving off bits and pieces. Sometimes it's smart and other people can help you figure this out in a business plan. You can't necessarily go in with a Cadillac model right out of the gate, but you can in any smart range. Start with an R03 or an R21, and then you build to the R01.
It's rare for someone to smack a home run right out of the gate. You have to show that you are a worthy investment. In our field, it is, "What impact are you having?" It's either measured traditionally by H-Impact and scholarly publications. Now, more commonly, altmetrics in social media are people following you. Do you have Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn where patients are clamoring to your practice? How else are you having impact? Sometimes you can say, "If I build slowly and reign in my enthusiasm, I'll get there." That's a strategy of dialing back the enthusiasm to be smarter about it.
It's the point about the prototype and getting that out there, because then, people see what you mean.
That's another lesson I always tell people. Don't be afraid to admit things. My latest fun thing is a friend of mine sent me a funny meme. When you lose or feel like you can't get words on the tip of your tongue, you just, "What is the English word for that?" That way, people will give you a little a pass, "She must not be a native English speaker." I'm losing vocabulary in my basement for the past years by myself, but I'll say, "What's the English word for that word I'm trying to think of?"
“Don’t be afraid to admit things.”
Prototypes. Even if you have a great idea and you are convicted and you believe it's going to go, you just need to find the right angle, the right team, the right people, the right prototype, you can also parallel track be doing those things. I was pitching the Faculty Factory concept. When I started this few years ago, in academic medicine, nobody was doing a podcast or very few people were doing podcasts.
It certainly were a global thing. Some people do in their disease specialty. "We don't need to podcast. We have conferences. This is not going to work. Why are you wasting your time doing this?" I still knew it and I could see it such that I designed the logo. I found the guy to help me design the website. I envisioned what I wanted to have on the website.
I'm all about community and I thought this would be a great place for people to come and see scholarship on faculty development in one spot. See all the geographic map of North America with all the medical schools posted there with links to their faculty development. I wanted this to be a one-stop shop and I could see it, so I started doing it. I didn't talk about it until it was palatable. It's one of those things you don't necessarily always ask for permission, rather easier to beg forgiveness after the fact. You could do that parallel track to feed your hunger.
With the technology we have, you could always do something to start because you can build your own website. Even if you have a big research question, there's probably a data set somewhere you could go, tap into, and analyze. It's not going to be the answer you want, but it gets some preliminary thing, like how many patients are there with this cluster of symptoms. This one thing that we're pushing, because we're trying to build communities for research and to continue on is what we're calling accelerant projects. These are lightweight, low-resource projects. You don't have to wait to get the funding to start doing something. It'll help you get the funding later.
We do that at Hopkins, Accelerator Grants. It's the same thing. You have a great idea. We have Biomedical Engineering. We have some Applied Physics lab. We have some cool opportunities, tech ventures where you get people who have a great idea and people are thinking outside of the box. Let's next generation this. No holds barred. Let's think about this and invest in it.
That's what makes us great. That's why we do such great things. People take chances and calculated risks. We know that some of these things aren't going to work. Yet sometimes by discovering what doesn't work, we now can get closer to the solutions because a lot of people think, "We confirmed the null hypothesis. It didn't work."
Thank you for that. Now nobody else perhaps was going to waste their time testing that null. That's part of science. Figure out that doesn't work. Move on. It's wonderful. It's inspiring. It's growing that muscle. Growing not only our own muscles in our brains, in our hearts, and our leadership toolkits, but it's growing teams. It's growing community of people who realize nothing like somebody who's got an idea who can inspire and encourage other people to do. That's what we're best at when we're doing and being, but usually, it's always in community. I love this work. I love what you're doing. Anything to get people thinking about innovative ideas, creativity, working together, riffing off of each other is exciting to me.
I completely agree. It's what I like that's happening here now. What is it that you do when no one else is looking that improves your performance as a leader?
It's probably exercise. I'm a gym rat. I love fitness. I find that when I am partnering with oxygen, moving and breathing it, is when the ideas come to me. It's a trite saying and I've heard many people say it before. I never appreciated that even walking, until COVID when I was relegated to my home working. When I go outside and walk, I never used to have my office at Hopkins. I would just, like everybody else, power through the day. The only time I'd walk would be going to different meetings in different buildings.
When I go outside, breathe, and think, I'm not running and thinking about that meeting. I'm just going out for a walk. I invariably, 9 of 10 times, come back into the house and I keep pads of paper around. I'm like, "There you go. Great idea. I got it." The moving of the oxygen through my body is what I feel makes me better, because then also, it calms me down. It relaxes me. Just movement.
That's a great one because we often forget that it's not just go. You've got to go into that slow thinking. That's when the best ideas come in and that's where you can have them. We could probably go on for a long time. It's been fantastic. Is there anything else you wanted to say, mention, or bring up in this context?
I just want to encourage people reading this to never give up and never surrender. It's from an old Galaxy Quest movie. You are doing great work. You're not alone. Be courageous. Don't be afraid. Keep doing what you're doing. Also, invite other people on your journey with you. Even when they're the prickly pear people. Even the people who sometimes know you. Abraham Lincoln was also attributed to saying, "I do not like that man. I must get to know him better."
Every time I felt like myself not liking somebody or feeling like we are not jiving, I got to figure that out. I would encourage people to keep doing what you're doing. Don't give up. Invite other people to be with you. That's where the fireworks happen. That's where the ideas generate. We're not meant to be isolated. We're not meant to be alone. We are meant to be in community with each other. That's where all the good stuff happens.
Faculty Development: We're not meant to be alone. We are meant to be in community with each other. That's where all the good stuff happens.
Thank you a lot for coming on the show.
This has been great. Thanks for doing what you're doing. I look forward to seeing your community grow and being a part of it.
Important Links
Charlie Irvin - past episode
About Dr. Kimberly A. Skarupski
Kimberly A. Skarupski, PhD, MPH is the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the Office of Faculty Development (OFD) and Professor of Medicine (Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology) in the School of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. The OFD creates and delivers effective programs that develop and nurture our diverse faculty as leaders in clinical care, medical education, and research excellence. Dr. Skarupski has focused her faculty development efforts on building communities of engagement (e.g., WAGs [Writing Accountability Groups], Grant Review Investigator Groups, Specific Aims Speed Sessions, Late-Career and Senior Faculty Transitions) and on the development, teaching, and evaluation of various faculty leadership programs. Dr. Skarupski is a certified professional coach through the College of Executive Coaching and has developed group coaching and career development coaching camps for the Hopkins School of Medicine faculty. Kim also hosts the Faculty Factory podcast – an international forum for academic affairs and faculty development conversations and a repository of faculty development snippets for academic medical faculty members. As a social gerontologist and program evaluator, the major theme running throughout Dr. Skarupski’s 25+ year research career has been the quality of life in older adults, using data from large-scale epidemiologic studies to examine disparities in quality of life in this population, as well as the contribution of various social and psychological determinants of quality of life in older age. Most recently, she has merged her gerontologic and faculty development interests exploring late-career faculty members’ career and retirement needs and expectations.
