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How do parking gates (you heard right, parking gates) impact the emotional well-being of your faculty and staff?
Making the connection between functioning parking gates and faculty wellness is just one of the often overlooked and fundamental factors that influence the productivity, success, happiness and overall well-being of faculty.
“I’ve started joking that I can beat mindfulness meditation with a glass of water. If everyone is dehydrated, then I can do a lot more for them with a glass of water that I can with 45 minutes to meditate.
“I have nothing against mindfulness, I just think it’s a thin way to fix systems’ problems.”
We explore these factors in my recent chat with Daniel Shapiro, MS, PhD (Episode No. 2 of the Faculty Factory Podcast). Dan is the Vice Dean for Faculty and Administrative Affairs at the Penn State College of Medicine (Hershey) and the Garner James Cline Professor of Medical Humanism.
One of the most impactful quotes from our conversation came at around the 12:30 mark of our podcast:
“It’s vital for faculty and staff to look within and start modeling self-healing for the population we’re trying to treat.”
In addition, we discuss the necessity of emotional intelligence as a chair, and how to screen candidates for emotional intelligence via a simulation with a disgruntled faculty member.
You can learn more by reading the podcast’s entire transcript, or by listening to it through the embedded podcast player above.
Make sure to subscribe to the Faculty Factory podcast through Apple Podcasts/iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. We’d love to hear from you, contact us directly with feedback. If you want to be interviewed or have an idea for the podcast, contact us.
Transcript – Daniel Shapiro, MS, PhD (Faculty Factory Podcast Episode No. 2)
Kimberly: Welcome back to the Faculty Factory podcast. On today’s episode, we’re talking with Dan Shapiro from Penn State University. So, why don’t you start off by telling everyone how you got into faculty affairs and faculty development?
Dan: I started at the University of Arizona as an assistant professor with a lot of clinical responsibilities and I did some writing, etc. And ultimately I was recruited to be Chair of the Humanities Department in the College of Medicine at Penn State. I did that job for about seven years, and then I got pulled into doing more administrative work for the dean’s office.
And then, I was ultimately blessed sort of as the Vice Dean for Faculty in Administrative Affairs in 2015. So I do things like recruit chairs, evaluate the chairs, and I play vice principal sometimes. There is an Office of Faculty Development that reports up to me, and the Diversity and Inclusion Associate Dean’s office reports up to mine. I do a lot of as-needed jobs as well.
Kimberly: Can you give us a sense of how big your office is? How many people are doing what kinds of jobs?
Dan: The Diversity and Inclusion Office has four people total. The Faculty Development Office has three. What we call Faculty Affairs, which is promotion, and tenure has four. My office has four total. There’s a psychologist who does a lot of analytics for us. There is a financial guy who does a lot of the business side of what’s happening in some of the departments. And then, an administrative assistant and myself. That’s really the whole show.
Kimberly: Was that office in place when you came on board and you assumed your position or did you build this up?
Dan: There was a vice dean when I first became a chair who actually recruited me. He left after I’d been around for about a year. I think maybe it was something I said [Kim laughs]. And then that office did not exist for many years. A new dean took over and a product of a conversation between the two of us resulted in the office being kind of reinvigorated.
Kimberly: Did you recruit folks externally, internally or both? How did all of this come about?
Dan: Both. The faculty development has been internal. Diversity and inclusion was external. We stole Lynette Chappell-Williams from Cornell and she’s fantastic. We just turned over the Office of Faculty Development. Barbara Ostrov was in that spot and she just became a chair of pediatrics in Albany.
So, we recruited internally and had some really stellar candidates, and Jennifer McCall-Hosenfeld has taken that role and is just running with it, gangbusters. Faculty Affairs is about to turn over and we recruited that internally as well.
Kimberly: Wow, good. So what kinds of things are you doing that’s maybe unique or different, or something that you’re excited about that you’d like to tell us about?
Dan: A couple of things. We’ve had some innovations in recruiting chairs. We have them do simulations which is an unusual part of an interview process.
Kimberly: I remember you talking about that. Yeah, tell us about that. That is really creative.
Dan: It’s pretty common for chair recruits and chair candidates to have had illustrious research or clinical management experience. But the real jobs they have to do every day requires a level of emotional intelligence that we don’t always capture if all we do is celebrate Avida.
So we have our chair candidates do a brief interaction with a simulated disgruntled faculty member. And the faculty member isn’t once in a lifetime upset, they’re generally just mildly disturbed about something. And usually, there’s a little bit of an accountability issue somewhere in their camp.
And we give this scenario to the candidate a couple of weeks in advance. And then when they’re here in front of the committee as part of their interview, they do these kind of brief simulated interactions, and it’s been discerning. It’s very helpful to us.
Kimberly: You have an actor?
Dan: We have different people play the role of actor. I did the first few but then the role of disgruntled faculty member has been played by over five different people, depending on the search. It’s really not hard because the people on these committees are generally faculty themselves and have a pretty good idea, and we just coach them. It’s not an over the top once in a lifetime thing, just mildly irritated.
Kimberly: When you say brief, what’s the length, the timeline average? And then, do you debrief the whole interaction?
Dan: Yeah, that’s a good question. The interaction part takes about 10 minutes, and then afterward we ask them what they thought about it. We ask if there’s anything that they would do differently which is a nice opportunity to see if they are reflective, particularly if they did something odd. Like one guy said, “I made a joke, and it was a little too early for him. And I shouldn’t have done that.”
Now I thought, this shows someone who’s reflective, that’s what we need.
And, you know, being one of the people who play the role of vice principal in the organization, part of this is just self-preservation on my part. When I have chairs who are engaged and can manage tense situations with faculty and advocate for faculty, but also hold them accountable and have the emotional intelligence to give a nuanced message, then my life is easier.
If they can’t do that, if they botch even simple interactions, then I’m one of the people who has to clean up after them.
Kimberly: Have you developed a rubric that the committee uses after that candidate leaves where you kind of go through a number of competencies?
Dan: We have not done that, but the rubric is a great idea. What we’ve done is to ask the committee to vote on whether the committee thinks it was a pass or not; to use their judgment. And we’ve had very few times when there’s been much disagreement in the committee, and there’s different committees. The vast majority of the time, they…you know, people agree, and they’re not hard to pass, I think.
Kimberly: Yeah. Now, that brings me to faculty development. Have you thought about or do you already build in these kinds of emotional intelligence training sessions where you’re helping people develop this skill and this ability and be able to be reflective and thinking about interactions with others?
Dan: We have a few venues. We have a kind of emerging clinical leader program that meets once a month, and there’s usually a topic and it rotates, and people have to bring their own challenges. So, they might say, “I’ve got a faculty member who’s a little bit of a bully working in the clinic and I don’t know how to handle them.”
And then you brainstorm things you’ve tried, etc., etc., but I don’t think it’s very easy to teach emotional intelligence, honestly. And by the time you’re a chair, if you don’t have it, it’s too late for me. There is too much at stake. And, I wish I could say, “Yeah, I think this is absolutely doable.” But, I find the job’s hard enough for people with exquisite emotional intelligence. I think being a chair is enormously difficult to do well.
That’s one. The other is, I think we’ve done some innovative work in burnout.
I’ve got a little team that’s just publishing our model in the American Journal of Medicine, which is a little bit more robust, I think than your typical burnout evaluation, which is kind of binary, “Are you burned out or are you not burned out?” This is looking across levels.
So, starting at the basic you get, “Are you eating when you’re at work? Are you dehydrated? You know, are you suicidal?” Kind of the fundamentals first, then assessing, “Do you feel physically safe? Do you feel like your job is safe?”
Moving up from there, “Do you feel you have a basic level of respect? Do you feel respected by the machines you interact with? Does the parking gate open when you swipe your card? Do the people around you respect you? Do you feel like you work in a civil environment?”
Then up from there, “Do you feel appreciated? Do you feel like the system notices when you go out of your way to do excellent work?” And then, at the top, “Do you have the resources and autonomy to actually heal patients? Are you doing the work that’s meaningful to you? Or are we making it possible for you to do that?” So, we’re trying to assess across these different levels, and then intervene to improve life as we need to.
Kimberly: That’s amazing. That’s like a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, kind of thing.
Dan: Exactly. That’s exactly what it is.
Kimberly: I’m just amazed that you took advantage of these things that we take for granted, I love that. Does the arm go up in the parking garage? With 90% of the time at Hopkins, it doesn’t. And you see people starting their day off in the morning raging that they can’t even get in the building.
Dan: Right. I’ve started joking that I can beat mindfulness meditation with a glass of water. If everyone is dehydrated, then I can do a lot more for them with a glass of water that I can with 45 minutes to meditate.
Kimberly: Isn’t that something, because it’s run, run, run. It’s this cult of busy, and it’s some kind of badge of honor to say, “Well, I haven’t eaten in a month and I haven’t had a bowel movement in six weeks, and oh, I haven’t gone… You know, I haven’t urinated in forever.”
This is not something to be proud of.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We’re not exactly modeling self-healing for the population we’re trying to treat.
Kimberly: How did you come up with this comprehensive, holistic approach like backing this train up to the very basic sense? Did you have a committee that came up with this way of thinking or did you conceive of this and your team, how did this happen?
Dan: I was doing a burnout evaluation for Brown Lifespan, the four hospitals out there, and Kathy Duquette is this brilliant, you know, she manages all of the nursing. She’s the Chief Nursing Officer for the whole system. And she was the one that kind of looked at everything we were assessing and said that, “This is Maslow.”
And then we as a team, adapted the hierarchy to think about physician and health professional wellness. But, it’s made it… It helps organize the response, like start with the basics. Don’t start with flapping mindfulness meditation in there.
In fact, I had a quote in one of the assessments I did that was something like, “I don’t know who put up the meditation lunch flyer in the men’s room. But if I find them, I’m going to choke them out.”
(Kim laughs)
That was just one of the physicians who was just so frustrated with… You won’t change my life at all, but you’ll tell me like it’s my fault I’m not being mindful enough instead of…
Aand I meditate sometimes. I have nothing against mindfulness, I just think it’s a thin way to fix systems’ problems.
Kimberly: Well, that reminds me of, we have a great talent management organization development unit at Hopkins, and they have these wonderful programs on anything from communication to negotiating and etc., etc., and the one they offer is time management.
And I had a faculty member email me and said, “This is not even disrespectful. It’s completely ignorant. You’re offering us a time management course that goes from 8:00 a.m. to noon, four hours to take time management.”
Dan: Yeah, exactly. (Dan laughs)
Kimberly: And it’s insulting to our faculty members. I can only imagine they go, “Are you kidding me? Seriously? Time management in four hours? Can’t we make that simpler people?” So, you’re so right. Let’s focus on that basic essentials. I love it. Drink a glass of water for crying out loud, inhale and then maybe an exhale. Wonderful.
Dan: And we have to fix this stuff that doesn’t work you know like the parking gates. Before we go on to more advanced stuff, let’s help people to feel a fundamental basic level of respect.
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, love it, what’s going on around your leadership courses? Talk a little bit about what’s happening in your faculty development?
Dan: A number of years ago Barb Ostrov and even before her, Anna Yang, cultivated relationships with our business school. And, so this created a really nice sequence that includes some time away from work to do a leadership training. It’s been really beautifully reviewed and people are very enthusiastic about it, and it continues to evolve.
And we’ve taken a real learning culture approach to it, which is, let’s keep making it better and better and better. And so, that’s been great. We also as you know, try to take advantage of what’s available to AAMC for chairs and others and of course, the GFA which I’m a huge fan of. So, you know, and we’ve tried multiple…
Kimberly: This training through the business school you said is a sequence. Is it like a cohort program where they’re starting at a junior level of progressing through the academic continuum for mid-career or late career because we…
Dan: Oh, no. No, we’re not that sophisticated.
Kimberly: Yeah, and in Hopkins, we recently said, “Gosh, we’re so good for junior faculty. We recently started something for senior faculty, and late career, retiring faculty, but we’ve got virtually nothing for that mid-career who are have been associate professor for a while and maybe a new, newly promoted professors, we got nothing going on there.”
Dan: We have a nice like you say, a nice junior faculty development program that was started by Luanne Thorndyke when she was at Penn State. Luanne started this with colleagues, and that has continued to flourish. And then we have this other one, that’s cohorts which is the business school that people honestly all across the leadership continuum take.
So it isn’t really geared to just one segment but we have the same…and we have been doing this very small cadre of emerging clinical leaders which tends to be either division chiefs or medical directors who are running a clinic or who aspire to run a clinic, but we don’t have anything for more advanced folks at all.
Kimberly: Yeah, interesting. We too are trying to think about what that might look like and it’s people a little bit more mature maybe retraining, thinking about mentorship and new and different ways to retool. So we’re also kind of challenged with what that might look like and how we might meet those needs. I think it’s really an underdeveloped area.
Dan: We have been doing coaching. We have used both an RSA and solicited names from all across the country from our colleagues from all over, and have a nice cadre of coaches who’ve done a nice job.
And every time we hire a new chair or even the president of our hospital, we get them…with chairs, we get them some internal coaches who are other chairs, but we also hire an executive coach for them for the first year.
And sometimes that’s helpful, I think, and sometimes I get mixed results back, I think.
Personally, I think the jury’s still out on how effective coaching is. I really don’t know what the secret sauce is but sometimes folks are really enthusiastic about it. Some feel like they’ve gotten a lot of insight from it, and it’s really helped them in difficult situations. And other times I get back and sort of, you know, where we’ve kind of dwindled. We’re not really talking that much anymore, I don’t know.
Kimberly: So you’re talking about external coaches brought into your institution to help the existing faculty. Have you or has anyone expressed interest internally about training, say, senior faculty to be coaches to junior faculty?
Dan: We have one ex-chair who’s doing that, but we have not had…we haven’t done anything like the Stanford program where they’ve really tried to cultivate a large group of internal senior faculty coaches.
Kimberly: Do you have a retirement academy or anything like that for your senior or retired faculty in Hershey?
Dan: There is a faculty group who get together and have coffee, but we have not had success in an organized way of taking advantage of their wisdom.
Kimberly: Yeah, we’re trying to do that real hard at Hopkins too. There’s a lot of interest in our near retirement and newly retired folks to continue teaching or help review grants and help write manuscripts. And, they don’t…we’re not really into the coaching, but there’s been some interest from our, frankly, our new faculty, the junior folks who are hearing about more sponsorship and coaching, and they want to, they say, “Hey, do you guys have coaches?”
And, you know, we certainly don’t have that kind of a resource to provide coaches to all new faculty, but that’s kind of starting to bubble up and we’re curious about that.
You mentioned this awesome burnout program. Do you have a chief wellness officer? Have you gone that direction yet?
Dan: As a result of the surveys we did, we discovered that we had higher depression rates than we’d like to see. And we successfully joined resources with our GME office and hired a psychologist who just started less than a month ago, to really serve as sort of a safety net and coordinator for wellness.
So we’re not calling him a Chief Wellness Officer, but he was doing some executive work for Johnson & Johnson for a while. And he’s really just started to get to know the lay of the land but we’re hoping for big things.
Kimberly: Yeah, that’s awesome. Do you do your own ingrown faculty satisfaction survey or do you do the faculty forward through the AAMC?
Dan: We grew our own…the burnout survey, we built ourselves, and now we’re doing it. We did it from Lifespan and Brown. And actually, starting Monday we’re going do the same thing for Allegheny’s hospitals in Pittsburgh. So, we like this because we think we’ve hit the sweet spot with how long the survey is. And at the end of it, faculty and other docs, go, “They get me, they really get me,” and we like that.
So we think we’ve trimmed the noise. I know some people are real fans of the faculty forward survey. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as other folks, so we grew our own.
Kimberly: We also have our own homegrown, we do it every two years, and we too had a little uptick in some dissatisfaction and burnout. So we got a 50% effort, Chief Wellness Officer, internally just recently.
Dan: Oh, that’s great.
Kimberly: Yeah. So what else? Anything new you want to tell us or inspire some of our friends out there who are maybe just finding themselves falling backward into academic affairs or faculty development… any words of wisdom for them?
Dan: It’s really great, honorable work. I think it’s a really fun way to complement other pieces of an academic career. And I am still constantly confused and stimulated by this work. So, I think it’s absolutely worth throwing oneself into.
Kimberly: I love that, constantly confused and proud of it. That’s good. It keeps us interested and engaged.
Dan: Yeah, that’s the reality. Well, I love that you’re doing this podcast and keep up the great work.
Kimberly: Thank you, Dan. And this concludes another episode of the Faculty Factory Podcast. Thanks, Vice Dean, Dan Shapiro from Penn State.
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We encourage you to go to FacultyFactory.org to find out more. Get in touch with me, ask me any questions. Maybe you want to be interviewed on the podcast. Thanks for tuning into Faculty Factory Podcast. We’ll see you next time.
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