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This week we have an interview with Amanda Termuhlen, MD. Dr. Termuhlen is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, in the Office of Faculty Affairs at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Transcription
Dr. Skarupski: Welcome back to the “Faculty Factory” podcast. On today’s episode, we have Dr. Amanda Termuhlen, the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and the Office of Faculty Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Amanda, how does a rare pediatric non-Hodgkin Lymphoma expert from Ohio end up in Minnesota? And I do want everybody to know that Amanda wins a Winner Winner Chicken Dinner award for being the newest associate dean. You’ve been in your role, I guess, 10 months now, Amanda, right?
Dr. Termuhlen: So, thank you so much for inviting me to do this podcast. I’ve been an avid listener and I’ve gained so much out of them. How did the person from Ohio end up in Minnesota? Well, it was actually via California. So I’m a pediatric hematologist oncologist and bone marrow transplanter, and my first faculty position was at Ohio State at the Ohio State University, and I developed an interest in faculty development, and I was actually sponsored. There was a woman who was the division chief of pediatric surgery and she said, “I think you would be great for this dean’s task force on promoting women in leadership in academic medicine.” So of course being the early career faculty member that I was, I said, “Great, I’m in, let’s do it.” Had a great experience on that task force. And then, as I was working on that, this was back when the American Association of Medical Colleges had a position called the Women’s Liaison Officer. At the time the woman who was the women’s liaison officer retired. And so, again, the leadership at the medical school said, “How would you like to be the Women’s Liaison Officer to the AAMC?” And of course I said, “I would love that.” So that really started my journey and I didn’t realize it at the time how much sponsorship was actually involved there. But absolutely, people recognized the interest and gave me the opportunity to develop in that area.
Dr. Skarupski: At what stage in your career were you? And I assume this was back at the Ohio state when you were sponsored to be on the task force and then nominated for the women’s liaison officer. Were you assistant professor, associate professor? Give us a sense of where you were in your career trajectory when these opportunities were given to you and provided to you by a sponsor.
Dr. Termuhlen: This was about, I would say four to five years in as an assistant professor. So it was early. And I loved going to the AAMC. I really enjoyed learning and getting guidance from all the experienced people that attended that. And I made it a point to go to the meeting every year and try to glean everything I could. Meanwhile, my day job progressed, I became more and more clinically active. I became more administratively involved, moved into some leadership positions. And eventually fast forward to about 2009, I applied to the ELAM program and was accepted. And that year really opened my mind as to what do I want to do for the next phase of my career? I’ve been a huge, you know, clinician educator, program grower, clinical researcher. What do I really want to do? And so part of that exploration was actually leaving Ohio and moving to California, to Los Angeles. I was a professor at that time at the University of Southern California, and I ran a small pediatric hematology oncology program in Long Beach, which was under the umbrella of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. So hands on financial experience, hands on developing early career faculty, and more and more I began to contribute in the faculty development role at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Eventually I went there full time with an official title in faculty development for my division, which was a large division ,and also working informally for the Department of Pediatrics.
So how did I then jump to Minnesota? What I discovered for myself was that I could have a really bad oncology day. But if I could meet with an early career faculty member and give guidance about career, about research approaches, about mentoring, it became a great day. And so that realization made me think, “Yeah, I really… This is where I get my positive resilience from. This is what makes me happy. This really is very personally satisfying to me.” And right after ELAM I had gone to my first GFA meeting, so I got to meet a lot of the professionals in the Group on Faculty Affairs. And really, again, learned, listened, thought, and applied what I had learned in my day job. So about probably 18 months ago, my sister-in-law, who is also an ELAM graduate and is the regional dean at the Duluth Campus of the University of Minnesota, sent me an email and said, “Hey, you know, Minnesota is looking for an associate dean of faculty affairs,” to which I responded, “I just bought a house in LA. I am not going anywhere.”
Dr. Skarupski: Not to mention going from LA to Minnesota.
Dr. Termuhlen: Yeah. So she waited. She was… Very hard. She waited a couple months and then she sent it to me again in all caps. “This is what you have always wanted to do. Open the email.” So I thought, “Okay.” So I opened it and I read it and I thought, “This is absolutely what I’ve always wanted to do.” And when I look back to my ELAM experience, we did this exercise on the future history of your career, and the thing that I was going to do 10 years from then was to be an associate dean of faculty affairs, and so I was like, “Okay.”
Dr. Skarupski: We just had on the podcast last time Nancy Spector, who took over from Page Morahan having built the ELAM program 25 years ago. I had no idea ELAM was 25 years in the making. And Nancy was telling us on the podcast that there are already over 1,200 alumni. So it’s really wonderful that here you are endorsing that program and that specific exercise, “The future history of your career,” and here you are and it was directly applicable to you.
Dr. Termuhlen: Directly applicable and a real inflection point, I think, in my career and now I have my dream job. I absolutely love what I do at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Skarupski: That is really incredible. I love that story, how you got there. Oh, and I just love the comment of having a really bad oncology day, but then when you meet with junior faculty, boom, that’s where you get your resilience. And that is so true for so many of us. And I think I talked once on my little Fac Chat when I was talking about how I got into this field the same way as I’m an off the charts E extrovert. And when I was just sitting doing my gerontology research day after day, week after week after month after month after year, writing papers and doing data analysis and writing grants, and it was such a lonely, for the most part, just a lonely, solitary endeavor. And then when I fell backwards into faculty development, the same experience you had, that I actually felt when I could go home at the end of the day and interacted with somebody who was a few rungs down the ladder from me, but have a connection and feel like I was actually making an impact right here, right now, really was rewarding and it was strange to me to go, “Oh, wait a minute. Maybe I should be doing something that’s more people-oriented.” So I feel the same kind of passion and draw that you would do, that you felt that. So I think so many of us have that, that our heart just swells when we are with faculty. And so it’s like, “Oh, that’s right. That’s because I’m supposed to be doing this faculty development stuff.”
Dr. Termuhlen: Yeah. There’s something about overlapping what you do for work with what you love.
Dr. Skarupski: So everybody is always dying to know. Can you describe your office and who’s doing what and give us a bird’s eye view?
Dr. Termuhlen: I sure can. So my office, I have a full-time director of the Office of Faculty Affairs, and I will say when I moved into this position, everyone in the office was new. And that wasn’t because anything happened, it was because they all had grown professionally and got promoted out of the office. So I really started with all 100% new people. So I have a terrific director of my office who actually comes out of education so brings tech educational knowledge to the office. I have an executive assistant who does project management for… We’re trying to update our CB process, so project management, handles all our data reporting to accrediting bodies such as the AAMC or the LCME, and is our frontward facing face to our office so deals with a lot of the incoming questions, calls, etc. I have a full time program specialist who focuses on our promotion and tenure processes for our tenure track and what we call our academic track faculty who also does our mentoring programs and faculty development programs. And then since I’ve been here, we have added up another program coordinator who is our major data tracker, does our brand new clinician track or pathway to promotion called the master clinician track, handles all that promotion material and is also, works with us on our diversity, equity and inclusion.
Dr. Skarupski: Wow. So when you say “brand new,” did you have to put the job descriptions together, recruit, interview, hire or you walked into those folks being in place already brand new?
Dr. Termuhlen: So the director had been in place two, three months before I started and she had interviewed the executive assistant and the program coordinator, and then together we hired the next program coordinator. But I did interview and get to help pick the director and it is just been an amazing group of individuals to work together. I couldn’t imagine a better group of people to work with, especially coming into a new position.
Dr. Skarupski: Yeah. That is such a blessing to not have to walk into a mess or any crisis or drama or an office with no resources and no budget and you’re a one person show so…
Dr. Termuhlen: Oh, and I forgot. We also have a center for women in medicine and science…
Dr. Skarupski: Oh, wow.
Dr. Termuhlen: …and they’re also under my umbrella, and they have also a program coordinator who is our half-time person, who’s terrific. Very nicely structured and resourced.
Dr. Skarupski: And you report directly to whom?
Dr. Termuhlen: The dean.
Dr. Skarupski: The dean. Wow, that’s nice. Okay. And about how many faculty do you have in the School of Medicine in Minnesota?
Dr. Termuhlen: So we have about 2,200 faculty with an additional about 1,500 that are adjunct faculty, and we’re scattered over essentially the entire city of Minneapolis and Duluth as well. Yeah, we have our regional campus there with faculty as well.
Dr. Skarupski: Okay. Let’s get into something innovative, unique, something you’re excited about, you’d like to share with our faculty development, academic affairs family.
Dr. Termuhlen: So I think one of the issues that we talk about in the Group of Faculty Affairs is that, that session, you know, “What Keeps You Up At Night?” And I always thought that was a cute name for a session until I took this job.
Dr. Skarupski: Oh no.
Dr. Termuhlen: And then I realized, yeah, there are things that definitely keep us awake at night. And so I view that, you know, what I get to do for faculty development is very positive and very good for the faculty, good for the institution. But I also think of professionalism, disruptive faculty members as an opportunity to really look at how do you tackle those issues across the entire institution, especially since our clinical sites are scattered. You know, we have affiliate institutions, we have multiple practice sites. How do you bring all this together to really give everyone the advantage of a great working and learning environment? So one of the things that I wanted to tackle right away was how do we deal with people that are struggling, and how do we make things better across the culture? It’s not particularly, I don’t think, innovative or new, but one of the first things I set out to do was to really get a good relationship with human resources, both on the medical school side and on the clinical practice side, so we could really work together and to identify who is struggling before they get into situations where there may be formal complaints or concerns registered. But how do we find those people and how do we reach out and how do we help them?
And part of that was, I work with 27 chairs and how do you let the chairs know that you want to help them do this, that you really do want to help their faculty? You want to help make their job easier because you want to help their faculty deal with the pressures that they deal with every day. And so one of the very early things we did was we just tried to set out some expectations, some trying to improve that culture of reporting things before they’re problematic, letting people know what the resources are available and how do we reach out in the most inclusive way we can to help our faculty do the best they can? Because, they are dealing with incredible pressures from all different sources and sides. So that was, I think, one of the first things that I really wanted to move forward on. So we used a lot of the, of Hickson’s work out of Vanderbilt and really trying to encourage that openness and that letting us know and that we will work on things as much as we can with the chairs, with the faculty, with everybody to try to work through these issues and improve the work and the learning environment for everyone.
Dr. Skarupski: Since you’ve been there in Minnesota only 10 months and you decided to tackle professionalism, I’m wondering how you came upon that. Did you engage, for example, in this appreciative inquiry model where you went out on the listening and learning tour and met all these 27 chairs and talked to them and then you discerned that there was a potential issue with faculty members who are struggling and, or did your dean say to you, “Amanda, this is an issue. I feel it, it’s palpable,” or “Here’s some data that show that professionalism is an issue.” How’d that come upon as your number one mission versus any other thing you wanna tackle?
Dr. Termuhlen: Well, three things. So the first was that I think it is just so foundational across every workplace that there always can be improvement and there always can be movement made in that area. The second was it was exactly that. It was talking to all the chairs and actually it… There was kind of a red balloon that was floated that gave me a hint that things were going on, but they were falling between the cracks. That one group of people didn’t know what another group of people knew. And so faculty who were struggling were kind of falling between the middle. So I kind of have a, had an indicator that there may be something going on. And then it was talking to the chairs and I think it was not so much about, you know, tell me what’s going on.
It was tell me how I can help you help… How can I help you help your faculty? So it wasn’t so much I knew there was glaring problems, because I don’t think there are glaring problems. It was just like, how can we make it better by working together? And I think that was really the main thing that made me do that. And then it’s talking to the Dean and the Dean is 100% behind this. And so it made a very good, I think, partnership because we both felt that this was a very high priority for the institution.
Dr. Skarupski: Yeah. So, allow me to add a little bit of vinegar to this scenario for just as folks listening to think about this, because this is so fresh for us at Hopkins. Just yesterday, late afternoon in our faculty senate, we had a presentation on disruptive behavior and civility and a new policy guidelines, something like you mentioned for coming off of the heels of when we provide a survey or questionnaire to the students who are graduating, the learners and there’re some indicators as you called it, red balloons, little singing canaries saying that they were experiencing mistreatment. So on the heels of those kind of telltale data saying we have a problem here, we had a small committee that would put together these three and a half page guideline proposal that essentially the faculty in the faculty senate felt like it weighs, weighing very heavily toward the students side such that one faculty member said, “This is good. We all agree that a learner environment and the learning experience should be paramount.” We are actually, you know, obviously a university and education is primary and yet this policy as it’s set forth almost is very heavy handed toward the faculty because the faculty member seemingly could be blindsided by this series of guidelines or protocols where all of a sudden at stage four, they’re getting a call in to go meet somebody because there’s been a complaint lodged X steps backwards that the faculty member wasn’t even aware of. And this whole debate arose around more burden on faculty members who many times are mentoring that’s uncompensated effort and they’re engaging in all this extra, extra, extra activity. And now we wanna throw some more guidelines with, you know, air quotes, meaning that they’re gonna have some more directives and then perhaps may even be blindsided by some and sometimes, you know, some students who are being unreasonable in their demands.
So I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about how you carefully weighed this effort of professionalism without creating an environment or perhaps a sentiment among the faculty that, “Are you kidding? There’s now something else that we’re not doing well or that we have to pay attention to or do another learning module or.” Do you see what I’m getting at that, you know, that… Did you experience any of that or were you concerned or how did you navigate that without coming across by your faculty as being punitive in some way?
Dr. Termuhlen: So I think it’s really about, is it something that’s coming down as here’s a… You know, we have a code of conduct that’s pretty vague, you know, but it is what we all should aspire to. But we didn’t come down with here’s exactly what you need to do and here’s how you should behave and here’s…you know, it wasn’t a top down. It’s very much a bottom up. We all want to work in a place that respects us. We all want to work in a place where learners are treated very appropriately, and it really has come very much, I would say, from the ground up. So our medical education, our UME faculty have really worked to support and to help our learners deal with some of the things that happen and we work together. You can’t have a medical education group that says, “Okay, here’s a problem with this faculty member,” and then not ever talk to the…you know, someone who can actually assist or help that faculty member. So we’ve made it a very, I would say, more of a constructive process and a ground up process as opposed to a top down, here’s the behavior, here’s what’s gonna happen if you do this. And we’ve made it, I wanna say personal. It’s all of us working together across, you know, education, human resources, faculty affairs. We communicate well and we have the faculty and the learner or, you know, the trainee. We want people to be successful in what they’re doing. And I’m a firm believer that people don’t wake up in the morning to be disruptive. That stuff happens.
And in our new faculty orientation, we’ve added, you know, what are trigger… What is disruptive behavior? What triggers it? What triggers it for you? How do you recognize it? What are the strategies around dealing with that? So that you can acknowledge that it’s there and you can hopefully avoid having something happen that you don’t really want to happen. So I think it’s that it’s not a top down, it’s a ground swell, and I think it’s a really, a desire to have a better culture.
Dr. Skarupski: That’s great. I love it. I think it’s, anytime we address cultural change, civility, professionalism, disruptive behavior, burnout, resilience, equity, all these, they’re huge and they’re so complex. And they just reach from the roots to the very tippy top of the twigs and the branches and it’s just never easy. And so I applaud you in doing this in a way that seems like it’s just been embraced and not been one of those, another hammer. I always worry, you know, as we all do about protecting our faculty and worry that we’re just throwing more things on them, at them and being critical. So this sounds like your approach has been very inclusive and not something that has been looked upon as some other thing that faculty have to do. So, good for you.
Dr. Termuhlen: Yeah. It’s like, you know, mandatory training and preventing gender bias, which can be, come across as a very top down, you know, “Take the training. Yep, you’re all good now.” This is kind of the inverse of that. And I will say, I’m sure there are people that are not happy with it and I’m sure there are people that are, you know, that are resistant to doing it. Out of, you know, 2,000-plus faculty that will happen. But it’s a slow, slow, slow cultural change process. We just have to take it from there really.
Dr. Skarupski: What else would you wanna share with the group of us?
Dr. Termuhlen: Yeah. So our dean, actually, we have monthly meetings with our department chairs and we have…he has decided that at every single department chair meeting, that the topic of gender equity will be addressed in some way, shape, or form. And we are in the midst of doing a very large salary, gender equity study, and so we started, you know, talking about that. And now we’ve changed again to not only talking about that, but talking about how do we all…how do we get smarter about how we, again, culture. What is our culture around this? And I think it was really an eye-opening situation where I realized that, you know, I have quite a bit of HR-type responsibility background and I’ve, you know, been to a lot of faculty development, I’ve been in these leadership training courses such as ELAM, and most chairs don’t have that experience. And so it was a real wake up that you have to give the chairs material they can use that’s practical, that’s still very based in best practices or based in literature, whether it’s from academic health care or whether it’s from business literature, but you need to give them something to kind of level the playing ground around some of these issues. And so I’ve started doing what I call two-minute tips for chairs and they’re very focused on specific topics. So we did one on sponsorship. How is it different from mentorship? How do you do it? What specific actions as a chair can you take to sponsor people for opportunities in their career? We’ve done, how do you negate kind of the negative impact of implicit bias when you’re interviewing or when you’re negotiating a startup package with someone?
And they’re just very straightforward, practical, not assuming everyone knows things about what I may know or you may know or other associate deans for faculty affairs may know and just say, “Okay. For those that know it, great.” For those who don’t or don’t think about when they’re interviewing, how do they look to the interviewee? What does their office look like? What perceptions are there? How do they get rid of some of the things that may give people a negative impression of them and vice versa? How do they look at a person who walks into their office to interview? What are their implicit bias and biases, and we all have them. But how do you acknowledge them and how do you kind of get rid of any negative impact that you, come from that? And this is beyond training and unconscious bias and those kinds of things, which we do do. So it’s been a lot of fun to try to figure out how to distill those ideas into very quick, again, one page things that chairs can take and look at and go, “Oh, I get this. And maybe I will think about it as I go through my day-to-day work, and maybe I will be able to incorporate some of those things.” So I think having a dean say, “This, we’re going to talk about this at every fac, every heads meeting and looking at it from different lenses and different approaches,” I think has been helpful. I mean, we’re very early in this, but it’s been good.
Dr. Skarupski: So this is so important. I love this two-minute tips for chairs. Now can you be clear on the… You’re saying at this monthly meeting with all the chairs, there’s actually an agenda item that says gender equity, and then in that segment is when you do your two-minute tip? It sounds like it’s a one-page handout. Or can you tell us, help us understand how this two-minute tip happens in the monthly agenda?
Dr. Termuhlen: Sure. So the agenda for the meetings typically will involve, you know, multiple things, from education, from research, from the Faculty Affairs. So every month there is an Office of Faculty affairs update. And then under that agenda item will be something about the…if we have an update on the salary gender equity study, that will go in there or I will do two-minute tips or we will do both. We have presented some of the articles out of the Lancet issue that was on women. We probably will be talking about the AAMC recent monograph that came out this week on how to work on salary equity. So we have 10 to 15 minutes of the agenda every month to talk about these issues.
Dr. Skarupski: Wow. That says something right there. That is so important that your dean recognizes the value of your office of faculty affairs to put it on an agenda item, make it a standing agenda item. We talked to Darrell Kirch on the podcast a little bit ago, and he also was talking about the value that our deans place in faculty affairs, faculty development. Because I said, “Well, what do deans think about us?” You know, because he’s on the council of deans and he rubs elbows with these deans all the time. And I said, you know, “How can we in our offices demonstrate our value? What do our deans need from us and want from us?” and you know, “Help us to help them.” And he basically said, “If you’re not hearing from your dean it’s because you’re doing a good job and these deans do recognize the value of what you do.” And it’s not a huge topic of conversation because everybody knows that they’ve got good people doing important valuable work. And the fact that your dean however, makes this a standing agenda item, I mean, everybody knows that you can mention anything you want during a meeting, but until it takes a place, a real place as a institutionalized part of the agenda, I don’t think it’s, you know, really taken seriously to me because at Hopkins, on our monthly dean meetings with the department directors, we have, for example, the United Way update. There’s always a United Way update because…and that says right away, well obviously if something’s on agenda, you value it. So it’s a brief, you know, 20, 30-second update, “Where are we on our United Way and what departments are really meeting their targets? Who’s not?” So that says something, and the fact that your dean puts that on the agenda sends a message loud and clear, “This is what’s important to us.” So that is just amazing. And I love your two-minute tips for chairs. That is a really great idea.
Dr. Termuhlen: Yeah. And we have our Center for Women in Medicine Science, it’s relatively new. It went into effect probably maybe six months before I started, and they are incredibly strong and they have a great leader who is super organized. They have four action groups. They work on specific things and they are just a terrific resource to me and to the dean in terms of… One of the things that we look at are having women represented equally on committees and it is… And again the dean will say, “How can I identify people?” All people, not just women. So we are constantly on the lookout for emerging leaders, for those who were just promoted, for those who are active, who have stepped up and said, “Yes, I’m interested in X or Y.” But also for the people that don’t volunteer themselves, that the chairs identify as, “You need to talk to this person. This person has incredible leadership potential.” And we try to meet with those people because I think part of getting equal representation as you move up into senior rank and the opportunity for leadership positions is having a light shone upon you. And there are many people that just don’t feel they have the time, don’t feel they have the expertise, don’t feel that they’re the right person and so don’t volunteer for things. And so we try to make an effort across the board to think about people that we want to shine the light on and get into these early career growth opportunities. Again, we’re heavily research, we have to balance that with promotion and tenure and grants and all this new, our traditional academic measures of success. But you can do that, and it’s how do you get people into a culture where that is valued and that is desired? And fortunately we have a dean who believes in that.
We were able to add metrics onto the dean’s or into the chairs’ evaluations, annual evaluations, and we were able to add in addition to what we collect through, you know, promotion and various metrics that our offices look at, but we were also able to add on presentations by women, startup packages by women, women in leadership positions within the departments as part of data collection from the departments because we couldn’t access that data very readily centrally. But to give the dean a visual every year of what…how are the departments doing? How are the chairs doing? And again, giving time on an agenda is important for saying this is important to us as an institution. But putting it into a department chair’s evaluation is another way of saying, “This is really important to the institution and we want to support that.”
Dr. Skarupski: I love that accountability. That’s so important. Yeah. Lip service is one thing, but when it comes down to brass tacks and you’re being held accountable and your numbers are going to be compared to others, that’s where the rubber really hits the road.
Dr. Termuhlen: Yeah. So I do have to say, just being around the Group on Faculty Affairs for, I guess, 9 or 10 years now, going to the meetings, listening to your podcasts, give me tips, give me things I can try. You know, I don’t think we ever wanna do something that’s going to be perfect. Sometimes it’s just important to do something and see what happens and measure what you do. You know, we have very short term things going on. We have long threads of efforts going through the office, but we…it is something that we want to continually build on. And I have to say, being part of the GFA really jump started that. I think one great example, went to the meeting last year and someone presented what they had tracked over their course of time as associate dean of faculty affairs. And I thought, “Oh, we should track what we do.” And so we track, what are the complaints, incidents, questions where we have actually had to intervene, and we give them kind of a severity code, you know. Something we can answer in minor, you know, takes two phone calls and it’s done, it’s negligible, but then we have minor, we have moderate with not much time, moderate with a lot of time and then severe and critical. And we’ve been tracking now for about six months and…because I think it’s important that we know what we’re doing, but also at some point to perhaps even say, “Hey, this is what we do. This is what we’ve resolved. This is what’s ongoing,” and just in a very general kind of way. “Here’s how… This is how many issues we deal with that really take a lot of our time and are really major issues, and here are the ones that, you know, we can deal with quickly.” So I did pick up, you know, track what you do and I thought, “Oh, that’s a great tip. You know, I’ll pass that along today.” Because it really does help.
Dr. Skarupski: Yeah. You’ve done a lot in 10 months. I can’t believe that you’ve implemented so many of these new activities and policies and guidelines and interventions in 10 quick months.
Dr. Termuhlen: Well, it’s a work in progress. That’s for sure.
Dr. Skarupski: Yeah. I wanted to just circle back real quick to something you said that was really important, and I love the way you put it. You said, you know, thinking about how do we get smarter about these things? And I love the way you said that, because so many times, I think so many of us at institutions or companies and organizations think, “Well, we’re really good at these things. We’re five star rated. We’re good there. Let’s move on to the next thing.” And I liked that when you said, “How do we get smarter about recognizing that we all have room for improvement?” That no matter how good you are or how well you think you’ve mastered a thing, there’s always room to tighten up, improve, advance, involve or incorporate new or different diverse ways of thinking and looking at things. And what I loved about what your next comment was this idea that, you know, “The chairs don’t wake up knowing certain things that we know.” And so by virtue of our years of experience in leadership, in faculty development and thinking about these things and attending ELAM and programs and the GFA conferences, we tend to, I think, can take for granted these things. I mean, they’ve become so second nature to us that we’re like, “Well, of course it’s important that faculty, you know, have these resources for career advancement. Who doesn’t know that?” Or who doesn’t know that we have this resource or that resource? And it’s, geez, a lot of our department chairs, they don’t know that.
So I like how you highlighted that and I think it’s an important thing that we, in our field, Faculty Affairs, Academic Affairs, faculty development, can sometimes forget that we do bring so much value, but because we’re so good at it and we love it so well and we’ve been doing it for so long, we think, “Well, it’s just common sense by now.” But there’s no such thing, that we have to always approach what we do with fresh eyes, recognizing that there are a lot of people for whom this is news, it’s new stuff. And so we do bring a lot to our institutions and I just think that’s really important to emphasize. And I liked how you said that, you know, “How do we get smarter about something?” And it’s…just love it.
Dr. Termuhlen: The other piece, I think, as the Group on Faculty Affairs, one of our challenges is how do we actually measure the impact that we have? You know, how do we know that this mentor training program is successful? How do we know this faculty development series is of benefit? And I think we wrestle with that. I wrestle with it. My office wrestles with it. Probably everyone wrestles with it. It’s like how do you actually measure the outcomes of what we do? So I think that’s a big challenge for our field, is how do we actually measure what we do? I have no magic answer to that. It makes us think, how can we do this better so we can actually measure something and measure the effectiveness of what we do?
Dr. Skarupski: And you’re doing it and you’re starting it and you talked about that, like collecting data and systematically thinking about what are we doing and how are we doing it? Above and beyond outputs, counting how much of this and then how many seminars, workshops and programs and attendees and those kinds of smiley face program evaluation critique sheets. But, yeah. That’s a challenge in our space. And I struggle with that all the time, is feeling like what somebody once accused me of being a superficial cheerleader. And I just, my jaw dropped to the ground and I felt horrible that, you know, “What you do is so nice. Oh that’s so cute. That’s really sweet. How nice.” But a pat in the head kind of a thing without, you know, recognizing that there are short term outcomes, intermediate outcomes and long-term outcomes. So yes, ideally if we could zoom ahead and talk about retention and leadership positions assumed and growth and satisfaction and increased morale or a sense of engagement or a sense of community or short term is yes, I’m gonna negotiate for bigger lab space, or yes, I put out X number more manuscripts or grant applications or better manage my time. There’s so much, and how do you measure it? And without having randomized controlled trials and having a comparison group and people, some faculty wanna take your course and you randomize them to some, you know, time and attention. I mean, it’s so complex and I just am so thankful that there are people who are our deans and people like Darrell Kirch who get it, and they do understand that, you know, as Darrell said, “You can’t expect people, faculty members by osmosis to know about professional development.”
Times are different from back in the day when you just kinda showed up and saw your patients, did your research, wrote your papers and got your grants and everything was lock step and a little bit more prescribed. Now it’s a lot more complex. And so, thankfully some people do appreciate that, and I just love stories that we hear on the podcast that emphasize and encourage those of us out there who maybe do have these periods of doubt and feeling like, “This is complicated, it’s hard.” And I love how Dan Shapiro from Penn State on the podcast talked earlier about…he’s like, “I’m constantly confused. Every day I have constant confusion. It’s just so much coming at us.” And yet we have that constant confusion and sometimes pain and feeling so badly about our faculty members struggling, and yet thankfully it is countered by the joy in our hearts, you know, as we all talk about that sense of, you know, knowing that this is right, I’m doing…I’m making an impact and there is meaning in my work and I’m making a difference. So it’s really quite a roller coaster of a job, isn’t it?
Dr. Termuhlen: It is. When I took this job, I knew it would be a lot of, you know, promotion and tenure on policy, and I’d come out of operations so I’m like, “Problem, fix it. Problem, fix it.” And I thought, “Ooh, my big risk here is I’m going to go, I’m just not gonna do well with things that take three to five years to do.” But thankfully, there are plenty of opportunities for short term, for short-term interventions and short-term wins, and it has not been boring. I will 100% say that. And I think the complexity and the complexity of what we do and the complexity of our organizations is what keeps us coming back tomorrow.
Dr. Skarupski: So 10 months into your job, what do you think is gonna be around the corner for you at the end of year one and year three and year five?
Dr. Termuhlen: Well, there’s a plan. So, yeah. So I think, you know, some of the longer term goals or aspirations are really about culture. It’s about equity. It’s about diversity. I’m running a thread that, again, I got through GFA on approaching faculty development from a faculty life cycle perspective. So we, we’re pacing out the long haul. We are working on the short term and we just keep moving forward. But definitely looking out a couple of years from now, I hope that the things that we’re doing now are continuing to progress. Things will happen. People will change. The environment may change. The complexity of our healthcare system is always changing. And so it’s being open to those opportunities, but always sticking with we stand, you know, my office, myself, we stand for the integrity of the institution. We stand for the dean. We stand for the department chairs and we stand for the faculty. And somehow we have to navigate all that. And I’ve been in a moving ever evolving healthcare environment with learners and trainees and staff and everything. And I think that makes it fun.
Dr. Skarupski: Well said. Well, is there anything else you’d like to share with us, Amanda? This has been a wonderful conversation.
Dr. Termuhlen: No, I just thank you again for giving me the opportunity to participate in this. I enjoyed listening to every one of them.
Dr. Skarupski: Yeah. I love that our GFA family and friends around the world are listening in. I learn so much from everybody and it’s, I hope everybody else is enjoying it as much as we all are.
Everybody, you’ve been listening to Dr. Amanda Termuhlen, the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Thanks for tuning into “Faculty Factory” podcast. The mission of the “Faculty Factory” is to build and support a community of leaders in faculty development who share tools, resources, wisdom, and encouragement in service to our faculty members, schools, and institutions. We encourage you to go to facultyfactory.org to find out more. Get in touch with me, ask me any questions. Maybe you wanna be interviewed on the podcast. Thanks for tuning into “Faculty Factory” podcast. We’ll see you next time.
Dr. Skarupski: The “Faculty Factory” podcast and website is sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Office of Faculty. For more information, visit facultyfactory.org.