A question that is increasingly cropping up in my work with clients is, how do I deal with interruptions? The subtext behind the question is usually: how can I ensure I have the time I need for tasks that demand that I concentrate?

The interruptions come in three main flavours: phone, mail, in person. Since it is difficult to concentrate for much longer than 90 minutes without a break, you can deal with stored up interruptions during these breaks.

When the phone rings

In some ways the phone is easiest to deal with: put it on silent, forward it to a colleague, or just let it go to the answering machine. If you forward it, then the person needs to know under what circumstances it is ok to disturb you and for the other cases they need to know when you will be contactable again (and will return the call, of course). If it goes to machine, you need to check the messages from time to time.

Interruptions through e-mail

People have written books on how to deal with mails. Here I’ll just describe some techniques that have proved useful in practice for researchers. The sound of an email arriving triggers a Pavlovian response in most people. No matter how they’re concentrating, part of them wants to know what’s just arrived. One solution is simply to turn off the bell or any other visual or auditory cue that new mail is in your inbox.

The next step is to deal with emails at certain specific times of the day and to block out a chunk of time for this. Some people just check at 10am and 4pm, for example. They take about 30 minutes to deal with whatever is in their inbox. By focusing mail on twice a day, they have a lot of time and energy or work that needs their concentration. Now, some people use email to announce the cancellation of a meeting just a few minutes before it’s due to begin. Therefore, you can relax the 10am/4pm idea slightly and scan your inbox before you leave the office for a meeting – or just leave anyway and enjoy stretching your legs for a few minutes on the way to the meeting and back.

Finally, when you check your inbox, ask yourself if you really need to reply to this email. Your reply will generate another reply, and that in turn will need a reply. If you’ve ever had a a day where you notice that you’ve mailed back and forth several times with someone on a topic, then you’ll know that some mails are more easily dealt with on a quick phone call or over a coffee break.

When people walk in

When dealing with direct interruptions by colleagues or staff, it is helpful to establish some visual cues so that they know not to disturb you before they ask if you have a minute. One of my professors in Dublin had a disturbance barometer outside his door: the settings ranged from “come in!” to “do you really want your Ph.D?”. Many people simply use the obvious signal that if the door is closed, people should stay out; if it’s open, people can come in. Some simply hang a “do not disturb” sign (if you do this, it’s important to remove it when you can be disturbed).

Another technique is to make you calendar open, so that people can book time with you. If you use this technique, you can also make appointments with yourself for the times when you do not wish to be disturbed. If you really need to concentrate on something, e.g. when you are writing a proposal or an important paper, then you can stay at home for a half-day or day from time to time.

This range of ideas is not exhaustive. Avoiding disturbances is a challenge that triggers our creativity. How do you meet this challenge?

Photo: SFDenverLV

1. Determine your room for maneuver

Projects live from momentum. Therefore it is vital to clarify ahead of time what level of decision-making responsibility you have for your project. You can’t go looking for your boss for every small decision along the way. Over time, you’ll get a good feel for how much room for maneuver you have – for how willing your boss is to back your decisions. That’s when a lot of the responsibility you carry is based on mutual trust (your boss trusts you to not do something dumb, and you trust your boss to back you).

2. Clarify when to pull the plug

By definition, research is an uncertain undertaking. Therefore it is helpful to decide in advance at which point you’re going to give up this endeavour. You’ll find thousands of websites that extol the virtues of Thomas Edison going through 1000 variants before he came up with a working light bulb. That level of tenacity wouldn’t get funded today. That’s why it is helpful to think in advance about when to say, “enough! Time for my next research question!”

To help you recognize this, you need to be clear on your project’s goal. Standard questions that help to identify that include:  how long will it take? What does it cost? What is the scope of the project? What does the project not include? How can you recognize that you’ve reached your goal?

In addition, in research we’re faced with the challenge of not always being able to state the goal clearly at the outset. In such cases, a helpful question is: How big are the error bars around your goal? As the project progresses, you can usually decrease those error bars.

It’s also helpful to think about signs that they goal won’t be reached in a reasonable way.  This protects you against your own emotional attachment to the project. That way, when you hit on one of these signs during the project, you know it’s time to pull the plug.

3. Agree your resources

Who do you need to help you with the project? What skill sets do they require? What training needs to be arranged? What materials and equipment do you need? What are the delivery times for special materials? Do you need to book time on a beam line or other specialist equipment?

I learned this the hard way: we held our first project team meeting  a few weeks into an 18 month compressor design project. Everything was carefully laid out so that we would only have to take the expensive decisions as close to the end as possible. Then the head of design asked us how much of a particular titanium alloy he needed to order for us. It had a delivery time of 17 months, so we had until the end of the week to make our expensive decisions!

4. Evaluate feasibility of your approach

Before launching a large project, it is usually helpful to have a smaller pilot proh´ject so that you can test the basic idea. This helps you to evaluate whether it makes sense to launch into the full project, which could tie up valuable resources for several years.

5. Obtain the access you need to your boss

There comes a moment in most projects when you need some active support from above to make progress. In one project I was managing, a manager who had the people we needed so that we could make progress quickly, didn’t want to release his people or see the project succeed. Leaving the building at about 7pm, I bumped into one of the senior vice-presidents; he asked how the project was running. He took the time for me to explain the situation and then size up how he could help get things back on track. When I came in the next morning, the person who had been blocking me called to set up a meeting. By lunchtime I had the people I needed and we were back on track.

Of course, it’s much better if such access isn’t random, as in my case. So, figure out how important the project is to your boss(es) and ensure regular access to keep them up to date accordingly.

Photo: Hamed Saber

The first idea is, I reflect on my behavior and its impact on other people. I have written another article “observe first, judge later” that discusses the benefits that accrue from watching your behaviour. This helps in two ways: first, I get a clearer picture about my strengths and potential derailers. Second, it helps me to improve my ability to guesstimate – the brain’s neural nets appreciate high quality feedback.

One client had a problem with project planning – their projects were always way off. A quick session helped them identify that the planners were never involved in the final review, so they never saw what happened to their estimates in practice. After that small change, their ability to estimate project plans improved quickly and sharply.

The second idea is, use models to get a handle on what’s happening. Life is complicated and we are inundated with information. In theory, it is possible to process all this information and then respond. In practice, life has moved on long before we get that far. Therefore, it is helpful to have a way to filter out the noise. Judiciously selected models can do this quite well. As long as we keep George E.P. Box’s words in mind, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”. The trick is to have a wide range of simple models and select an appropriate one in any given situation. With practice and reflection, this becomes easier than you might think.

The third idea is, maintain an attitude of experimentation. When I was starting out in research, I naively hoped that leadership might turn out to be as deterministic as Newtonian physics. I got several quick wake-up calls! I quickly learned that it is helpful to treat leadership issues from a systems theory viewpoint. Thus, I learned to treat any steps I take as experiments, since the effect of an intervention in a complex system can often be surprising.

Two main reasons for that are: one, people are not as predictable as we might hope. Two, depending on where we draw the boundary on our system, we get a different idea about how to handle the problem. For example, I recently had a conversation with a client about how to solve a conflict between two group members. In the old days, I might have focused my attention on just those two and helped him figure out how to hold a conversation with them. However, by asking a few questions and helping him to sketch his system, it quickly crystallized that the source of tension was less between these two individuals, and lay more between their respective collaboration partners. Thus a whole new frame of reference for a solution opened up and he was quickly able to find a good path forward.

I’m curious to hear how your training in science or engineering influences your approach to leadership.

(Photo: Robert Scarth)

He gave one piece of advice on time management. Academic researchers are judged on their research success and still need to handle the demands of teaching and committee work. For lectures that were not too early, e.g. 10am or 11am, he would get up earlier than usual, so that he had three hours to prepare the 50 minute lecture. His experience reflected the law of diminishing returns: if he spent six or even nine hours on preparation, the lecture was not appreciably better. The key for him was that as a result of this strategy, the rest of the day was free for research.

His strategy is an example of the Principle of Delayed Gratification (which I first came across many years ago in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled). If you have things to do on a particular day, first do the ones you don’t like. Your reward is, you can spend the rest of the day on the things you do want to do (in Cech’s case, research).  As long as you really do reward yourself, you’ll find that you get through the things you don’t like much more quickly and without the guilty conscience that comes from postponing them.

Cech finished his piece of advice with, “it it’s an 8 o’clock class, that’s a little brutal.”

A major part of leadership is about influencing others through word and deed. Since it isn’t possible to be aware at all times about what we say and do, and how this impacts others, it is essential to collect information about this. The resulting increased level of awareness about behavior helps to set up effective learning loops that allow you to improve your leadership quickly.

One way to collect is to obtain feedback from others. Another way is to learn or cultivate the habit of observing your own behaviour and then learn how to evaluate it. Two challenges to this are the tendency to jump the gun and the role our personality plays in what we notice.  By “jump the gun” I mean the tendency that most of us have to announce our judgment or interpretation, skipping over the observed data.  A couple of tell-tale signs that we’re doing this are:

• generalizing from one recent observation “you’re never on time” (instead of “this morning you were fifteen minutes late for the meeting”). “you’re always faster” (instead of “yesterday, you finished the experiment ahead of schedule”).
• Using an interpretation to describe the data “he looked angrily at me” (What facial expression or body language did he use that suggest his anger?), “the report was excellent” (What was it about the report that made it excellent?)

If you listen out for these, you will begin to spot them quickly. Simply by becoming more aware of these patterns, you will probably notice that you use them less often.

Another challenge is the role that your personality plays in this. In my work I usually use the Enneagram model of personality; in this each personality type applies a different type-based filter to the data the person is collecting or receiving. For example, some people who have very high standards are labeled Perfectionists by others and have an automatic data filter that helps them to notice what’s wrong or a mistake quite easily.

The wordle at the top of this post shows the characteristics that people name; the larger the word, the more often it is named. These characteristics illustrate how important relationship skills are for leaders.

The characteristics that your people look for in you are also in this collection. Now, before you get depressed, please remember that this is a composite picture – many people describing many leaders. There’s no need to try and measure yourself against this collection and exhibit all of these qualities. However, it’s worthwhile to take a moment to think about how many of these qualities you already exhibit and which you might want to cultivate. This will help you to be a leader others want to follow.

I’ll be updating this wordle from time-to-time. So, if you’re surprised by the importance attached to any of these qualities, if something important for you is missing, or you’d just like to share what makes your best leader special, please leave a comment below.

Field Marshal Lord Slim, responsible for the British campaign in Burma in WWII and a great thinker on leadership, summed up the difference thus:

“There is a difference between leadership and management. The leader and the men who follow him represent one of the oldest, most natural, and most effective of all human relationships. The manager and those he manages are a later product with neither so romantic nor so inspiring a history. Leadership is of the spirit, compounded of personality and vision. Its practice is an art. Management is of the mind, more a matter of accurate calculations, statistics, methods, timetables, and routine. Its practice is a science. Managers are necessary, Leaders are essential.”

Here is a chart I use to illustrate the difference:

The tasks in the management zone require a certain degree of intelligence and discipline. Those in the leadership zone largely benefit from emotional and social intelligence. While some tasks are purely leadership ((e.g. develop vision) and others purely management (e.g. plan), many require a blend of the two (e.g. develop staff).

To succeed, you need strength in both areas: an excellent manager with no leadership qualities will ensure that the experiments are completed; however, there is no guarantee that the results shed light on the right question. An excellent leader with no management skills can develop and communicate wonderful visions; however, these will never materialise. The former is a technocrat, the latter a dreamer.

I surround the management zone with the leadership zone (rather than vice versa) in this model, since most researchers who move into leadership positions start out with a reasonable level of management ability and need to expand their skills and capabilities into the leadership zone.

If you would like to find out where your centre of gravity is between management and leadership, carry out the following experiment: write down your six most important tasks (not necessarily most time-consuming). Then place them on an axis with management at one end and leadership at the other. Some tasks will be at one end or the other, others will be somewhere in-between; this reflects that they need a blend of management and leadership. When you look at how you’ve positioned these six, you get a sense of whether your center of gravity for the six is closer to management and leadership. I’d like to hear from you, how you get on with this exercise.

leadership noun \ˈlÄ�-dər-ˌship\
1: the office or position of a leader
2: capacity to lead
3: the act or an instance of leading

For once, the dictionary is not so helpful. So, let’s continue and see what some of the great thinkers on leadership have to say.

Peter Drucker defines the term leader pithily: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.” However, that seems a little to pithy for my taste. Are you only a leader once you have followers, or do you attract followers through displaying leadership? (This is akin to the old philosophical question about whether a falling tree in the forest makes any noise, if there’s nobody present to hear it.) John C. Maxwell made an early attempt to fill out the dictionary definition, “leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less.”

The coiner of the term transformational leadership, James MacGregor Burns, expanded on the idea of influence thus: “I define leadership as leaders inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations – the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations – of both leaders and followers.” Bernard Bass defined this in terms of how the leader affects followers, who are intended to trust, admire and respect the transformational leader.

Warren Bennis added another layer to this, “leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential.” So, one way of being better able to influence others is through knowing yourself, your strengths and weaknesses. John Kotter points to another aspect in “Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles”. Tenacity is a key quality in research, the willingness and ability to keep attacking a problem or question until it yields its secrets.

From the area of research come two other definitions, which are pretty close to those from the mainstream literature. Alice Sapienza author of Managing Scientists: Leadership Strategies in Scientific Research writes “leadership is an influence process that is noncoercive in nature and produces acceptance or commitment on the part of organizational members to courses of action that contribute to the organization’s effectiveness”. In Making the Right Moves (available for download from HHMI), Edward O’Neil (UCSF) condenses it to an equation:

 Leadership = Vision + Relationships + Tasks

 This equation helps to illustrate why I place so much emphasis on skills and tools that support relationships in my leadership sculptor® process.

When I ask researchers to describe leadership, they give me a wide variety of viewpoints. One such description is of someone I would term a boss, someone who directs people to achieve a goal. In such a definition, the research leader is relying on their position, their scientific ability and on their research funding (in the literature, this is labeled assigned leadership). While such a style can work well in an emergency, Daniel Goleman et al’s research has shown this to be less effective in other settings. One indicator of an overdose of “boss” in R&D settings, in my experience, is the above-average staff turnover or drop-out rate in such a group or department. Other viewpoints echo the literature: having and being able to share a vision, getting people to do their best, maximizing results, having and transmitting ideas.

R&D takes place in an intense environment – you’re either first to a result, or nowhere. There are no 2^nd prizes. That’s why, in my definition of leadership I make visible a counter-balancing aspect to save researchers from themselves:

Leadership is the art of maintaining a dynamic balance between influencing others, by word and deed, to reach common goals and ensuring their development and well-being.

(Photo: Margaret Anne Clarke)

David Ferrucci, leader of the Watson artificial intelligence project , has just written an article for the New York Times in which he describes how he pulled together the multidisciplinary research team behind this great achievement. He had to overcome the researchers’ natural inclinations to stick with their own individual projects and to foster an environment in which they collaborated intensively and shared ideas. He won them over with the vision of how they together could achieve something grand that none of them alone would ever manage. He reinforced the team collaboration with what he terms the “war room”, where the researchers from all the different disciplines worked together in the same big office.

The grand result was due to many insignificant breakthroughs, as if each researcher was delivering one tessera for the overall mosaic.

While winning a quiz show is impressive, it’s just a milestone. IBM is already investigating how Watson’s ability to understand language and crunch data can be put to good use to suggest diagnoses and treatment options to doctors. If you would like to know more about this research, visit IBM’s own site about Watson.
Ferrucci has the last word: “In the end, the hero was the team, not any individual member or algorithm.”