3.8: Four Flavours of Faculty Frustration

🔍The Mindful Academy Episode 3.8 Highlights: "Four Flavours of Faculty Frustration"

📚 1. Overwhelm at Work:

The aftermath of the pandemic has left academic workplaces in overdrive, with workload spikes persisting. Whether it's adapting to changes or working at cross-purposes with colleagues, overwhelm is a common thread. If you're feeling this, consider where the pressures are coming from—internal, external, or both.

💼 2. Success Metrics and Prioritization:

Metrics for success can vary, from grants to publications, teaching evaluations, and more. If you're frustrated with output goals despite doing all the right things, it's time to rigorously prioritize. Focus on what success means for you, set meaningful priorities, and stay true to your own success metrics.

🤝 3. Interpersonal Circumstances:

Academic environments can sometimes foster toxic behavior, impacting your experience. Issues like harassment and less contentious but frustrating interpersonal challenges can impact your joy and fulfillment at work. Developing self-awareness and self-trust is vital to making meaningful decisions about your career. 

💡 4. Intrapersonal Circumstances:

As you grow and change, the job may no longer fit. Values conflicts, misalignment, or simply feeling done can lead to frustration. Assess your values, skills, and priorities. Acknowledge patterns that might be hindering your growth and explore possibilities for change—whether within your current role or by considering new opportunities.

🎙️ Upcoming Episodes:

Stay tuned for in-depth discussions on each of these faculty frustrations, offering guidance and strategies for overcoming them. Plus, explore the concept of intentional job design and maintaining excitement in your academic journey.

🔗 Connect with Jennifer Askey:

For personalized support and further insights, visit JenniferAskey.com and book a free consultation. Connect on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferaskeycoach , and follow on Instagram at @Jennifer_Askey.

👂 Your Input Matters:

Where do you find yourself frustrated at work? Share your thoughts and experiences. Let's continue the conversation and work towards a more fulfilling academic experience.

Thank you for being part of the Mindful Academy community. Until next time, take care and stay mindful!

Episode Details

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 3.8 of the mindful Academy. Today's episode is brought to you from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and my sublet office. So my equipment is not what it usually is the background isn't what it usually is. And I'm gonna hope that this is still okay for YouTube as well as for audio. But episode 3.8 of the mindful Academy podcast is where I your academic coach, talks about I talk about faculty discontent, that is the focus of this episode. So I'm going to begin with a disclaimer. I have not actually read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. My dissertation and first book are on 19th century historical fiction. So I figure I have read more than my fair share of Big Fat Loss books. From the 19th century. I tried Warren Piece once I was about 20. I bailed about a third of the way in, I don't think I was ready for it. I listened to just Daisuke on audiobook when dark Ontario winter. And that was not a good thing. So I've given myself a pass on Anna Karenina. But we all know how the novel opens, or many of us do. In translation to English, Tolstoy writes, All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And in today's episode, I'm going to apply this little nugget to academic life, and suggest that all happy academics are alike. And every unhappy academic is unhappy in their own way. Ouch. Right? Okay, I'm gonna modify that it's unhappy academics all have unique stories that illustrate how they personally went from bright eyed, eager grad student to disillusioned or discontented or fed up, okay. But I am going to suggest that if you or someone you know, is an unhappy academic, you're likely experiencing one or more of the following four key areas of frustration. So I do think there are some commonalities in the people I work with. And then the career arcs I see, we can sort of boil down major faculty discontent with their working environment into these four categories, overwhelm success, interpersonal circumstances, and intra personal circumstances. So we'll start with overwhelm. So overwhelmed at work seems to be near ubiquitous, since the pandemic changed the rhythms of our work. Every college and university workplace went into overdrive, and workload spikes in order to adapt to the disruption in teaching and research that the pandemic brought. And the pace and the sequence of those changes and disruptions simply hasn't gone down. Even if your campus supposedly has gone back to normal has returned to work, everybody I talked to seems to experience that the work spike that they went through during COVID has not resolved in any sort of peaceful way, there's not been a bow tied on that either emotionally, or, like hourly, workwise. And internally, so that's one cause of overwhelm. There's just more stuff to do. Or there's more sense of urgency, or there's less, there are fewer rules and policies. And so everybody gets to do it their way. And everything's customized and that makes life harder. Whether it's students, or staff members, or faculty like poker changed the way we work. And now we're trying to bring the things that we liked into the new environment, but somebody else doesn't like it. And so we're kind of working at cross purposes with each other often. And we're trying to take the best work from home and bring to campus and it just feels like a lot for a lot of people. So if that's you, that's one really common potential cause of overwhelm. Another one is sort of internal overwhelm. And in my work, I see a lot of academic professionals fuel their own overwhelm, by not really having a strategy for how to allocate their time and their priorities. So if for example, you are a person who says yes to every opportunity that comes your way, if you find yourself falling into people pleasing mode, if you are reluctant to delegate work or to ask for help, because only your solo effort counts In your mind, if you do it all, then you are also creating your own ideal conditions for overwhelm. So look, internally, look externally and ask yourself, if I'm feeling overwhelmed. Where are those pressures coming from? The second type of faculty discontent that I see quite often, I had a hard time coming up with like one name for this, maybe six success metrics. I wrote success, prioritization impact in my notes, it's all of those things. So whether you and your institution judge your success, by the amount of grant money, the number of publications, your teaching evaluations, your research presentations, creative work, if you're in a creative field. People who are experiencing frustration with success metrics, find themselves feeling like they're sort of treading water, with their output goals with the results of the work that they're doing. Like, I feel like I'm doing all the right things, but it doesn't seem to be landing or right, that kind of frustration with outputs. So you got to where you are, because you're a subject matter expert, a good teacher and have something to contribute to your field, right, some combination of those things. And then if you wind up in a faculty role, whether it is tenured tenure track or contingent, the job you have feels like so much more than is illustrated by the words teaching Service Research, right? Those three things seem like oh, yeah, hidden along those, but the job just expands way beyond reasonable hours, right. And so figuring out where your success fits in this never ending expansion of potential directions to be pulled in. That is a struggle. So figuring out what success means for you. Prioritizing that work in meaningful ways, keeping yourself focused on those on your own success metrics, of figuring out the impact you want and need to have in your career. That's, that's the path to take. So really focus in on success and prioritization and not let that be a source of frustration. But focusing in on that is actually harder than it sounds. But happy and successful academics do know what it means to rigorously prioritize the most important point. So if you find yourself frustrated with success and outputs, are you rigorously prioritizing your work? Or are you or other things getting in here? 

The third bucket of things that faculty members find themselves frustrated about on a regular basis are intrapersonal circumstances. Now universities and colleges are in my opinion, and in my experience, and I've worked at seven as an employee, and I've consulted at many more can be breeding grounds for toxic behavior, tenure and academic freedom, which are meant to ensure the dignity and rigor of scholarship and the rights of individual workers. visa vie employer Caprice, gets misused and it protects people from consequences of bad actions. And you know, it's five to 20% of any campus can change the tone of what it means to be a faculty member there, right? I see how academic protections are often misused as personal protection to shield people from the consequences of their own unprofessional behavior. So sexual harassment, gaslighting, mobbing, unmitigated bias, these things can become entrenched and allowed in departments and in units. And often even if you get mediation or conflict adjudication or something. These environments are places where nobody's going to be able to flourish. If this is your workplace, if this is what your discontent stems from, seek external support, and get the heck out. I wish I had better news but if that is your source of frustration at work is intrapersonal circumstances seek support, right? Because there may be are things that you can do to change the tone of those things for yourself. But if there isn't, if it is an external person who's being allowed to use their freedoms and be protected, that is a crappy situation for which there is very little Very little escape, unfortunately.

And if I am wrong if you have seen excellent processes for these sorts of things to get sorted out, please let me know. But in my experience, it's pretty rare, less contentious, so less not gaslighting, abuse mobbing. But less contentious interpersonal issues can also cause frustration and discontent at work. Right? I work with clients frequently, who are really concerned like how do I best supervise graduate students and postdocs, so that's an interpersonal issue. It's a leadership issue. It's not toxic, but it's, it's a growth edge for those people, right? Oh, I need to grow into this. And right now it feels frustrating because I don't feel like I've mastered these supervision or mentoring skills, for example, how to do those how to do that mentoring, and that student relationship without it taking all of your time, it's another cause for frustration that I see a lot. Determining your own stance, your values and vision as a leader, and crafting a vision for your department, if you're a chair for your lab, if you're a PI, for your collaborations, if you work research with other people, a vision that others can get excited about, that doesn't come naturally to everyone. And that's also an intro interpersonal circumstance that can give rise to a lot of frustration in the job. If you feel like hold on a second, I got the degree I have the job, I have the tenure. Why is this so hard? Shouldn't this be easy to and then you beat yourself up about it? Or shouldn't I have figured it out by this point, and then you beat yourself up about it, those things also crop up. And so when navigating interpersonal situations. And this is something that I work on in coaching a lot, and I do it with teams and with individuals. What what helps is having a solid anchor of self awareness, and self trust. And what is interesting is that the traditional academic training does not reward those things, right. Self awareness isn't baked into a lot of academic training and rigor, and self trust, can get undermined by the experience of being graduate student and a postdoc, right? It can intersectional identities. So people who are multiple, marginalized or oppressed experience an erosion of self trust in the academic workplace, because every day they are trying to maintain their right to exist in a space that wasn't created for them. So women, people of color, queer people, this is a daily struggle to maintain trust in your own ability to be in that space, hold your own and make your contribution. And that's the tip of the iceberg. There are a million other ways that academic training can actually erode your self trust. So how do you once you have sort of grabbed the first brass ring of some sort of academic employment? How do you then establish, discover and build on that self trust and self awareness, so that as the job and the people and the circumstances around to change and shift, you are solidly anchored, so that when a difficult interpersonal circumstance arises, you don't immediately go into self doubt, questioning? second guessing, you first go to? Who am I? Where do I stand here? What do I know to be true, right, and start from a place of self knowing and self trust. So if those sorts of interpersonal issues are ways that you get frustrated, right, I'm going to follow up this podcast episode with episodes that talk about each of these buckets, a little bit more in depth. So I'll provide some guidance on how you might get yourself out of that. And also, this is what you can seek a coach for. The fourth sort of large category bucket category of faculty discontent that I see the most are what I call intra personal circumstances. So this is stuff within you. Sometimes people grow and change and grow out of a job, or the job changes and moves and shifts, and it's no longer the job you signed up for. Sometimes people find themselves in profound misalignment over their values and the values of the institution or the department or the discipline. Right? So if you find yourself experiencing regular values, contact, regular values conflict with the context around you. It might be time to assess what you're in a position to change what how you are in a position to maneuver. Right? Because if things have changed, you get to To adapt, and maybe one of those adaptations is leading, maybe one of those adaptations is shifting roles, departments, institutions, both sigh, right? So what can you move? What might possibly make the job fit better? Okay, this starts along with sort of that self awareness and self trust with a deep exploration of your values. What are your skills? What are your strengths? What are your highest priorities? And an awareness of your particular patterns for getting in your own way? Right? So the job can be frustrating, the job kind of changed around you. And it no longer feels like a fit. But also, are you getting in your own way, by trying to sort of wedge a square peg into a round hole? Right? And are those things that you can and want to change? Do you not want to change them? Right, but acknowledging that getting the PhD and getting the job doesn't mean that you're done. Right? I, I spent a long time mulling over this and it still pops up in my mind. Frequently, when I work with clients who are at the stage of their careers. When I got the tenure track job, it was a huge checkmark off my lips like yay, done. And then of course, I'd work to get tenure. And that felt, I felt like I was chasing something like I was always behind always late. And that's an intra personal circumstance. Why did I feel like I was always late? Were there strategies I could have deployed, were there conversations, I had perspectives I could have taken that would have adjusted the way I felt about my job, I think there are definitely changes I could have made made. Had I known that they were out there, right, I had a lovely department chair. But the kind of mentorship that I have experienced since then, in my coaching journey, and working with people on like the second version of my career, I'd had that kind of mentorship, the first round, I would have experienced the tenure track quite different, differently. And then when you get tenure, and especially when I got tenure, I know a lot of people are like this, like, Oh, I'm done. Like, of course there's more to do. They're more classes to teach, they're more things to write, there's promotion to full, but the big hurdle, the biggest hurdle I had to achieve. And I think a part of me it was like, Oh, thank God, I can stop chasing. And that's good. It's good to not feel like you have to chase. But in my case and and I think with a lot of people the the sense of I'm no longer chasing now comes with this sense of like I'm done, uncooked, the butterball Turkey and the little internal thermometer has popped, I'm I'm done nice and juicy. And what intrapersonal circumstances mean for me is that you're not done, you get to continue to grow and develop and change. And you need to change your job along with that, whether that's just changing research focus, or whether it's doing other kinds of intentional job design, so that as your priorities shift and change your you can shift and change your environment as well. So that you maintain some kind of joy and excitement. I frequently get clients coming to me saying, oh, gosh, I think I need a coach, because of the next 10 years look like the last 10 years. I don't want to do this anymore. And my response is good, because that means you're still looking for the next thing to excite you. And you don't have to do the same thing for the next 10 years. You can stay in your same job and have your same title and maybe even teach the same classes. But what can you shift so that you have something to be excited about and to look forward to at work? So where do you find yourself frustrated at work? Or if you're a leader of a department or a unit? What do you notice in the people in your department? Are they frustrated because they feel overwhelmed and overworked? Are they frustrated with the success metrics that are applied to them and how they're managing those success metrics? Are they frustrated because of intrapersonal circumstances within their control? Not within their control? Right. How are you doing on that on that front? Or are you frustrated with intra personal circumstances? How are you fitting the job? How are you fitting the environment and the expectations right? Or is there something else? I'd love to hear from you. And I would love to know if you're interested in talking about this where you're frustrated, and how to get out of that, because that's what I specialize in.

I think the work can be a lovely thing to do. I think working in universities and colleges can be great. And I think that people are the key to that. And it does start with each of us. So you can go to Jennifer askey.com, and book a free consult with me, and I'd love to talk to you. And you can also follow me on LinkedIn at Jennifer Epstein. and on Instagram at Jennifer underscore Askey. I will be back soon with four episodes that go into each of these buckets and talk a bit about what that looks like and some basics for approaching it if that's your particular flavor of frustration right now. Take care and I look forward to being in your ears again soon. Thanks