Deborah Boehm-Davis on career paths, leadership, and change (CAL129, S7E2)

Geri Fitz: 00:00:05

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. I am really delighted to bring this conversation with Deborah Boehm-Davis. Deborah is now Professor Emeritus from George Mason University. But she's had a really interesting career where she worked in various industry roles in the very early days of human factors work, and she was actually one of the pioneers at the very first CHI Conference with CHI being the Computer Human Interaction Conference back in the 1980s. So she brings lots of experience to reflect on from both industry and research and her industry roles span Bell Labs and NASA and General Electric so all very interesting. And then she had a 33 year plus long tenure at George Mason University at the psychology department. And she ended up alternating between faculty roles and moving into leadership administration roles, eventually becoming the dean of a college. And so I was really interested to talk to Deb because the interesting career experiences reflect some of the themes from previous conversations, just to show that flexibility that we can have. And I was also aware that I've never really spoken to anyone who is involved in more of the administration side, leadership side of universities, and I don't know about you, but it's often easy to get quite critical about people in those roles and what they should be doing and what's wrong with a whole university. So it was interesting, particularly I think talking to Deb about what it was like being at that level and trying to navigate all the different tensions that they had to, to deal with in trying to run a university or run a college. So there's lots that she reflects on here. Lots of great insights, lots of suggestions for those of us who are part of faculty and how we can also better support our leaders. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Deb. Welcome, Deb. I'm really happy to be able to talk with you because you have had such an interesting career journey. And also you've held some really senior leadership positions in universities, and I haven't often got the chance to talk to people more from that leadership perspective as well, so. They will probably be the two main areas. Would you like to just introduce yourself a little bit in terms of where you're coming from, background and a flavor of the journey?

Deb: 00:03:24

Absolutely. So I'm Deb Boehm Davis and, I was an undergraduate psychology major and in my junior year, uh, my advisor told me about a position at Bell Labs. Neither of us really knew what Bell Labs wanted was psychologists, but it turned out they had a human factors group and that's how I discovered the field. Went on graduate school school

Geri Fitz: 00:03:46

The field being human. Oh, human factors. Human factors, yeah.

Deb: 00:03:50

Very broadly. Yeah. So I went to graduate school, had planned on cognitive psychology. As, uh, a field. So I studied that, but as I got closer to graduation, started remembering that thing that I did as an undergraduate that was really interesting. Uh, that led me to my first job at NASA doing aviation applications. I was at NASA a fairly short time when my husband got offered a position on the East Coast. So, uh, and it was a dream job for him. So there was very little question that we should move. We moved to the East coast and I ended up at General Electric, which is how I got involved in HCI. Uh, they were doing work on how programmers understand software, and that was. In the very beginnings, that was 1980. So before even the first CHI conference. Yeah. Uh, GE did support that first CHI conference, so I got involved in that very early on. I was there several years. GE made some business decisions that, uh, didn't bode well for continuing to work there. So I moved to George Mason University and was there for over 30 years.

Geri Fitz: 00:05:01

As a psychologist?

Deb: 00:05:02

Yes, in a psychology department. Yeah, they did have a human factors program. Um, interestingly, the university had positioned itself to respond to the needs of the local community, and therefore it had programs that many psych departments don't have. It had a human factors program, it had industrial organizational program. So it really was, uh, some of the more practical aspects, if you will, of psychology. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:05:29

Yeah.

Deb: 00:05:30

And then to finish off. So I stayed there for a very, very long time. I went back and forth between being a faculty member and being an administrator. We can talk more about that if you'd like, um, at some point. And then, um, towards the end of. What turned out to be the end of my career, um, I ended up going to meta. At the time it was Oculus Research, a research lab doing research on virtual reality, and that was sparked by a confluence of events, a difficult meeting with the president and the provost, followed by seeing my grandson, who was then 15 months old and realizing how much we missed being so far away from them. And then my son-in-law recruiting me to Oculus Research where he was working. And then I was there for almost five years. Yeah. And then decided it was time to, to step away and do some other fun things. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:06:22

And you were 30 years at George Mason in the

Deb: 00:06:26

33, I think. 33.

Geri Fitz: 00:06:28

Wow. Wow. A couple of things just to pick up on there. You said at the beginning like you started off working in NASA and that was more in, was it cockpit or aerospace type work and you had been at Bell Labs, which is more phones. Yes. And then you talked about working with software developers. Was there a red thread through those?

Deb: 00:06:51

So for me, the thread was always what information do people need to perform effectively? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, um, when I went to NASA. The place in NASA that I was working was focused on commercial aviation, and it was just at the time that, um, automated systems were coming into the cockpit. So instead of a flight engineer having a huge panel of analog displays, there was now information being displayed on the computer. And it turned out that it wasn't always sufficient to bring the pilot back into the loop to understand what was happening because they hadn't had the preview of things starting to go off. So my background in cognition was really what information do people need to make decisions? And that was kind of the foundation. And the same thing was true in the software psychology work that we did. It turns out that a huge proportion of funds that go into creating software is not creating new software. It's modifying existing software. Documentation tends to be very poor. And so we were asking two kinds of questions. One, were there better ways to document the code so that a new person could understand what had gone before? And the second thing we looked at do different structures like functional decomposition versus object oriented. Do they lend themselves to easier modification? Mm-hmm. So that thread through that was always, what information do people need?

Geri Fitz: 00:08:22

Were you aware of that as a thread at the time? Because they're quite, it's shifting to quite different domains, or is it only when you're looking back that you go, ah, I was always interested in information and decision making.

Deb: 00:08:36

I think, if I'm brutally honest, it was when I came up for tenure, right. And I needed to explain the programmatic nature of the work that I had done. And it took me a little while to think about it because I was intrigued by the problems.

undefined: 00:08:52

Mm.

Deb: 00:08:53

But as I looked at it, I was always focused on the information needs of the user. Mm-hmm. So, uh. I think I was aware of it relatively early in my career, but certainly it wasn't something that I set out to say, this is what I'm gonna focus on.

Geri Fitz: 00:09:08

Yeah. That's interesting. And it also points then to the value you get from those. Times when we can think, oh no, I have to write a, I have to write a case for promotion, or I have to write a tenure case or whatever. And you can get a bit humpy about it. Yeah. But they're actually really useful points of reflection, aren't they, to do that heads, heads above the detail and mm-hmm. What was this about?

Deb: 00:09:35

Yeah, I would agree.

Geri Fitz: 00:09:37

Yeah. Do you have other insights when you like from that sort of heads up looking when you think back on that varied career?

Deb: 00:09:46

Um, I don't know. I mean, I. Didn't really have to do that kind of introspection for other, uh, job related things, except when I started to interview. So when I started to interview for the dean's position, when I interviewed for a provost position, those were situations where I had to look back and look for threads. So, for example, my management style, how did I think about that? But it wasn't from. Any other documents I would say that I had to produce for some reason.

Geri Fitz: 00:10:23

The other interesting thing I thought just in the, in the very short potted history, and I will put a link in the, on the webpage, on the episode notes to a great talk you did that walks through that career path in a little bit more detail if people are interested in seeing that. But the other thing that struck me is, it doesn't sound like at any point you had this career plan in mind and this was my path. It sounds quite opportunistic in a way that someone told you about a job at Bell Labs or your husband happened to get a move that was really perfect for him. Mm-hmm. Stuff happened in the industry that where you went, nah, not the place for me anymore. Can you talk a little bit about those transitions and again, I guess looking back on that, it wasn't a set career path that you had it planned out, but stuff worked out.

Deb: 00:11:20

So I guess I would, what I would say is I think I've always wanted to make a difference. I wanted to know that something that I did had some impact. And when I was at Bell Labs there was a problem that they came up with. There was a company that went to sodium vapor lamps, and this was back when you had a big black telephone with, uh, crystal buttons on the bottom and the light shone through the crystal. Well, because the sodium vapor frequency and the frequency of the tungsten lights coming out, they couldn't tell which phone was ringing. So we did a spectral analysis. My colleague did it, I will, full disclosure. And we discovered that the right colors to allow the maximum light coming out and the minimum light going in was actually the color of the nail polish that one of the secretaries had used to coat the buttons on her. But the, the point was we made a difference, right? It, it helped people do something better. And I remember thinking, wow, I, I helped somebody, you know, do something better. Mm. And that, I think, was the spark for everything I wanted to do in my career. Mm-hmm. Uh, and so yes, opportunities changed. Sometimes I changed areas of research due to funding changes, sometimes due to personal issues, but always, I was looking for something where I felt I could make a difference and if truth be told, the reason I retired from meta was I didn't feel like I was having much of an impact. And so I thought if I'm not doing something that feels like it's having a real impact, then I should just stop. Yeah. So, I think that has been the thread. I was less fussy perhaps, or, or I was just, I'm intrigued by a lot of things. So the domain that I worked in didn't seem to matter to me as much as the fact that the work that I was doing was making a difference.

Geri Fitz: 00:13:19

Mm. And that sounds, was it more of a gut thing then when you just had that feeling or was it a head thing?

Deb: 00:13:28

I mean, I guess I looked to things that, to me were indicators that something had been of value. Mm-hmm. So I would say throughout my entire career the piece of research that I did with colleagues that I think was the most impactful was work we did in an airline where we created procedures that embodied good crew resource management techniques. And we had two fleets at this airline. We trained one fleet. We did not train the other fleet and. We had pilots who got promoted from being first officer on the trained fleet onto being captains on the untrained fleet, and they started teaching their no new co-pilots what we had taught them on the trained fleet. And that just felt like a win, right? Mm-hmm. It was, they recognized that the help we had given them, the information they needed to convey to, to their pilots, their co-pilots, was valuable. And so we saw that didn't help our research a whole lot, but it was inspiring in a way that, you know, when you publish a paper and maybe people read it, maybe people don't, it just has a different feeling to it.

Geri Fitz: 00:14:39

Yeah, yeah. So you were looking for, you were looking for those sorts of signs of validation of difference. So publications then. But how did that sit?

Deb: 00:14:52

I published. Mm-hmm. I did not publish as much as some of my colleagues, but I published a respectable number of papers. And to be quite honest, I've, I've heard things that say, you know, on average any given published paper is only read by two or three people, and I've occasionally met younger researchers who, um, I was explaining something I had done years ago and they said, oh, yes, I've read that paper. And I'm always surprised. I mean, I, I, I'm truly shocked when people say they've read my papers. But it is important to codify. I mean, as I tell graduate students, and undergraduates when they work with me, if you don't publish what you find then it goes into the bins of history. You know it's lost. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, and if it's published, at least there's a chance that someone can build on it.

Geri Fitz: 00:15:44

Yeah. Yeah. I think I was also just thinking of that tension of wanting to make a real difference and the, the academic paper, which feels so dry

Deb: 00:15:57

mm-hmm.

Geri Fitz: 00:15:58

In comparison. But then it's also the currency isn't it, for staying in academia and being able to continue to make those difference. So,

Deb: 00:16:06

exactly.

Geri Fitz: 00:16:07

You know, cause I know that some people are much more driven by the papers that they get out in the publications.

Deb: 00:16:14

I have to say, looking back on my life, writing is not my favorite thing to do. Mm-hmm.. I'm a great editor, but that first draft is always quite daunting. Yeah. Um. So when I look at my colleagues who would keep multiple papers open on their laptop and just write every spare moment they had, that just wasn't me. Interestingly, as an administrator, people say, you know, what did you get out of administration? It was the same thing of making a difference and looking at what information people needed. You find in many systems, you know, organizations, the information's not flowing very well. And so could I do positive things either to change the culture or to change the information that people were getting. And over the years we've had to kind of change the way that we deliver that. I remember when I first went to the university, we used to get a, a eight by 11 or eight by 14 sheet of paper that would be delivered to our mailbox and it would have kind of what's going on in the university, just a front and the back. Mm-hmm. And so I'd pull it outta my box and I would read it as I was walking to my car. Now I have to sit in front of the computer and be stationary and be intentional about looking at that, whereas that opportunity just came up in the past. Mm-hmm. So I do think there are things we've lost in terms of helpful modes of communication just to keep people in the loop.

Geri Fitz: 00:17:39

Yeah. So, going to your administration, sort of leadership roles, how did that move happen and what did you like about it that you kept going back? 'cause you said you kept going in and out of faculty and leadership roles.

Deb: 00:17:58

After I got tenure, my department chair pulled me aside and said, you need to do something administrative because we're trying to reduce the load on untenured faculty members. And so I chose to serve as the undergraduate coordinator. At that time, the university was still checking whether every student had met the graduation requirements by hand. Yes, I spent many, many hours looking over graduation applications. But the university was in the process of creating an electronic mechanism for doing that. And so I got a chance not only to contribute to the way that looked, the look and feel given then the technology of the day, which wasn't all that useful. Mm-hmm. Um, but I also got to meet faculty from other parts of the university. And so it expanded my view. I think a lot of faculty members are reasonably so, very focused on their department and their discipline, and they don't necessarily have a reason to reach out to colleagues in other departments. And I found that interesting and intriguing. And at the end of my first year as a coordinator, I. Then we were doing evaluations of the faculty, our own evaluations, and they didn't look at the work that I had done as the undergraduate coordinator. They said, well, you got a course released for that. And so, you know, that's a wash. And I was frustrated because I knew there were others with administrative positions who had not really done very much work.

Geri Fitz: 00:19:34

Yeah, yeah.

Deb: 00:19:35

And so I thought, well, if I'm going to do administration, then maybe I'll do it. At a higher level and get some more credit for it. And as it happened, they were searching for a part-time position as an assistant dean of the graduate school, and it was halftime and only a two year position because they were in the process of decentralizing the graduate school. So I thought, well. You know, I'm enjoying meeting other people. I'm enjoying having this impact on the way that other people get to work in the university by reducing their load and, and having technology take over. So maybe I'll see, I'll try it for two years and see if it's something I might like to do.

Geri Fitz: 00:20:15

Mm-hmm.

Deb: 00:20:15

So that was, it really was, again, not intentional, but. It was in reaction to being frustrated.

Geri Fitz: 00:20:22

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm frustrated on your behalf that the work isn't acknowledged and it sounded like, you know, in line with your wanting to make a difference, it sounded like it really did make a difference, like you put in extra work beyond the sort of the core definition of the role and exactly where do you think we've got any better as a sector

Deb: 00:20:44

The department did change the way that they evaluate work. Um, yeah. In the department. And they did eventually have separate sections for research, teaching, uh, service and administration, if you were doing administration. Mm-hmm. So it did eventually, I think get to where it should have been. Yeah. But it was not there at the time.

Geri Fitz: 00:21:06

cause it sounds like one course release isn't equal to the work that you did.

Deb: 00:21:10

No, it was not

Geri Fitz: 00:21:11

in that role. And so when you were doing your part-time assistant dean role, is that above, is that still in the psychology department or is that a higher level?

Deb: 00:21:24

No, it was across the university.

Geri Fitz: 00:21:27

Oh, okay.

Deb: 00:21:27

So some universities, um, have graduate programming that stays with the college and some universities have a separate graduate school that controls enrollment and that sort of thing. And that was what the model that we had. Mm-hmm. They did eventually switch to the other model, uh, which is why it was a two year position. They knew they were gonna switch to this other model. Mm-hmm. But we were responsible for students across the spectrum.

Geri Fitz: 00:21:54

Yeah. And so that what, what additional skills did that draw on stepping up to that?

Deb: 00:22:04

So it required thinking in a different way. Mm. So I will give you one example. We had a student, actually several students who applied for extensions to, they had six years to complete their degree. Uh, their graduate degree and people would apply for an extension at some point in time when they were desperate because they realized they had three months left and they weren't gonna finish. And so I had the bright idea that we should just notify all the students when they were coming up to, you know, some deadline to avoid this last minute rush. At which point the dean pointed out that there were some departments who were just happy to let things go. That there were students who probably weren't gonna finish, and that by notifying them, it might actually make things worse. And so you really had to start thinking about both my intended consequence and the unintended consequences that come from a decision.

Geri Fitz: 00:23:04

Yeah. Were you still able to do research in that role? Because you said it was part-time, but we often know that part-time roles are not part-time.

Deb: 00:23:15

Yeah, that's correct. So, yes, I still had obligations to the department to do research. Obviously they were reduced in some, in terms of they wouldn't have expected me to produce as much as if I had been full-time in the department. But a year into my position as assistant dean, they decided to accelerate the process and they moved me into the provost office and they wanted me to go full-time, which had not been the plan. And so I found myself in a full-time position, but I was still an associate professor and I knew I wanted to become a full professor. So I did have a lot of tension trying to maintain research while I was also an administrator.

Geri Fitz: 00:24:05

Because what were the criteria at George Mason for full Professor?

Deb: 00:24:12

It's really national or international recognition. Um, so people recognize your work and it's, and it's being cited, well cited. I think that was long before the H Index came along. But, evidence that people would be willing to say that you had achieved stature in the field such that people would recognize your work Yeah. And, and excellence of that work. Yeah. So you, it, it, they're very. Difficult to pin down.

Geri Fitz: 00:24:38

Yeah. It sounds like the usual sort of, its the usual research is the driver for the step into full professor. So you were working full time as the vice Provost.

Deb: 00:24:49

Oh yeah, yeah. I was assistant then associate then vice provost for research and graduate studies and

Geri Fitz: 00:24:56

family at this stage?

Deb: 00:24:59

Yes. I have three daughters. They were maybe 10 ish or so in that neighborhood. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:25:06

And trying to keep up a research profile. Yes. On the side. On the side. That now was not counted in the full time.

Deb: 00:25:15

I mean, luckily, most of my research I did in partnership with others. Mm-hmm. There was. Very little that I did, just totally on my own at that point in my career. Mm-hmm. So I also had, I had colleagues that I could work with who would, in fact, for a long time I had a great group of three. One guy had these great ideas. Another one I was really good at getting people to sit down and execute. And then, there was someone who's really good at writing things up. So it was.

Geri Fitz: 00:25:45

Sounds like we had a good, good mix of skills.

Deb: 00:25:48

It was a wonderful mix of skills. Yeah. So I was quite lucky, I think, to have supportive colleagues. I will say that George Mason in its history was not, it's now a research one, but it was far from that when I joined them. Mm-hmm. And, people were very collegial. There wasn't the backbiting. It was just wonderful because people didn't care so much about credit as long as you got on a paper because they had started as a non-research university, there wasn't that feeling of, you know, I'll only succeed if you don't. Mm-hmm. So it was really helpful to me. Yeah. Because I was able to do things in partnership with people. Yeah. I didn't always have to be the first author, so, yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:26:33

And did you have explicit discussions about those roles or was it, did it just emerge naturally that that's how you all complemented each other?

Deb: 00:26:42

I'm not even sure they were aware. Yeah. My, my colleagues, I, I just recognized what people's skills were. Mm. And I do think I haven an organizational bent and so, um, I was able to, to see where things, you know, could move forward more, more smoothly. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:27:00

Because I, that's something I try to talk to people about now, about having these sorts of discussions proactively. Mm-hmm. About what do you think you're really good at and how can we fit together and what am I not so good at that you might be able to complement and what is none of us? What is it that none of us are good at? That we have to find someone else? Find someone else, or just put in the effort. Yeah, because that's really valuable, isn't it? Mm-hmm. And so do, is that a change that you are seeing, that you think that it has become much more competitive and less collegial now?

Deb: 00:27:34

I there, there are. Individuals who are very well published, who are very well published because they're just heads down working on their stuff and just doing, you know, grinding away, which is a good thing, but it does make collegial work more difficult. Now universities are attempting to get people to do more of this, especially across disciplinary lines. And I suspect that the fact that I'm in human factors, which in itself is a mix between psychology and engineering, helped me have that perspective. Because, you know, you can have an idea of how to build something, but you may not be able to build it. Yeah. Um, if you don't have a partner who can do that,. So. It may be that I was helped by the fact that the university in, actually, the other thing I would say about George Mason, an early president was trying to get more funding from the state or more support from the state generally. And the University of Virginia, the flagship school in Virginia Tech would both, whenever we tried to get a doctoral program, would say, oh, there, those upstarts, they don't have qualified faculty. They don't have the means to do this. And so this president positioned us as being more interdisciplinary and responding to the needs of Northern Virginia. That meant that I think eight of the first 10 doctoral programs that were approved were interdisciplinary. And so they had information technology. They didn't have computer science and engineering, they just had this generic degree. Psychology first started with a PsyD and the PsyD was not only for clinical, but also in human factors io, um, which is really quite unusual. And I remember faculty meetings where we railed against the president. He cares more about originality than he does about, you know, quality. But we had our PsyD, I would say six years.

Geri Fitz: 00:29:44

What's this psyD?

Deb: 00:29:45

It's a PsyD, a doctorate in psychology, and it is targeted at. Individuals who want to practice clinical psychology mm-hmm. With the notion that instead of doing a dissertation, they do a project, but then they do supervised clinical hours so that they're getting more exposure and experience with the clinical practice. So it was started in part, I think, because there was a dearth of qualified clinicians. And PhD programs had people who really didn't see themselves ever doing research in the long term. Yeah. Doing this. Um, so this was an alternative path to become licensed as a clinician.

Geri Fitz: 00:30:26

But the, some of the faculty were against it, did you say?

Deb: 00:30:32

Well, there is a belief in some quarters that the, you know, PhD is a higher quality, it's certainly a more research degree. Mm. So if you are a researcher and you believe strongly in research, you will see the PsyD as a lighter, if you will, degree. Right. Um, but it was, it was developed and targeted specifically for clinical psych. It was never designed to be used in any other field of psychology. Yeah. So that was what made it unusual. I think we, in maybe one other university in the whole United States, were using it for something other than a clinical psych program. And after we'd had this degree about six years, the president went to our state council and said, you know, we're offering this PsyD, but it's really a PhD. Can we just change the name? And they went, oh yeah, sure. So it was one of those nose under the tent and then blow the tent wide open kinds of things. And we went, oh my God. He was so politically astute.

Geri Fitz: 00:31:36

Just gonna say like, you. Even like you, you saying before about sending out the reminders and then someone saying there are unintended consequences, right. As you're moving into these more leadership positions, this is different, you said, talked about organizational thinking and or you know that, but it requires different sensitivities, doesn't it?

Deb: 00:31:59

It does. I mean, in. As a faculty member, you mostly care about yourself. Mm-hmm. And about your department. Once you get, I mean, I was amazed when I got to into the deanship about how much research topics overlap across disciplines. My college was humanities and social sciences. And there were people in English doing website design. And I went, what? And it, it was just amazing to me to see how many topics actually overlapped across all of those areas. And of course, that's not quite as diverse as engineering and social sciences, but still lots and lots of threads and things that really could be more developed as an interdisciplinary function than what they are. We are still fairly stovepiped, I think, in universities.

Geri Fitz: 00:32:55

Yeah. Moving into sort of provost type roles and, and also then taking on the dean of the college. I'm curious about what were those key skills that you think you naturally brought? What were the skills that you had to learn to develop?

Deb: 00:33:19

So I think I naturally brought budgeting and organizing or reorganizing skills to that. I still have to work on my listening skills. Someone would come and bring a complaint and they were so passionate and you just kind of go all in until you hear the other side of the story from the other individual involved. So it took a while for me to learn to balance. The other thing I had to learn to do. It didn't come naturally is learning how to talk to people about difficult issues. Mm-hmm. Um, I had had. Worked with people who just ignored difficult issues, which then creates problems. So if there's a problem in your department and a faculty member is out of line, if you're afraid to confront them, it just continues and it affects the culture of the whole department. Yeah. And so I learned that you really need to address that. And I did work with some people to learn some skills about how to say, okay, here's the issue I'm dealing with. Here's what I see as your part of it, but I could be mistaken about what that part is. You know, how do you feel about this situation? Mm-hmm. And working to solve the problem rather than blaming the individual. Uh, and. I will say after learning some of those skills, I was surprised. There were days I would go in dreading that I had to meet with someone about a difficult issue and then coming out saying, gosh, that wasn't so bad.

Geri Fitz: 00:34:57

Yeah. So I think that's worth just repeating. 'cause many people, even if they're not in more senior leadership roles, even if you're supervising a student at, at whatever level, may well have to have difficult conversations. So you talked about, a framework that talked about, you know, like naming the issues as an objective thing. Yes. What you see. Owning your I don't know, interpretation or possible interpretation, but then inviting the other person to provide their perspective so that Yes. Listening and giving them a chance to talk. And that then I liked the bit about focusing on solving rather than blaming. Yes.

Deb: 00:35:41

Right. My goal as a. Leader is not to get someone upset because they're doing the wrong thing. Mm. I wanna solve the problem. And if I can engage them in working with me to solve the problem. Now there were some situations where they weren't willing to work with me and I needed to take more drastic steps. And really to do that, you have to be willing to be disliked. So, mm-hmm. There's another piece of that is that, I mean, inherently I am a people pleaser. But in that role, you sometimes have to make decisions that not everyone will like, and you have to be willing to accept that. Some people will not like the choices you make. You do the best you can with the information you have at the time, and you hope that, you know, things go as you would like, but you have to be willing to accept those consequences, and that's sometimes difficult.

Geri Fitz: 00:36:39

Yeah, I would imagine that that would be often because if you are the one holding the responsibility for the decision making, ultimately

Deb: 00:36:48

mm-hmm.

Geri Fitz: 00:36:49

Part of your role, and I think what you've also sort of alluded to is, you've got multiple priorities, values, mm-hmm. Stakeholder concerns. I, I don't like that language, but you're not gonna be ever able to find a perfect answer for everyone. That's right. So I'm thinking about being a faculty member and reflecting, how I often wouldn't have that perspective on the difficulties that the person who was in the leadership position had.

Deb: 00:37:22

Mm-hmm.

Geri Fitz: 00:37:23

How they were trying to provide the, a best solution, recognizing that they're not going to keep all of us happy. And it's really easy to get selfish and think that I should be happy with your decision. If you were talking to faculty members or what would you want us to do, how, how would you want us to respond or how could we help someone in leadership in, in supporting those sorts of decisions?

Deb: 00:37:52

Well, but just asking what went into this decision, right? Why did you make the call that you did?

Geri Fitz: 00:37:59

Mm-hmm.

Deb: 00:37:59

And being open to understanding mm-hmm. That I was faced with trade-offs. Mm-hmm. That if I did X, this would be the outcome. If I did Y, this would be the outcome. And. Given the choices that I had and the constraints in, in decision making, you know, this was what I thought was best. If we're coming to a conclusion, I would certainly take input on what they felt was the better alternative. Ultimately I had to make a call. I don't know if it's universal. In our university, people loved consensus. They always wanted to be able to come to consensus, and I had to learn that it's not always possible. And if you wait too long, then things fester. So you do at some point just have to make a decision and. You know, there's that other, that's that other piece of this working together. I'm listening and I'm trying to bring us all to the same conclusion, but I also recognize that that's not always gonna be possible. That, yeah, what's good for this is not good for this and there're gonna be people on both sides. So I need to look at the situation from both the faculty member up and the university down and say, okay, what is the best solution? I think under the circumstances, and you're not always right. Uh, you know, sometimes afterwards you think, oh, that wasn't the best thing to have done. Yeah. But. You know, we're not perfect.

Geri Fitz: 00:39:22

As you said best, that you could make best decision at the time.

Deb: 00:39:26

At the time, and with the information I had. Mm-hmm.

Geri Fitz: 00:39:29

Which is interesting when you said that your, uh, red thread across some of the early career stuff and the research stuff in different industries was what information do people need to make good decisions?

Deb: 00:39:39

Yes, that's right. Yep.

Geri Fitz: 00:39:40

And, what information did you need as a leader to make good decisions?

Deb: 00:39:48

It depended on the the issue. Um. Oftentimes it was finances. You know, we had a college that was woefully underfunded. And both as a chair and as a dean, I had to make decisions. Do I make this faculty member happy by giving them a raise? But then, disadvantage this other department because they now can't hire someone? Or, you know, things like, do I ask my faculty to take on larger class sizes? Because if we have higher enrollments, the university will give us more funding for the department. So there are lots of different kinds of trade-offs. You need different information for those different situations.

Geri Fitz: 00:40:29

Did you develop any particular mechanisms or platforms or whatever for engaging with people and getting their views or inputs? I mean, I know I, again, it probably depends on what the issue is and, uh.

Deb: 00:40:46

So, as a chair and as a dean, I had meetings with relevant groups. So as department chair, I had a faculty meeting every month. As a dean, I had meetings with my, um, department chairs. And when I started, a lot of what I, I would go to the dean, the meeting with the dean as a chair, and the dean would give us all this information. I would come back and I would spend a large portion of my meeting kind of regurgitating what I had heard.

Geri Fitz: 00:41:13

Yeah.

Deb: 00:41:14

I eventually realized that was not the most effective way to work with people. So what I did was I sent very long agendas, sometimes as many as 50 pages. If someone had given us a, a PowerPoint briefing, I just attached the PowerPoint briefing. Mm. So instead of me summarizing it, I let them look through it. And then in my meeting we were able to have discussions. So, you know, what concerns did you have about this issue? And so I asked people to be prepared coming into the meeting in the dean's meetings, I did the same thing and I listed each item on my agenda. But at the start of the meeting I said, by raise of hands, how many people want to talk about this issue? And we would do a count, and I would just take them from the most pressing issue or the one that. People wanted to chat about so that we were using that time for discussion and communication and sharing of information rather than me just dumping stuff, them not knowing anything about it, having to process it, think it through, and then coming back later. Now I had hoped as Dean that my chairs would then take that packet that I sent them and send it to their whole department. Many of them did not. And I would hear from faculty members, well, I didn't know about that. Yeah. And I think, oh, yeah, yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:42:33

Yes. I think, I'm just reflecting on some discussions I've heard just recently from a few different people, people at different universities, and that has often been a component, especially when they're in situations of change, high change. Um, so is that not getting through. But that model of giving people the information beforehand

Deb: 00:42:56

mm-hmm.

Geri Fitz: 00:42:56

With the expectation that they at least familiarize themselves enough to be able to say, yes, I want to talk about it. Right. Both has the advantage of enabling different people with different thinking styles, you know, who may need more time to consider stuff compared to others of us who might just be able to go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, straight away. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It gives, it gives everyone time to process information and I love that it then creates the space for the discussion rather than the one way throw it out. Mm-hmm.

Deb: 00:43:28

Yeah. Yeah. It was so much better after we switched to, to that model.

Geri Fitz: 00:43:34

And do have any other hard earned tips and tricks for anyone in leadership positions around the aspects particular to being in leadership roles, whether it's dean level or just, running a research project or whatever.

Deb: 00:43:51

I don't know that there are any special tips that I have. I mean, I just like to have lists and so the agendas when I would send the agenda to the department when we had issues to discuss. And so for example, a tenure case, I would estimate how much time was needed. And there were times when we didn't have much to discuss. There was a lot of just, you know, getting together. And every now and then someone would email me and say, just want to let you know I'm going to be out of town. But I read through the agenda and it looks like it's light, so I don't think I'm gonna miss much. And it was great that even people who had to miss a meeting were informed, were in the loop. Yeah. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:44:32

Yeah, and I know that there's research that talks about, as academics, that's one of the things that we just want to, we want to be informed and at least feel like we've had a say. I'm sure if that research was repeated now there'd be other challenges. But yeah. Any particular differences between leadership within an industry setting? Because you then went to Oculus and that and leadership in universities that you would reflect on.

Deb: 00:44:58

So, I would say my, the scope of leadership that I had in, uh, industry was smaller. But I did try to use the same mechanisms, having an agenda for a meeting, trying to make sure everyone speaks and is heard, giving space for people who tend not to speak up as much. And. In industry, they also, or at least at meta, I won't say necessarily, they have like one-on-ones. So anyone who reports directly to you has a regular standing meeting with you. Now at the university, I did encourage that with my chairs. I wanted them to come in and meet with me on a regular basis and do that, but it wasn't as structured, I think, as it was in industry. And really the goal was to say. How are things going? Where are you stuck? What's my role in helping you get unstuck? And that's, I think, a very useful thing because sometimes one level up you can do things and move things along in a way that an individual can't. Yeah. And that's something that I don't see happening much in a university. I mean, I think you're much more left to your own devices Yes. To make things happen.

Geri Fitz: 00:46:11

Yes, you are. Even though people above could provide insights or direction. What I liked about what you said there was you didn't take on the problem and turn into problem solver. Mm-hmm. You said basically, what do you need from me, or what's my role in helping you with that? Mm-hmm. Which is a lovely message back to the person that I trust you to, you know, to find a way through, and I'm here to absolutely support you.

Deb: 00:46:41

And if you need help and you're not sure what to do, let's problem solve together. Mm.

Geri Fitz: 00:46:46

We don't have that culture, as you say in universities and no, well, it's not been my experience either.

Deb: 00:46:54

Yeah. There's a lot of discussion about mentors and, and mentorship. And there seems to be this notion that you have one person. And there's a group in the US it's a group that supports faculty development and they talk about having a mentoring map. So the person who can be your safe space that you can complain to when things aren't going well. Yeah. And the person who's gonna critique your work. And the person who's gonna help you understand the politics at the university or your current job or whatever it is. And understanding that no one person probably can fill all those roles. Your role as a woman versus a man versus a minority in a majority culture. Mm-hmm. All of those things, you know, no one person has them all, and. It's also easier for the mentor who has a particular expertise to be able to say, yes, let's meet when you have an issue on this topic. Yes, and I'm happy to help you, but it doesn't have to be a month, you know, once a week, once a month, kind of a situation. And somehow I think in universities, that mentorship model doesn't seem to happen naturally.

Geri Fitz: 00:48:07

Mm, yes. And I think it could also be tied up with what you said before about it becoming increasingly competitive as well, the, the competition where, mm-hmm. The time to be available and to share and to reach out and to connect. So identifying what your needs are and who's your board of mentors as I've heard people mm-hmm. Talk about. Yeah. Yeah.

Deb: 00:48:33

And I was lucky. I did have a few people who reached out and supported me early on. Uh, when I was at GE, a group of managers led by something I suggested, made a decision while our. the next level manager was away and he came back and was very unhappy and he said, well, who made this call? And a more senior person said it was me. And I looked at him because I thought it was me. And I asked him afterwards, I said, why did you take credit for that? 'cause I did it. And he said, I'm in a better position to handle the blowback than you are. And he said it wasn't going to hurt me. And I went, oh my God, how lovely. You know? But I hadn't realized it. And then when I got to the university, there was a more senior faculty member who pulled me aside and said, if you're gonna get tenure, you need to do service. Let me tell you the service opportunities that aren't that overbearing.

Geri Fitz: 00:49:27

Nice.

Deb: 00:49:28

And so she, she helped me a lot. Yeah. Now I have to tell you a funny story. I found out many, many years later that at the time I interviewed, I was about seven months pregnant and this person who eventually mentored me without my asking, had said to the department chair, great candidate, two bad she's pregnant. I know.

Geri Fitz: 00:49:50

Sorry, my mouth was just open.

Deb: 00:49:53

Yep. So. You never know. She was, she was wonderful to me once I got there. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:50:01

Yeah. Just conscious of time marching on. Mm-hmm. When you look back over this career and I, you've already given us so many really lovely insights that I think we can all apply in regardless of our roles, what are you proudest of?

Deb: 00:50:25

Gosh, so. I'm reminded of, there was a listserv early in my career of women in computer science, faculty members in computer science. Not sure how I got on the list. I mean, I was doing HCI work, but, and they said they didn't feel really good at anything. But what they were good at was juggling that, you know, they would do work, work, work, work, work. And then, you know, they'd realize, well, family's dropping and they'd throw it up in the other air. I think I'm most proud of the fact that. My children still love me and feel like I gave them an okay life, even though I was balancing all these crazy things, um, with both parents working. I don't know that there's any one thing I would pick out from my career per se. it's really more. Having my girls wanting to be around me now that mm-hmm. They're adults and they have children of their own and they want me to help. Yeah.

Geri Fitz: 00:51:21

So you, one of the things you mentioned before we started as well was a course that you created about lots of how tos, mm-hmm. What was that? That's because it sounds really innovative.

Deb: 00:51:33

So I would say of the courses I've taught in the work that I did as a faculty member, I was most proud of this course. It was a course on work skills. So how to identify opportunities for grants. How to write a grant proposal. In fact, the very first time we did it, someone who was a granting agent read all of the proposals that my students wrote and gave them feedback. It was just lovely. How to give. Good presentation. How to budget, different career opportunities, industry, government, uh, academia. And within academia. People often think because they're. By definition, if you were in a doctoral program, you're in a doctoral institution. So they forget that there are community colleges and tribal colleges and four year colleges that are focused on the undergraduates. So given different careers, how to write their resume, and how to track what they're doing. Um, and in light of that, we talk about a CAGE, career accomplishments, um, and. I, it's, I've said to you and to others, I look at my resume now and there are things I see on, on there that I don't remember doing. And it's important, especially as you think to the future, if you're, you know, people change jobs quite a bit more now than they used to. Can you capture what you were trying to achieve in a project, what you did achieve, and what skills it demonstrates? Is it a leadership skill? Is it an organizational skill? Is it a publishing skill? What are the things you learned from that? And then just keep that. It's just for you, but it lets you look back on your career and see the things that you've done.

Geri Fitz: 00:53:07

Mm-hmm.

Deb: 00:53:08

Yep.

Geri Fitz: 00:53:09

So CAGE stands for, do you remember?

Deb: 00:53:12

Career accomplishments, goals and experiences, I think.

Geri Fitz: 00:53:18

Yeah. Yes. Career accomplishments, goals and experiences. Right. Yeah. And those things that you've just talked about in terms of the how to's they're transferable skills generally. Okay.

Deb: 00:53:37

Absolutely. And, and they work no matter what the setting, even personally, just keeping track of what you've done, and what you've accomplished. And, and there's so many of us, so as an academic, if you leave graduate school and you go to a university. You likely have had no training in teaching? Yeah, no training in how to prepare a course, how to build a syllabus, how to do all those things. You may never have written a grant proposal. You know, you may have written something for a small scholarship or something, but writing a grant proposal with budgets and such, and yet you're expected to do that when you get there. Now some universities are starting to have support systems for faculty so that they can get experience or they can learn about it when they get there. But I just think it prepares students better regardless of the industry they go into when they leave to know how to do some of these things. I mean, I learned budgeting at GE where I had a grant and I had to account for the money. Luckily I figured it out and my manager helped me with that, but I've never been trained on how to do that. And so it just helps you succeed when you walk out the door.

Geri Fitz: 00:54:50

And even your statement as well about talking to people about different types of university roles. People would think of academia and just think of research intensive. But your career also points to the fact that thinking about university roles can also be thinking about the diverse range of roles you can play within an academic institution. So it's not just a research intensive faculty member or a teaching intensive faculty member that mm-hmm. You can move into more of these leadership. And Absolutely. Management roles.

Deb: 00:55:23

Mm-hmm.

Geri Fitz: 00:55:23

What would be the trainings that you'd love to see in an ideal world for people to be set up for those roles?

Deb: 00:55:33

So, our university did eventually develop a training program for people who are interested in that. And it looked at, looking at yourself first. They did mm-hmm some various, you know, little tests of where your skills lie. So, and then looking at the group that was there, which they pulled together from across the university. If you were gonna staff a project, which skills would you need to have? And we did kind of a grid of the skills, people's top skills, and what the team had as a whole. So learning to think about how you create teams mm-hmm. Partnerships. There was information on how the university's budget ran, so there were a lot of things like that, that were in that training program.

Geri Fitz: 00:56:15

Yeah. They sound really important skills for everyone to have as well at whatever level. And anything to reflect about being a woman in academia?

Deb: 00:56:29

So when George Mason was established, it was actually a college of the University of Virginia. It was a Northern Virginia Branch campus and as a result it was not research intensive. And it also drew a lot of women as faculty members. So when I started at George Mason in 1984, I would say of the 10 or 12 departments in our college, probably seven or eight of them were women. The year I came up for tenure, my department chair was a woman. My dean was a woman. The provost was a woman.

Geri Fitz: 00:57:07

Very unusual.

Deb: 00:57:08

It's never happened since. So it was very unusual. And I will say that I had a blessedly free time, by and large, in terms of feeling left out as a woman or feeling like the only one in the room, because we did have a large number of female faculty members around. Now I will say when I was on campus one day, pregnant with my second, a man walking past me said, oh, in my day, women in your condition weren't seen in public. Yes.

Geri Fitz: 00:57:40

It's a bit outrageous.

Deb: 00:57:43

It was more than, yes. It was outrageous. Um. But that was unusual. And I would say I felt being a woman more in some of the administrative roles I played outside the university. Okay. So, I was the second woman president of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. The first one had been in the seventies, and I was then in the nineties and I thought, okay, now we certainly have broken the barrier. It was almost another 10 years before another woman was elected president. I do remember talking with the gentleman on the executive council, you they often talk about who should we elect for the next round? And they said, well, you know, we should have more women presidents. And I said, well, that's easy. And they said, what? I said, we just nominate three women. And they went, oh, you can't do that. I said, why not? Three guys have run lots of times. But there was still that resistance there. I was, I think, the first female chair of the FAA advisory board. For human factors research. So there were places where I would look out and see a sea of black suits. Mm-hmm. Um, but I will say I rarely felt like I was discriminated against. I didn't feel like I was necessarily, being demeaned in any way, shape or form. Yeah. So, from that perspective, it was not an issue for me.

Geri Fitz: 00:59:03

That's good. That's great. Well, thank you for sharing that. That was just mm-hmm. Interesting to hear and sounds, it does sound unusual.

Deb: 00:59:13

It was. Um, as I say, we were blessed to have so many women in leadership positions when I was untenured. Uh, and which continued for quite some time.

Geri Fitz: 00:59:23

Yeah. That's brilliant. Well, thank you. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you wanted to share?

Deb: 00:59:36

No, I can't think of anything. I think it's been a lovely conversation and I'm delighted with the directions it took.

Geri Fitz: 00:59:42

And yeah. So thank you Deb. Really appreciate you taking the time. And, enjoy this next phase of life.

Deb: 00:59:52

Thank you.

Geri Fitz: 00:59:53

And the opportunity to make a difference in different ways.

Deb: 00:59:56

Well, thank you for having me on. It's been delightful.

Geri Fitz: 01:00:02

You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together we can make change happen.