Chapter 16: Faculty Health and Wellness: Programs and the Anti-Bullying Task Force
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Holleman begins to sketch the range of traditional and non-traditional programs that Faculty Health and Wellness offers, then turns to one initiative in particular, the Anti-Bully Task Force. He defines what shapes bullying can take in the workplace and stresses the “emotional immediacy” that victims of bullying experience. He then clarifies that the Task Force was created in 2013 in response to the way Dr. Ronald DePinho handled his policy of raising the standards for promotion and tenure.
Identifier
HollemanWL_03_20170427_C16
Publication Date
4-27-2017
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Warren L. Holleman, PhD, Oral History Interview, April 27, 2017
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional Unit; Overview; The Clinician; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; MD Anderson Culture; Leadership; Working Environment; Building the Institution; Institutional Politics; Growth and/or Change; Critical Perspectives on MD Anderson; MD Anderson Culture; Critical Perspectives; Understanding the Institution; Institutional Politics
Transcript
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
All right, we are recording. It is about 24 minutes after 10:00 on the 27th of April, 2017. And I am sitting in the Historical Resources Center Reading Room with Warren Holleman for our third session together. I'm Tacey Ann Rosolowski. Thanks for coming in.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Thank you.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Managing to come in after—
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah. Thank you. This has been a refreshing experience for me, thinking back over things and trying to put them in perspective.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Cool. Great. Well, I really appreciate your candor. Also, unusual insights that you've shared about the faculty. I did go and kind of investigate more about burnout and suicide and all of that, yeah. You really shed a light on all of that. This is a really interesting and important contribution to the oral history project. Plus it was just fun to talk to you.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah. Same here. Thank you.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So today I had just a few additional questions, and we strategized a little bit ahead of time. And the first one I wanted to ask you was sort of a follow-up. When we were talking about your various activities once you came to MD Anderson, you kind of quickly moved to this epiphany moment when you realized the severity of the burnout issue here. I kind of got the sense that part of the epiphany involved you coming to the realization that you were sort of trying to put a finger in a dike, you know, that there was only so much that you as an individual with these programs could actually do. I totally appreciate that perspective. But I didn't want to lose sight of the fact that you also did develop some things here. However, in the grand scheme, they may not be able to accomplish what you would like to see happen for the faculty, and for their long-term well-being. So I wanted to make sure that you had an opportunity to tell me about some of those programs. And I know, for example, I attended a program that you contributed to Survivorship Week, so that's one of them. I'm just wondering if you could speak about that and maybe some of the other things that you've done.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
The way I view it, we have kind of a dashboard of offerings, or a menu of offerings. On the one hand, we do some rather traditional academic activities, and then on the other hand, we do some not-so-traditional. Then we offer some programs and services for individuals, and then for groups. Then we try to intervene not only at the individual level, but also at the institutional level. So I could give some examples of each of those.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Yeah, sure.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
On the traditional academic side, there's the presentations and there's publications. So for presentations, I do grand rounds presentations, on topics like burnout and stress and work-life balance. We've organized a lot of panel discussions on various topics. Bullying has turned out to be a very popular and needed topic.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Can I ask you briefly about that? Because honestly, when I saw that on your CV, I was, like, what?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So tell me about that. What does that—what form does that take?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah. So, the term "bullying" was kind of a new term to me, a new-old term. I thought of that as a junior high concept. But it's the term often used to refer to incivility toward coworkers. And it comes in many forms. But in my counseling and in my just hallway conversations, I've become very aware that a lot of people who work here have experienced incivility in various ways. In many cases, severe enough that it's had a significant impact on their careers, or on their satisfaction of their jobs. So we decided to offer—we brought in a speaker, Kevin Grigsby, who is one of the leaders in the AAMC, Association of American Medical Colleges. He's kind of a national expert on this issue. He gave a lecture. We packed Hickey Auditorium—that's a lot of people. So we said, well, let's do it again. So maybe six or nine months later, or a year later, he came back. Same thing happened again. So we said, well, let's talk about it again. Let's keep trying to go deeper and find solutions. So the third time, we organized a panel of some of our institutional leaders. And Kevin was the moderator. And that was very well-attended as well. Our panelists did an excellent job. I thought that was effective in terms of bringing to their attention the, I guess, the emotional immediacy of this issue to those who have experienced it.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Could you give me some examples of what a ‘bullying light’ might look like, and kind of what the more extreme versions might be?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Sure. I'll give a staff example and a faculty example, say. On the staff side, I think of those individuals who've experienced bullying from their supervisors. They had a supervisor who, for some reason or another, best I can tell, just didn't like them. Not because of their job performance, but some personality type of clash. Or perhaps even the supervisor felt threatened because the worker was talented. Duh. I'm, of course, just hearing one side of the story. But I've talked to several who've told me a story like that. So the supervisor sets out to sabotage the career of the supervisee, which is just the opposite of what you want. You want a boss and a mentor to be a champion of your career, and to give you the skills to succeed. And in a functional organization and a resilient organization, you would have supervisors who saw their job as to make those under them successful. But you get this dysfunctional thing where people are basically doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. So if you're a young person coming to work at MD Anderson, you're idealistic. You want to make cancer history, and all of that. You really care about the mission of the organization. And you get in this situation where you're just treated like trash. It's very discouraging and disheartening and demoralizing. And in a sense, you've got the job of your dreams. But you've got the boss of your nightmares, you know? So that's a typical thing. Of course, the best thing to do is to identify those bad bosses and either get rid of them, or if they're rehabilitatable, to rehabilitate them. But that doesn't always happen. It's a tough thing to do that. So that's one type of scenario. Another type that's really been brought to my attention is, the junior faculty member, say, on a clinical rotation—I'm sorry, who's working as a consultant for the week, they're doing the hospital service for their department. So they're being called in by other departments to consult, to give advice on how to manage some aspect of a particular case. And several have told me that when they do that, although the majority of the people they consult with treat them respectfully and professionally, there's always one or two who don't. They say that just ruins everything. They say, ‘I've been through my medical school, my residency, my fellowship, and now I'm a faculty member at the job of my dreams, MD Anderson. And I'm doing the best work I can. And I just know the two days [before]—I start the service on Monday, Saturday and Sunday I can't sleep, because I know somebody is going to treat me rudely. So sure enough, say Tuesday night I'm called in on a case, and I'm on another case, and so I get there in 30 minutes. Some senior faculty from another department is waiting for me. Instead of giving me a chance to explain that I couldn't run off from the other case, they say something derogatory toward me. And I feel like a piece of shit. And I'm doing the best I can. And I know they wouldn’t say that to me if I was, A, a senior faculty, or B, maybe if I was—something else was different about me demographically, or whatever. They feel some permission to treat me like dirt.’ So it's experienced by our faculty, by our staff. It's just a lack of professionalism. People have always—they've always been jerks and unkind people. It's not a new problem, I don't think. But it is dysfunctional. And—
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Is it more prevalent now? Because I noticed on your CV, there was a task force that was established in 2013, the anti-bullying task force. And was there concern at that time that there were more complaints?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah. So there were, as I recall, 2013 had the elements that I just described. There was another element. There was an effort by Dr. DePinho to, as he put it, raise the bar on tenure, promotion and tenure. And many felt that was really just an excuse to get rid of certain faculty in order to bring in other people that he wanted, generally from the Northeast. I hate to keep using that geographic reference, but—
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, no, I think it is the intercultural or clash with regions is a very real thing here.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah. Yeah. So I believe this is what gave rise to this. So there were certain faculty who went up for promotion and tenure, and it appeared that they had met the requirements or exceeded the requirements. In a couple of cases, they were voted almost unanimously, or unanimously, I think, by the committee.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, there was one that was unanimous.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
By the committee. And then lo and behold, Dr. DePinho didn't approve it. He rejected it. And that seemed very unfair. It seemed illegal, really, because we were a member of the American Association of University [Professors]. And it's kind of a union for faculty. So it really broke the rule. And it felt like what people often call "bullying" or "incivility," a faculty member has given their best, and they've done or exceeded what they were asked to do. And yet for some [reason]—usually they'll come up with some reason that it's not a very good one, or we can't say this, but we know something that he did that was bad, so we're not going to approve it. And that seemed like a form of bullying, too. So there's another example, I think there's sort of culture conflict between the new faculty and the veterans, was a piece of this too.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So what were some of the discussions that you had in the task force that was created?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
I can't remember that far back the details. Even if I could, I think those would be confidential.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Confidential, sure.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
But I think it was just an effort to get together some concerned faculty and perhaps administrators, to see what we could do to make sure that we had as civil and fair a culture as possible. So as we know historically, the Faculty Senate did advocate for those faculty. There may still be some advocacy going on now, I'm not sure exactly how all that is played out. I know in the case of one faculty member who had a similar experience but was not talked about, because [in] his or her case, the vote was not unanimous. It was, like, 13 to 2, or something. There was a solution that was worked out that was very beneficial to that faculty member, that another department chair said, "You can move to my department, because you're a great faculty member. I'd love to have you in my department." So this person was able to leave the department where his or her chair was jerking them around, basically. So we were not in the role of—we weren't governing or anything, but we were trying to brainstorm solutions. And over the next couple of years, of course the shared governance process came about. And that has—that really gives us all hope that problems like this can get a fair hearing from now on.
Recommended Citation
Holleman, Warren L. PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 16: Faculty Health and Wellness: Programs and the Anti-Bullying Task Force" (2017). Interview Chapters. 1090.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1090
Conditions Governing Access
Open
