Chapter 10: Preparing to Take on Leadership of the Department
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Description
Dr. Tinkey explains that the growth of the department has been connected with Dr. Kenneth Gray’s vision and his role in mentoring her to take over as department chair. She talks about the areas of skill that leadership has required, noting the assertive temperaments of veterinarians at MD Anderson.
She talks about the value of the Faculty Leadership Academy and the challenges this training has enabled her to meet.
Next, Dr. Tinkey mentions changes she instituted once Kenneth Gray retired. Specifically, she expanded the approaches taken to large animal care into the area of rodent care: she hired four additional veterinarians and reorganized the department (in 2006) to create a Section of Compliance and Rodent Clinical Care.
Identifier
TinkeyPT_02_20160607_C10
Publication Date
6-7-2016
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The Administrator; The Administrator; Leadership; On Leadership; Mentoring; On Mentoring; Building/Transforming the Institution; MD Anderson Culture
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Obviously this is the backdrop against which you began to take on more and more administrative responsibility for shaping what animal care looked like here at MD Anderson. So tell me about how it began to evolve. You were section head. And then let me get my list here so I --
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
I was section chief of a few sections.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, 2002 to 2006. Anyway you started on your climb up the ladder after 2002. Talked a little bit about how that title came about. So tell me about the evolution of the program, how it began to change, what you began to take on to develop these services here.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Like I said, I wish I could tell you that I had this big structured, well-illuminated master plan in my mind. And honestly I don’t think I really did. Dr. Gray was the department chair. And he shared with me sometime around 2002, 2003, 2004, “Peg, I’m thinking about retiring in the next few years. I believe you have the leadership qualities needed to lead a department and be a department chair. And so I’d like you to think about that. And I want to continue to mentor you in basically what does it mean to be a department chair.” Because the reality is there’s a lot of pieces of administering a department that don’t necessarily have much to do in any department probably with medicine. There are things like human resources activities and attending administrative meetings and basically being an information conduit from the rest of the institution back to your department’s faculty and things like that.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
When he said that to you, “You’re department chair material,” what was your reaction?
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
I really had two different reactions, to tell you the truth. Certainly anyone would be happy to hear that. Not only was Dr. Gray my boss, and he was a very terrific boss, he was my friend. And so it was a huge compliment to have someone express that confidence in you. At the same time really it was intimidating because I saw him directing this busy active program with numerous faculty members. And I got to tell you I love the faculty here, I love veterinarians in general, but veterinarians don’t make their living being super laid-back, shy wallflowers. They are not afraid to express their opinion. And I thought of this very passionate vocal -- rough-and-tumble might be the wrong word. But they would disagree with each other. And I would be watching these debates in some of the veterinary portions of the staff, meaning the faculty portions. And I remember even thinking I’m glad I don’t have to figure this one out. And so to have him say, “Yeah, I want you to try and lead this cast of characters with their divergent opinions and their very strong passionate feels about something, I thought golly, I don’t know if this is something I can do. I’ve been doing this 10 years now and I guess that I’ve been successful at it. I’ve had my ups and downs. So I had that thought too. One of the things that Dr. Gray did for me that really was a turning point is he felt very strongly that I should attend Faculty Leadership Academy. I don’t know what cohort I was in. I can’t even remember what year I took Faculty Leadership Academy. I can’t remember if it was before the year 2000 or after the year 2002.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I think I actually have it here someplace.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Might have been in 2002 or 2003.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I’ve got your CV in here.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
But whatever year it was -- I think he’d even told me that, but I remember when he came and said, “Hey, I want you to attend this deal,” and I said, “OK, what is it, a seminar or something?,” and he said, “Oh, no, it’s a yearlong program. And you’re going to go to a weekendlong retreat as a kickoff, and then you’re going to spend basically one day a month in seminars and you’re going to do this for 9 or 10 months, and then you’re going to end with a project and a presentation,” I remember thinking are you kidding me, I’ve got enough to do, and now you want me to do this yearlong thing, oh, no, that kind of thing. But it was the best program. I don’t have an MBA. I hadn’t had a lot of formal executive coaching really. The success that I’d had up to that point I think is just a by-product of my personality. I think I just have a naturally amiable personality. So I hadn’t had much formal training. And it was a huge confidence booster. After I came out of that yearlong program where there were experts, and they’re talking about conflict management, and how to build a team, and how to resolve differences productively, and all these things, at the end of the program I remember thinking I think I can do this. I think I’ve got the skills now that I can do this. I don’t know if he realized at the time how important that would be to me later on. But that was really pivotal.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I just wanted to ask you since you sketched this scenario that you found really daunting of all of this cast of characters as you called them earlier. After going through the Faculty Leadership Academy what did you think when you thought about that kind of scenario? How did you tell yourself, “Yeah, I can do that”? What kind of skills did you develop that would now let you go into those faculty meetings and handle those spirited debates amongst these very forceful characters?
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
A couple things. One of the things that I think I learned was there are times, like situational leadership. There are times when it’s perfectly OK to say, “OK, I’m going to call the question, and this is my decision to make. And so I’ll make a decision. And you certainly don’t have to agree with it but it’s my decision to make.” I think prior to that time I constantly struggled. Oh, I have to get a consensus, and if I don’t have a consensus it’s just a failure. So I learned that. But the other thing I think I learned was really just to be a lot less -- don’t take things nearly as personally. Be a little more thick-skinned. There’s a problem, but it’s not necessarily my problem, it’s a problem to be solved. And we might find a solution that wasn’t my thought initially but it may still be a good solution, and not everybody has to agree on it. And just things like that. Like I said, I think up to that point again by-product of my personality, I think I have an amiable agreeable personality. And I really didn’t like the feeling when somebody was mad at me and upset with me. And while I still don’t like it, I’ve come to realize there’s just no way to avoid that. That’s going to happen. And I work with a lot of good people. And they’re going to get over it. They’re good enough people where they’ll go home and tell their partner how rotten I am, but they’ll come back in the next day, and then we’ll go on. So I think I’ve just learned to not let those things -- I don’t take them to heart nearly as much. You got to allow people to react and not feel like oh, I’m going to throw myself off a cliff because they’re angry with me today. They’ll get over it. I get angry with people too.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So you said that you continued a vision that had been sketched by Dr. Gray and then here acting as your mentor he began to put you in a position where you could really have the leadership skills to help bring that into being. So tell me how that began to take shape.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
I think it really began to take shape. When Dr. Gray retired and I was selected as chair, I think I mentioned to you I felt we’ve always had an extremely robust and strong program for what in lab animal medicine is known as large animal, so from rabbits on up. But not as interactive a role with the rodents. And so that was really on my mind when I became chair. I wouldn’t say that we necessarily developed anything that innovative or new, but what we did was extend what we were already doing much more fully into the rodent area. And the way that we started to do that is we hired some more vets, so our veterinarians grew. I’ll have to go back and look and see. But I think we had about six veterinarians. We now have 10. And as we grew we reorganized the department to have a section that was specifically focused on rodent clinical care. So we have now a new section that didn’t exist before 2006 called Compliance and Rodent Clinical Care. And what that section focuses on is veterinary medical care and research support and training for rodents.
Recommended Citation
Tinkey, Peggy T. DVM and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 10: Preparing to Take on Leadership of the Department" (2016). Interview Chapters. 1230.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1230
Conditions Governing Access
Open
