Chapter 11: The First Several Years of the Faculty Development Initiative
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Description
Ms. Yadiny fills in details about the evolution of the Department of Faculty Development. She explains why Margaret Kripke, the VP of Academic Affairs in 1999, supported a leadership development initiative. Ms. Yadiny then talks about her activities as Director of Faculty Development between 1999 and 2001, when the first formal course of the Faculty Leadership Academy was put together by a collaborative committee. Ms. Yadiny explains that in 2001, academic medicine trailed the corporate world by about 15 years in understanding leadership. She explains why leadership is so important and notes that MD Anderson had no succession planning and no real culture of leadership. She explains the success of the Leadership Academy and discusses the coaching sessions that are provided to participants and new leaders.
Identifier
YadinyJA_02_20160301_C11
Publication Date
3-1-2016
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 University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; Building/Transforming the Institution; Growth and/or Change; Education; MD Anderson Culture; Working Environment; The Professional at Work; Collaborations; Leadership; Mentoring
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
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wanted to go and pick up some details, just to make sure we have everything kind of nailed down from last time, because you were talking about that first retreat and the challenges of that period of time, when Margaret Kripke and Steve Tomasovic and others, were kind of putting their heads around how do we demonstrate that having a faculty development initiative here really is going to gain traction, is going to be worth something. So, you came in 1999 and there was, you said in 2001, was the decision to set up that team, which was really okay, this is the last ditch effort.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So I’m kind of wondering, what happened between 1999 and 2001? What was tried, where did the—you know, how did everybody get to the point where they said okay, now we’ve got to do it one last time, and what was in place to make that happen?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Well, Margaret Kripke was in as chief academic officer, and she was sending women, every year, to the Executive Leadership and Academic Medicine program, ELAM, so she still had her eye on the ball in terms of leadership development. She felt it was very needed, and Margaret was the one dealing with chairs and division heads, and seeing that there was a need for them to have more exposure to leadership development, that they weren’t performing. They were dumping so many things on her and coming to her with dysfunction in their departments or conflict in their departments, and asking her to fix it, and she said I can’t fix all my time fixing these problems in these departments, these leaders aren’t really leading the way they need to. So that was what spurred her on. Then she saw, from ’99 to 2001, we introduced Scientific Excellence. Actually, Shine Chang came up with that before I even got here and it was very popular. We did four a year, we would bring in three scientists, three faculty. We had things like how to find a mentor and work with a mentor.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So were these lectures then?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Yeah, they were these panel discussions up there, and we had beautiful posters around them, and we filled Hickey Auditorium. People were just hungry for this.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And I’m sorry, the name of that was leadership and excellence?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
No, it was called Scientific Excellence.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Scientific Excellence.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Scientific Excellence, and it was very popular. We would pick three great faculty and they’d come in on, you know, developing successful work habits, how to be successful in research science; all those kinds of things that they really needed to know, we did a number of those and they were packed, absolutely packed. So whatever we did worked.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And how big is Hickey Auditorium, just to get a sense.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Well it’s 250, 280.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, okay. I’ve always been struck, it’s amazing, people are so busy, and if they take time out of their day to go to something, it’s—
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Yeah, it’s important to them.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Absolutely.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
It was easier to get big audiences then, they didn’t have the pressures they have now. It’s harder to get big audiences at noon. It’s hard to get clinicians out of the clinic at noon. Anyway, it worked really well, and we did other things. We did some grant-writing, we did career development workshops. We did a whole bunch of stuff that was successful, people came to, and the evaluations were phenomenal.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, what was your particular area of activity during this time?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
I was planning and finding consultants and speakers, and designing the programs and putting them on, and also doing the focus groups and the interviews with faculty. Data gathering.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what was coming out of those conversations that you had with people at that time?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
It certainly was clear that the early career faculty were not getting the mentoring they needed, they weren’t getting help in figuring out how to have successful careers in science, that the leaders felt under-prepared to do their jobs. They weren’t really sure that there was something they should learn, but they were finding the burden of being a chair rather significant and left alone to do it. So they didn’t have really, you know, groups of chairs that they met with, or there was nothing being invested in them as leaders. So there was a lot of confusion around that. There was just a lot of, this is not a college campus, so there weren’t workshops around how to resolve conflict, for faculty. There were workshops for staff that were starting, but the faculty didn’t want to go to those. They wanted to go to workshops where people were talking about their milieu, the milieu they worked in, and had an understanding and sensitivity to their needs. So that’s what we did, is we focused solely on faculty and paid attention to them, and took them programs that they loved. Now we have faculty who say, you know, now I’m a full professor, because of what I got out of your programs. This was for seven or eight years, or nine years, they were able to come to these programs and listen to senior faculty talk about how they got to be successful. We put in a mentoring program in 2006. We did a lot of things like that, that were essential for faculty to have in order to be successful in their careers.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So in 2001, and the decision to create this executive team to basically plan a retreat or some big event, what were those conversations like, you know this last ditch effort. How did you end up coming up with the idea to do this retreat and the program that came from it?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
That’s an interesting question. First of all, Margaret put together the advisory committee. I imagine she did it with the help of Steve Tomasovic. The advisory committee all had different expertise that they were bringing to the table. I think I said Kathleen Sazama was on it, and she had done ELAM. She came and she was a very dominant force, I have to say, and good at what she had to say. She spoke about the need to have this self-awareness piece at the beginning. I had never put together a leadership development program, so I didn’t know what would be in there. So that was really important, that we have self-development, we have some assessments and so on. Jim Dorn was there, who was vice president of HR. He had had some experience with leadership development, so he put in his ideas about what some of the curriculum should be. Harry Gibbs, who was the Chief Diversity Officer, he came in and he had his ideas around how to address issues of diversity in an institution. Steve Tomasovic had been a chair and he was senior vice president at that point, or vice president, for Academic Affairs. He had his ideas. Everybody brought in something. Bill Klein was there, he was a chair, he had his ideas. Janet Bruner, she had been a chair for quite some time, I guess in 2001, she was a new chair, but a very respected faculty member, and she had—it was just, you know, all of us sitting around talking and participating and sharing, what is it that leaders need to be able to do.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What did you learn from those conversations? I mean, you said you’d never done this before, so what emerged for you as big lessons in this whole team process?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Well first of all, the collective wisdom of the group was phenomenal. I never could have done it on my own, I don’t think. I couldn’t have, and come up with this kind of program. Leadership development itself, we were able to look at other programs and see what they were doing, get an idea of what should be involved. It was just a learning process of what is it you do that really helps leaders lead. And the experience of having a program that didn’t work, Excellence in Leadership, was really on the minds of people, so we knew what we didn’t want, which was helpful. I think a lot of people, a lot of institutions went in the direction we had gone. Also maybe learned from some of our mistakes, because I did a fair bit of presenting at the AAMC, and the group on faculty affairs and so on, on our leadership programs, and talked to a lot of people about what we were doing. So the interactivity, the assessments, the 360 feedback, all of this you find now pretty much, in leadership programs, but it was all new to me. So it was a collaborative effort, it was truly a collaborative effort, and it was the wisdom of everybody in the group, that played into the design of the program itself.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, when did the Sperling Group come in? Was that during this period?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Yeah. They came in towards the—once we had an idea of what we wanted the program to do, and I may have mentioned that when we went to the division heads and said what do you want from this program, all they had, all they said was we don’t want it to be a waste of time. We want it to be worth the time. If you want us to send our clinical faculty to something like this, it better be worth the time. That was it. We didn’t have a list of outcomes. Margaret did. She wanted leaders who were able to deal with conflict in their areas. She didn’t want to have to have everything land on her desk so she had to fix it for people.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well it kind of speaks to a not very sophisticated understanding of what’s involved in leadership, at least you know. I mean, I’m not saying that these division heads weren’t sophisticated people, but it’s like the lingo wasn’t there, you know, to say oh, this is what leadership comprehends.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Right, right, because in 2001, we’re talking 15 years ago now, academic medicine was 15 or 20 years behind the corporate sector in understanding leadership development and how to actually develop leaders. Even now, consultants who have come in have said to me, we’re still 10 or 15 years behind the curve, because the corporate sector has found out we’re in trouble. We don’t have enough trained leaders, baby boomers are retiring out of here a mile a minute. We have younger people coming along, we have no succession plans. We had no succession plans in 2001, and we still don’t totally have succession plans, but we have a better idea about what’s involved. So, the Leadership Academy has allowed higher level leaders and division heads to actually spot potential leaders and they’ve invested in them in various ways. So there’s much more growth of leaders within MD Anderson, that was ever going on then. So no, there was no culture of leadership development at all, at all, and it was—the model was, if you’re a really great physician you can do this, you can handle this, you know. If you’re a good researcher, you’re a smart person, usually a guy, if you’re a smart guy you can figure this out, you’ll be able to handle it. But there wasn’t—then the people found out they couldn’t handle it. So Margaret said, within three years of the program running, she said, “I know it’s working because I don’t have all these problems dropping on my desk anymore.” That was huge, and the fact that the faculty were nominating other leaders to come immediately, that was huge too.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
I know we have changed the culture of MD Anderson, in that it’s totally receptive now, to leadership development. Leaders get into positions and realize, there’s a lot I need to learn here, this is not just intuitive. There are a lot of mistakes I’m going to make if I don’t understand some of these things. So it’s been incredibly successful that way.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now was it first called the Leadership Academy, or did it come to be called that?
Janis Apted Yadiny:
No, it was called the Faculty Leadership Academy from the get-go.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
From the very beginning. And so there was that retreat that was sort of the first big thing, and then afterwards, monthly sessions.
Janis Apted Yadiny:
Monthly sessions, full day monthly sessions, one a month, and that went on for eight months. So it has changed along the way. It’s gone seven months sometimes. Then, we’ve taken pieces out, we’ve put pieces back, other pieces in. It averages around 56 hours of curriculum, and then now, since 2008… No, I guess since about 2011, when we were doing the program, we budgeted in three hours of coaching for every new chair, every chair who’s in the program, every person who’s in the program. But we had already started, in 2008, to offer eight hours of executive coaching to all new chairs, and then I think I mentioned to you, Ethan has expanded that considerably and it’s been very popular. So, the culture of MD Anderson, the acceptance of leadership development is total and it wasn’t at all then, there was no culture of leadership development.
Recommended Citation
Yadiny, Janis A. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 11: The First Several Years of the Faculty Development Initiative" (2016). Interview Chapters. 254.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/254
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