Title
Becoming Section Chief
Files
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Identifier
EscalanteC_02_20140514_SegCode_Clip03
Publication Date
5-14-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Just for the record, who was the section chief prior to you?
Carmen Escalante, MD
Ed Rubenstein.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Okay, yeah. I remember you mentioned him last time.
Carmen Escalante, MD
So there was a decision made that he would no longer be section chief, and I was asked to be section chief.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Why do you think they asked you? What do you think you could bring to that?
Carmen Escalante, MD
Well, I think I was thought of as probably the most capable of the group. There were issues, and I brought these issues forward to superiors that things were not good. Other faculty had come to me and said, “You know, we need to do something or I’m going to leave too.” You know, people were very unhappy. There was no sense of fairness at the time, or there were some ethical issues. And we were a very small group and it was a difficult time. It was a very difficult time. It was a very difficult time for me. I even contemplated leaving and going somewhere else. No one likes to come to work when there’s a lot of stress and anxiety and morale issues, and so I made a decision and talked with my supervisor. And, again, I need to think about whether we need to hold some of this back.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Sure. Yeah, and that’s fine. [unclear].
Carmen Escalante, MD
And he spoke with the next level. So initially I was made section chief and he was left in the section, which created a lot of problems for the next year. I mean, they left him in for a year. He was not happy. He was not happy with me being section chief and him not. There was a lot of animosity there. It was very difficult. Here I had never been in a leadership position.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
I know, I was going to—
Carmen Escalante, MD
I was junior. I had a section chief that was no longer section chief in the group. It was every day there was an issue. He created issue after issue after issue. And by the end of that year, I said to my superior, “I cannot stay any longer if he continues to be in our group. You know, it’s just too difficult.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Can I ask you, during that time, I mean now looking back, what do you feel you learned about leadership from that period?
Carmen Escalante, MD
I learned a lot about conflict. I probably wasn’t the best at that time because I had—you know, back then we didn’t have training in leadership like they do now. Now, when I was made department chair, we went to a yearlong leadership training. I could have used that back then. I had no real mentor that I could go to and confide in and say, “Hey, this is going on.”
I had a thorn in my side, so to speak, from day one, creating all kind of, you know, episodes you can imagine on a regular basis. He did not want me to be in leadership. He did not want it to be smooth. He did not want the group to succeed. He even told me, “You’ll never succeed.” All the group, everything he created he thought would just basically go away and that I would never be successful, and he made this public to whoever would listen to him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
To what degree was your gender a factor in this, do you think?
Carmen Escalante, MD
Oh, I think it probably was. I think he had recruited me, and we were predominantly female faculty in that group, and he felt that he could browbeat me and that I would eventually leave, and I think his goal was to make sure I didn’t succeed and the group didn’t succeed, to basically, I think, vindicate him from his demotion. And so—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Pretty brutal to go to work with that every day.
Carmen Escalante, MD
Yes. And I did this for a year. He was in our group, continued for a year, so we had reverse—he had been my supervisor. Now I was his supervisor. And, finally, after a year of doing this, I went to my supervisor and said, “You know, something needs to be done. This is not a good place for any of us, and I’m not going to deal with this any longer.” And so they moved him. They moved him to anesthesia to do pre-ops, which affected us because we were doing pre-ops. But the good thing is he didn’t like to work, so he wasn’t seeing that many patients. I said, “He didn’t like patient care.” He’s a very bright man, very, very bright man. Unfortunately, his talents—he didn’t use his talents in the right way.
So he was moved, and it helped our group a lot just getting him out of the section, although it didn’t solve the issue completely, because he still would try to stir things up while I was there. But eventually after several years, I think he figured out that no one was listening to him anymore, both from senior management as well as from our group, and his credibility over time just continued to plummet. But, you know, it created a lot of problems, and you couldn’t focus on growing the group because you had to deal with issues from him all the time. And he had a lawyer, and, you know, that was another issue for the institution.
So, you know, it was a constant, constant problem, constant hostilities, stress, anxieties, and it was difficult to become a leader, not only a new leader, but to become a leader when you had this going on at the same time. But it made me stronger, I think. It’s not something I’d ever want to go through again. I think there is a lot easier ways to learn leadership than being thrown into such a bad situation, but, you know, I survived.
Recommended Citation
Escalante, Carmen MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Becoming Section Chief" (2014). Race, Gender, & Work @ The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: Triumphs of Houston’s Leading Hospital. 13.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_racegenderwork/13
