Delegation.

[rivka]

Yesterday's poll sparked some great discussion - my thanks to everyone who contributed.

Here's what prompted the poll. Tuesday is lab meeting day, and yesterday was our first lab meeting since everyone started taking off for holiday travel. At the meeting, I had this conversation:

rivka: "We are way behind with follow-up visits right now, so let's really make a push to get those scheduled."
RA #1: "I just have one subject tomorrow, so I can make calls all afternoon."
rivka: [looking from RA#1 to RA#2] "Please make sure that you split the calls up so that one person isn't doing all of them."
RA#1: "We always do."
rivka: [does not volunteer to make any calls herself.]

See, I hate making business phone calls. Hate it. Always have. If phone calls are on my to-do list, everything else happens first - generally including sizable amounts of procrastination. When I became a Research Supervisor, with two RAs and a grad student under me, I decided that I would not be making any more routine phone calls. I don't call to remind subjects of their appointments. I don't call to schedule follow-ups. I don't call to find out whether the clinic will be closed for Martin Luther King Day. I make the calls that need to be made by me - to the Institutional Review Board, to federal regulators, to our boss when there's news she isn't going to like, to anyone who needs to be handled with diplomacy. But I am not willing to make the routine calls. I made plenty of them when I was a grad student and a RA and a research coordinator. My RAs make them now.

Does this make me a bad supervisor? I don't think it does. My RAs don't seem to mind making phone calls - I mean, if RA#1 can cheerfully volunteer to make them all afternoon, then obviously she doesn't feel the same way that I do. I do unpleasant stuff I don't ask them to do - for example, I can't count the number of times I've said something along the lines of, "Well, if he tries to give you a hard time about it, just refer him to me. You're an RA - you're not responsible for our policies." I'm willing to have them schedule all the problem-child subjects on my shifts.

I'm just not willing to make the phone calls.

Comments

[lietya.livejournal.com]

I don't think it does, because back when your skill set didn't much exceed the making of those calls, you made them (albeit unhappily). Now that your skills are more greatly needed elsewhere, you delegate the calls, to people who do *not* suffer as you did with them. That's both fair and justifiable.

I also don't have a problem with scut work that's widely understood to be the province of the "lowest person on the totem pole," because everybody does their stint at it, then moves up the heirarchy and re-assigns it to those below (who know that one day they themselves will graduate beyond it). RAs make those phone calls, because that's part of the understood nature of the job and the job *level.* You did when you were one; now you get to make them do it. Such is life.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

I also don't have a problem with scut work that's widely understood to be the province of the "lowest person on the totem pole," because everybody does their stint at it, then moves up the heirarchy and re-assigns it to those below (who know that one day they themselves will graduate beyond it).

It ain't necessarily so. Some get the "secretarial stain" (a phrase stolen from an old Dilbert strip) attached to their CV and are never allowed to rise above it. Then there are class issues, etc.