Well, the lab saga has ended. The Love and Logic bit did work, and the subject in question opted for the consequence of poor behavior and poor choice rather than taking responsibility for the conflict that was tearing the project apart. It started out innocently enough; I had a series of conversations with the subject, indicating that for her to continue working in the lab, that she was going to have to have a direct conversation with the person she was having problems with and find a solution to the communication problems she felt were compromising her ability to work. I offered to be there for the conversation as a facilitator, but that I would not “fix” the problem; I hired the subject and her colleague (“nemesis”, for the purposes of this post) with whom she had the conflict as professionals, and expected them to behave that way. The subject was really angry with me, and when we ended our discussion, I anticipated her resignation, with came within hours, and was, in fact, a relief. When you realize you have someone on a team who is not willing to step up and take responsibility for something that is a problem for them or have a tough conversation with someone else, it is best for that individual to leave- managing them and limiting the damage they cause is a huge undertaking.

In any event, she tendered her resignation, and I accepted it. I had told her in our conversations, and reiterated in my response to her, that I wished her luck, and that although her resignation would limit the scope of the things upon which I could reccomend her (i.e. Not much good to say on the “works well with others” questions), I would be glad to support her for other endavors based on her technical skill, which is considerable, and her intellectual capacity. In the bak of my mind, I knew there was another shoe waiting to drop…

So, I informed the rest of the lab and the study staff that the subject had resigned for personal reasons and invited everyone to express their appreciation for her hard work. This email generated a contact from nemesis to the subject, which was actually gracious and professional.

The subject, of course, fired of perhaps the most poisonous, immature and unprofessional email I have ever seen at nemesis, spewing all sorts of venom and personal insults. It was not to believed. I know the content because the subject had the incredibly poor judgment to copy me and, in fact, to include me in her rant and blame me for her departure from the lab and for her own problems with communication. The email belied a level of poor judgement and immaturity that was really shocking to me; I know we have all sent things in anger, but I think we’ve all learned the lesson that once you hit “send”, there’s no taking it back.

Needless to say, the letter of recommendation offer has been quietly recinded, and the next day, the subject was releived of her keys, her credentials, and issued her last paycheck. I’ve regrouped with my remaining team, and the lessons learned by all of us are notable.

Science is hard enough to do without letting emotions, pride, and unspoken misunderstandings ruin an otherwise great opportuntiy.  I only hope that the lesson that should have been learned for this mess by the subject, never email when emotional, was taken to heart.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a great team working in my lab and at my recruitment site right now, but it’s the first time I’ve had a team comprised only of young women who collectively represent 3 ethnic groups, 4 countries, and 3 languages.  Typically, I have balance with nearly equal numbers of men and women in the lab, although given that we are recruiting pregnant Latinas and Caucasians from OB clinics, front-line study staff pretty much have to be females.  Things are going well, but the interpersonal issues that keep arising in this group and the time it takes them, often with some help from me, to resolve them, is taxing.

I am so proud of my current team, but I am feeling the crunch of negotiating many more interpersonal conflicts than I typically have with my male/female teams, and I’m learning even more patience than I’ve needed before as a PI and a parent.   I’m stunned at the frequency of misunderstanding and miscommunication in my current group, and equally stunned by how carefully and thoughtfully they work to deal with the conflict.  It’s great to see, but as a PI with an upcoming progess report looming who is paying the team to recruit X number of women and follow them until 6 weeks postpartum,  the amount of time and energy being put into dealing with these conflicts is worrisome and costly.  For example, the team requested that we devote 30 minutes of our last lab meeting to issues of communication, including yet another lab SOP on how to communictate with whom when. The SOP is  very helpful, admittedly, and written with no prompting from me by my lab manager and my studdy coordinator, who rock, but given that we essentially did the same thing in our previous lab meeting a couple of weeks ago (I wrote the SOP that time), from my standpoint, we need to move on from thiss topic and get back to what NIH is paying us to do.

On the other hand, the guilt I feel about thinking about the inefficiency of the amount ot time these issues are taking is impressive.  Part of my job as a woman scientist is to mentor students, male, female, green, white, beige, or argyle, for that matter, and part of the process is fostering good communication and the problem-solving  skills that my team is developing.  They are really doing a great job, and they are really supporting each other well and asking for my help only when they cannot work it out, which has been more frequent lately, but also very appropriate.  They are bright young women, and I am proud to have the chance to help them develop the skills they already have to get even better at working as a team and working to repect different modes of cummunication that have a cultural basis.

I wonder if this is a generation gap?  When I was training, we’d never have spent lab or PI time on stuff like this-  we were there to suck it up and do the job, dammit.  I had plenty of conflicts with labmates, but the PI was never brought in, and we soldiered through in spite of them.  I distinctly remember being so upset one evening that I was crying while weighing newborn rat pups for a study-  the tears kept falling in the weigh dish and I had to stop and wipe them out to avoid having them affect the weights.  It would have been great to feel like I could talk to anybody about the degree of the problems, but it was just not a possibility for me at that time, given that I worked for a man who had no qualms commenting on whether it was "that time of the month" for me or not.  Nice.

So, I’m really pretty glad that my team of really smart, awesome young women feel okay talking about this stuff and feel comfortable talking to me about it.  This is part of their (and my) development.  As a PI and a Parent, sometimes it’s just as important to leave behind "the way it was when I was a kid/a postdoc/a student" in favor of the way it should be.  The work *is* getting done, and by people who have found ways to work together respectfully.  I need to lighten up and remember that this stuff is, in fact, nearly as important to me as the science in the long run;  hopefully when these ladies are PIs or Docs, they won’t have the same baggage I’m still working to leave behind.