ep 59 - What Faculty Who Advance in Four Years Do Differently
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to the Academic Medicine Strategy podcast. Today we're gonna talk about what faculty who advance in four years do differently. Now, associate professor in four years instead of seven, it happens. Not all the time, but frequently enough that the pattern is worth studying
When you look at the people who compress their promotion timeline, the differentiating factor is almost never talent or effort. It is strategy. They didn't work more hours, although sometimes they did, but most of the time they did things differently. You can't work seven years' worth of hours in four.
It's just not possible. We work too much to do it. I gave a grand rounds this morning at a graduation talk, and I asked people, "How many people in the room work less than 60 hours a week?" Not one hand went up. Medical students, residents, faculty, PAs, staff people, no one raised their hand. We are working hard.
You cannot put seven years into four. But every faculty member makes choices about where they put their energy, and a lot of [00:01:00] times it's in clinical work. It makes sense. That's what we do. That's what we signed up for. But sometimes it's the outside obligations. It's the committee. It's the paper we write.
It's the student we mentor. It may be the curriculum that we work on or the QI project that we love. All those things are important. I work with a fantastic person named Julie, whose entire work was amazing. She was working on how to make our ORs more environmental and reduce the waste. Any of those things, fantastic, but most of it, it's not paid for during your normal day.
It doesn't come out of your 9:00 to 5:00 for many of us, unless you have some administrative time and you keep it. So that's the other thing that happens a lot, is that we quickly give away that time. Everybody admitted today that they do that, and it is one of the first things I work with people on when we talk about time management and how to get your goals into your workday.
Now, the faculty member who advances quickly understands something many of us don't, is that not all activity is equal. Some build towards promotion while others just take time. [00:02:00] There are service requirements for all of us. You do things because your chair asked you to, or you're interested in them, or you know that it's gonna help you move forward.
But there's a difference between I'm gonna do this educuma- education committee knowing that I'm not in education track, but I love this, or I'm gonna do an education committee 'cause I'm on the education track, and this gets me promoted. So you understanding that is the first step, and the second is to pick the things that you love doing that get you promoted.
Now, the difference between a four-year trajectory and a seven one is often not the quality of the work. We are smart, talented people. It's often the proportion of time spent on work that compounds. So there's national data from the AAMC that supports this. Clinician educators who advance to associate professor on accelerated timelines consistently report higher proportion of protected time spent on focused scholarship than their peers on standard timelines I wanna just be clear.
You take the time that's already been given to you, and you work on the things to get you promoted, whether that is working on a curriculum 'cause you're in [00:03:00] education, whether that's writing the paper about the curriculum, which absolutely will help you, or writing the scholarship, or sitting and writing your grant, or whatever your scholarship is about.
Those are the key things. In a study of mentor networks among NIH career development awardees, the people at the top of their career in terms of research found that successful mid-career investigators built coherent research programs by deliberately declining peripheral commitments, by saying no to things that didn't reinforce the work they were doing, and a strategic skill that's rarely taught.
Now, nobody's chair wants you to say no to everything, and those people we worry are maybe not strategic, but also oftentimes those are the people getting the grant. But I will tell you, you don't have to say no to everything. You have to be strategic. Will this help me with leadership? Does it help with my clinical niche?
There's reasons to say yes to a lot of things that aren't necessarily just your research niche, but you have to be very selective, and you have to be very clear that you don't have time to maybe do the baby sho- bridal shower, the, put the names on the doors [00:04:00] for Christmas, unless that's the thing that you love, and then that's your thing, and you say no to something else that doesn't fit in your niche Now promotion committees evaluate readiness.
The faculty member who advances quickly presents as someone who's become someone in their field, whether that's regional or national or emerging nationally, this is how you move forward, is you have one niche, it's clear to everyone, and that's because the name of that niche is in everything. It's in the title of your paper, it's in the presentation you do, it's in the committees you're on.
It's clear. I will tell you, at the beginning of my career, I wasn't clear. I look back on my own trajectory, and the decision that made the most difference for me was not a big strategic moment. It was learning to say no to work that didn't compound. So a request that felt collegial but was actually just available, a collaboration that was interesting but not really in line with what I was building.
Every yes to the wrong thing was a no to the right one, and I only clearly understood that in hindsight. I was three or four years out. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't on the short track to actually get promoted, and it's [00:05:00] because my stuff was all over the place. I didn't have my word or my niche until I was about three years in, and that's the gap that career- structured career development is designed to close.
So individual faculty rarely arrive with this understanding on their own. We don't teach this in medical school. But they do develop it over time. Unfortunately, for some of us, it was too much time. But you can have mentors, and hopefully you're that mentor, who's telling somebody that in order to accelerate their career, they need to be focused and have a story.
And the challenge is doing it well for every faculty member. That requires dedicated time and capacity. It makes it hard for a chair or promotion committee to actually have enough time to do that for everyone. Productivity does not equal hours worked. Supporting faculty in the right way, not just more work, is what advances careers and strengthens departments, and that is what my group, the Academic Medicine Strategy Group, is here to help with.
So here's what I want you to do this week. Do a quick audit of your last 30 days. List everything you worked on and then mark one. Does this directly build my [00:06:00] promotion case or is it something else? Then identify one primary research or academic focus. This is your niche. One word, one phrase. You should be able to tell me this in literally no more than a phrase.
And it's a line that you're building. For me, it was sleep. Sleep apnea, sleep medicine, sleep. Somebody walked into the room and they said, "I wanna work with you, and let's do something on allergic rhinitis." I said, "Great, let's look at the impact of sleep-disordered breathing on allergic rhinitis or vice versa."
However you wanna look at it, but that's the kind of things we did. And then if you're not in your first year, I would guess most of you have done lots of yeses to things that you may not find are aligning, especially if you're in mid-career. This is very common if you're in your later time of your career.
I'll try and nicely not to say I'm senior, but it- where I am. There's almost certainly something you could say no to, something you don't enjoy, something that's not moving you forward. And make sure that you're taking that no to turn and say yes to something else that matters. It could be a committee, a collaboration, a request that sounded good but doesn't compound.
Practice the graceful decline. [00:07:00] But be clear. It's not that I can't. If you say, "I can't do something," people will come up for all the reasons that you can. It's that I won't be able to do that. I won't be able to fit that in my schedule. I am in a season of no. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that because I'm able to-- I'm focusing on my grant for the next six months.
Find and practice a graceful decline. And then ask yourself, "If I keep doing exactly what I'm doing, will my CV look like I want it to in three years?" If that answer doesn't match your promotion goals, then something needs to change. Now, if you need help, our Faculty Excellence and Retention Program is strategic framework for departments, and we would love to talk to you about how we could support you.
In the meantime, if this is useful for you or anybody you know, please pass this along and share it. And please keep coming back and subscribe. I look forward to talking to you next week
