In the six months since President Donald Trump started his second term, American scientists have been thrust into a world of uncertainty.
Federal agencies have canceled thousands of university scientists’ research grants. Other researchers have federal grant applications in limbo, making it difficult to plan any future work. And Trump’s proposals to dramatically reduce federal spending on scientific research have left universities across the country unsure what their research budgets will look like in the coming years.
It all has implications for scientists’ careers, the pace of scientific discovery and the country’s economy. But in this moment of turmoil, the United States’ scientific enterprise needs effective leaders more than ever, says Jen Heemstra, chair of the chemistry department at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the forthcoming book, Labwork to Leadership: A Concise Guide to Thriving in the Science Job You Weren’t Trained For (Harvard University Press).
“As leaders, we often don’t have the answers people are looking for, but there’s always something we can do,” she said. “There’s often some information we can provide. We can also equip all of the individuals we lead with the skills to navigate uncertainty and challenges for themselves.”
Jen Heemstra
While many scientists may not think of themselves as leaders, Heemstra has developed a framework that allows any scientist—whether they’re a department chair, head of a lab or graduate student—to lead themselves and others through conflict and uncertainty.
Inside Higher Ed interviewed Heemstra about how academic scientists across all ranks can use her leadership tips to navigate a rapidly changing federal research environment.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q. Where do leadership skills come into play in academic science settings and what’s holding so many scientists back from reaching their potential as leaders?
A. When we talk about leadership roles in academia, often people think of a department chair, dean, provost, president or chancellor as leaders. But in the sciences, anyone who is a faculty member with a research lab is a leader because you’re leading a group of students, postdocs or staff as they do research. All of these jobs require leadership skills such as conflict resolution, giving and receiving feedback, helping people cope with failure, casting a big vision and communicating effectively about policies.
All of those things are leadership tasks, but few of us get adequately trained on how to be leaders. While some people become acutely aware of that and seek to do something about it, others just choose to say, “This isn’t part of my job.” I’ll often hear from a grad student in a lab who says they’re being bullied by someone else in the lab, but when they go to their research adviser or principal investigator about it, they’ll say “That’s just a personal situation. It’s not my job to deal with that. You go deal with it.”
Faculty members need to feel ownership of those situations and empowered by the leadership skills they need to approach it. That’s something that can create a better culture, healthier academia for students and postdocs. And if faculty can take all of their leadership skills and pass those on to the students and postdocs in their lab right now, it can break the cycle and equip young scientists who end up in leadership roles in academia, industry or government with the leadership skills they need.
Q. What are some of the consequences for science when faculty don’t have the leadership skills to address tough situations?
A. Everyone suffers when faculty leading research labs don’t really embrace leadership skills.
The faculty members themselves suffer because a lot of those skills are also about leading ourselves well. How we set our own goals that we care about, how we manage our time and how we cope with failure are all important to our own efficiency and happiness. Without good leadership, the members of the lab also suffer because they don’t have as positive of a lab culture if their adviser can’t communicate effectively, navigate conflict or cast a vision for where the lab should go.
The research itself also suffers because if you don’t have effective leadership, you end up not doing research as effectively as you could. People might not be as motivated, or you may not have strong alignment between your goals and where people are spending their time. You might be missing important policies that could help people work together better, work more safely or work more effectively.
Q. How have the Trump administration’s policies changed the calculus for scientists in traditional leadership roles trying to navigate uncertainty?
A. Leadership skills are more important than ever right now. When everything’s running along fairly smoothly, you don’t need a ton of intervention to help it just keep working well. But we are in really turbulent times, and navigating turbulence requires constant course correction. We need people who can strategize, communicate and lead with empathy. We need people who can have difficult conversations and advocate.
As a department chair, I’m actively reorienting what I consider to be success. In good times, success as a department chair might look like growing your faculty members, growing your department’s external funding, starting a new educational initiative or reforming your undergraduate curriculum. But in times like this, a lot of those things might just not be possible, especially the ones that are tied to financial need. If we just keep holding on to those same definitions and metrics of success, we’re going to get demoralized and frustrated really quickly.
Success now is helping doing things that are positive, but also possible within this context.
While a lot of leaders signed up thinking that they were going to be building things instead of putting out metaphorical fires, that work is still really impactful. If nobody is there to do it, or someone is there who is not going to do it, that will hurt people’s lives. By showing up and doing your best to apply your leadership skills to try to help people cope with the difficult things they’re facing—even if it doesn’t have a big, flashy metric tied to it—it has a tremendous impact on the people we lead.
Q. How has the Trump administration’s approach to science policy changed the leadership calculus on an individual level?
A. For every individual out there, there are also some self-leadership skills that are more important than ever right now. One of those is managing motivation. How do you motivate yourself to go to work every day when you feel like there is this existential threat to your very profession and your ability to keep doing what you’re doing? How do you cope with what’s happening? How do you think about your goals?
If all of my goals right now are tied up in achieving a certain level of funding, having a certain group size or publishing a certain number of papers, then I don’t know how I would get myself out of bed in the morning. But the ability to think more broadly about goals, such as having an impact on society, or mentoring and training the next generation of research leaders, those are goals that I can hold on to and say, “Okay, I can keep finding ways to do that even if things get really difficult on the science funding landscape.”
But if the goals that are really important to you are the ones that you’re no longer going to be able to do from your current job, then that’s where knowing that and leading yourself may push you to start looking at different career paths or consider doing your job in another location right now. Having that self-awareness of what’s really, really important to you is going to be more important than ever.
Q. What’s your advice for young scientists, who are worried Trump’s policies may derail their early career plans, to navigate this moment?
A. They need to focus on learning how to navigate uncertainty well.
Coping with uncertainty does not mean that you are agreeing that what is happening is okay, or that you’re giving up and not fighting. It’s actually the opposite. By learning how to strategically navigate uncertainty, take care of—and lead—ourselves as well as possible through it, you’re actually preserving your strength, which will allow you to be as effective as possible in standing up for what’s important to science.
There’s a set of three principles that can help you do this. The first is validating that what you’re feeling is real. It’s OK to feel angry, frustrated or scared. The second is thinking about how you’ve overcome adversity in the past. The third is to think about what level of control you have over things. If it’s in your domain of control, then just do it, whether that’s applying for more jobs, learning about jobs in other locations or looking for new funding mechanisms for your research.
For things that you may have less control over, think about a backup plan for the worst case scenario. But for the most part, don’t give too much energy to things you can’t control and miss out on being able to do things that could actually make the situation better.
