If you wish your relationship with your supervisor could be just a little bit easier, a little bit more supportive, then this is the perfect episode for you. We are going to think about how you can manage your supervisor in ways that are entirely under your control. And if you're an academic rather than a PhD student, all of these tips can apply to your head of research group, your head of school, vice chancellor, or whoever too.
Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This is series two, episode three, and we are going to be thinking about managing your supervisor or boss. Now, often when I do these, I'm thinking about my perspective as a coach. But really in this episode, I'm going to be drawing a lot of my experience of being a supervisor. I supervised a bunch of PhD students through to successful completion. Did I do everything right? Probably not. Did I learn an enormous amount from it? Absolutely yes, and they are all wonderful people and off doing wonderful things now. And one of the things when I reflect back on that time that really strikes me is how well some of them developed the skills of managing me.
This might not be something that you've thought about before. And that's why I wanted to do an episode on it today. Often when we think about our bosses, whether they're our supervisors, head of school, whoever, we think of it as something outside of our control. They are who they are, and they behave the way they behave and maybe we spend a lot of time thinking about how they should maybe behave differently, but we often don't spend a lot of time thinking about how can I behave differently in relation to them in order to make this relationship more effective.
Now, I've done two episodes before about supervisory relationships, so do make sure you check that out. One about how to get the best out of your supervisory relationship, and the second about what to do if you find yourself with a toxic supervisor, and how to know that's the case. So, as usual, the caveat is that all the recommendations today are within the basis of a broadly healthy supervisory relationship, not where things are sort of close to irretrievably broken down.
Before I get on with the tips though, I really want to think for a second about why we focus on managing our supervisors rather than asking them to be different because we can make requests, right? We can ask for more feedback. We can ask for quicker feedback. We can ask for more regular meetings.
There's a bunch of requests we can make and your supervisors may be willing to accommodate those. They may have not realized it would be useful for you. They may have intended to do it, but not got round to it and so they're happy to oblige. But sometimes what we want from our bosses is a little more tenuous than that. I have a lot of my clients talk about, I just want a bit more reassurance from them. I just want a little bit more positive feedback. They don't seem that interested in me. And it's quite a hard conversation to say to your supervisor, Can you be a bit more interested in me please? Could you give me a bit more positive feedback?
And whilst that's not to say that you shouldn't ask, if we expect other people to change in order to make us feel differently, then we're always in slightly dangerous territory. What is a lot more achievable is to think about what you can do in order to make this environment feel better and to be able to achieve the goals that you want to achieve within that environment.
So I'm going to be giving you a few different examples of things that you can do to manage your supervisor or boss, and I'll tell you some stories along the way of where students used to do this for me. So for those of you who don't know me well, I was an academic for 20 odd years in Sport Sciences and I was probably known for being enthusiastic but a little disorganized, over committed. Somebody who usually delivered in terms of getting stuff done, I was a safe pair of hands to deliver projects, deliver teaching, deliver tasks, all that stuff.
Had really good ideas about what could happen in research, what could happen in the department, but I often lost track of where I was up to with things and like routine procedures weren't my bag. And my best students were the ones... in fact most... I'm not even going to say that. I was just going to say my best students... Without a doubt, all of my students were amazing. Loved them all. They all had different strengths and all of them learned to manage me one way or another.
I remember getting an email from one of them, we were going to go to a ethics meeting together. So we were doing some clinical type trials and we had to go to an NHS ethics meeting where we actually physically traveled to it and sat in a room and answer questions and everything.
And afterwards, we were going to go through a draft of a chapter that she had submitted to me for comments a few weeks before.
And... The day before she sent me an email, that I will always remember. Because it said something to the effect of, Dear Vikki, Really looking forward to seeing you for the ethics meeting tomorrow. I'll see you at two in the car park as we arranged. I've reattached the ethics papers to this email. They've said the meeting will last about an hour. So hopefully we'll be back in your office to go through the comments on my methods chapter by then. Looking forward to it. See you later. That is not a direct quote. I'm not reading the email, but words to that effect. And what I loved about this email was it made my life so easy.
In one place, she reminded me where we were going, where I was meeting her, what time I was meeting her. She reattached the papers that I needed, and she reminded me what we were doing afterwards, and she importantly reminded me that I had said I was going to have comments for her. What that meant was that if I had forgotten any of those parts, then she had reminded me, but she had reminded me in a really kind and friendly way.
She didn't message me going, I know you usually forget things, Vikki so just to remind you. She made it seem like it was just a, I'll see you here. Here's the stuff to do. It was very breezy. It was very non confrontational.
Now you might ask. Why should you have to? Why shouldn't your supervisor, your boss, who's inevitably paid more than you , why shouldn't they have to keep track of this stuff? Why should I have to make it easy for them? And it's a fair question. I don't dispute that I probably shouldn't have needed all those things.
But the fact was, she wasn't my only PhD student. Supervising PhD students wasn't my only task. It wasn't my only research project. It wasn't my only teaching. I had administrative duties. I had a hundred different things. And I did sometimes forget what time I was meeting people.
I did sometimes realize that I was having a meeting with somebody to do comments and I hadn't done the comments. I did. Should I have been more on top of that? Yes. Did I spend a lot of time beating myself up for that before I found coaching? Yeah, absolutely I did. But... When a student makes your life easy like that, suddenly I could be a really good supervisor to her. Because she made it easy for me to be a good supervisor for her.
Imagine how different it would have been, if she had taken the line, well, Vikki should remember this stuff. It annoys me that she doesn't, but Vikki should remember this stuff. Then she wouldn't have sent me that reminder.
She wouldn't have been sure whether I was going to turn up at the right time. So she probably would have had a bit of anxiety waiting to see whether I was there at the right time. She'd probably have had a little bit of anxiety waiting to see whether I had the right papers for the meeting. Maybe she would have had to share her papers with me if I didn't have them.
Maybe she'd have come to the meeting afterwards and I wouldn't have done her comments and we'd have had to rearrange another meeting for a week later. And just think how annoying that would have been for her. Was it my fault? Yes! Absolutely. Was it still really annoying? Yes. Did it hold her up?
Yes. Now, it's possible, of course, that I was fine! I was on top of it all, I knew where I was meant to be, I'd done all the right things. That is also true. But the fact is what she did took very little effort and ensured that it was super easy to support her.
So what I would really encourage you to think about whenever you contact your supervisor or have a meeting with your supervisor is ask yourself, how can I make it easy for them?
One example is always making sure if you're asking them about anything, make sure you reattach the thing you're asking. Don't make them go fishing through their emails to go and find the thing you're talking about because they might not be able to find it and they might find the wrong thing and it becomes a whole effort.
Just reattach the thing. Even better, get in the habit with your supervisor of using some sort of cloud storage system where you can all access the same thing and then you just remind them where it is. Remind them which version it is that they're meant to be looking at and so on. So really think, how can I make it easy for this person to do this task.
There's a bunch of specific things you can do to make it easy. You can make meetings easy by keeping records. You can make meetings easy by being really clear what the meeting is for at the point you book it and the day before the meeting. So the supervisor can come prepared because they know exactly what you want to do in that meeting.
You can keep track of actions. Again, your supervisors should keep track of their own actions. Not all your supervisors will. I'm sorry, I know they should, but they won't. So if you can keep track, not only of the tasks that you're going to do, but also the tasks that your supervisors said you're going to do.
Even sending summary notes after a meeting saying, Great to meet! This is what we decided. This is what you said you'd do by these dates. This is what I said I'd do by these dates. Let me know if that's all good. Then you make it easy for them. Your supervisors are probably rushing from the meeting with you into a teaching session, then off into some other committee, then off into something else. Making it easy for them makes everything less painful.
You can even personalize this to your specific supervisor. So think about your supervisor or head of department now. I worked under five or six different heads of school. They all had different strengths and they all had different weaknesses. And what I learned when I was managing them was that understanding their weaknesses really, really helped me to make it easy for them. Have a think, what does your supervisor find hard?
Some of you will still have them on a bit of a pedestal where you're like, Oh, they don't find anything, anything difficult. They do. They do. Maybe they find it difficult to give positive feedback. Maybe they find it difficult to narrow down projects because they just want to study everything and think they can include it. Maybe they find it difficult to write more concisely. Maybe they find it difficult to find time to meet with you because they're often traveling.
Everybody has weaknesses. Everybody has things that are their less preferred stuff. If you can keep an eye out for the stuff that your supervisor or your boss finds more difficult, and find ways to overcome that, ways to make that a bit easier, then... you can help them so much more effectively.
I've had students whose supervisors travel a lot make sure that before their supervisor goes on an aeroplane to go to a conference make sure that's when you give them a draft because they know that this particular supervisor likes reading documents on planes and it's your best chance to get them sat still for long enough to get on with it, for example.
The other way that you can make things easy for your supervisor is making sure you're really clear on what you need. Often students will just send a draft and say, please could I have some comments on this draft? And I can do that, but the stage that that draft is at should really affect what feedback I give you. But if I don't know what stage you think it's at... you're going to get something much more generic.
If you can send a draft with comments saying, this is an early draft, please don't spend time on spelling, punctuation, and grammar, because I will straighten all that out later. I really want you mainly to look at whether the argument makes sense, whether there's sufficient evidence, and whether it's in the right order.
So if you could give comments on those things, that would really help me out. What that does is it focuses them on the stuff you need. It means they don't waste time on the other stuff. It also helps prevent misunderstandings.
I've read things in the past where referencing's all over the place, spelling grammar's all over the place, and I'm a bit like, oh goodness, if they think this is good, we've got a problem. They didn't think it was good. They just hadn't told me that they thought it was a rough draft. So I'm stressing out thinking, Oh my goodness, maybe they're not very good at this after all. By the time they got round to polishing it, absolutely fine. No problems whatsoever. They were perfectly capable of doing good spelling and grammar. They just hadn't at that stage. So be really specific with what you need.
You can even go as far as asking for more positive feedback. So I wouldn't just say, please give me more positive feedback, but I would say in this draft, please do point out any of the bits that I need to change, but it would also be really useful for the sections you don't want to change to hear why you think they're effective.
What you think I did well so that I can apply that to later bits of writing. Supervisors who receive those sorts of comments will almost always be really happy to do that because you've made their life easier. You've given them a specific focus for their feedback.
The next thing I want to talk about is trying not to guess what is in your supervisor's heads and trying not to change what is in your supervisor's heads. I talked about this a bit in last week's episode about receiving negative feedback. Often we try and predict what the supervisor or boss is thinking about us and we start worrying about that and then we start acting a bit weird because we're trying to manipulate how they're feeling about us. We can try and anticipate what would be helpful, but what we want to try and avoid is micromanaging their emotions.
If you want to hear more about that, do tune into last week's episode because in the second half of it, I talk about that in a lot more detail. But it's a really important part of managing your relationship with your supervisor is accepting that they have emotions and thoughts and some of those thoughts and emotions are going to be about you. And that's okay.
So here we're managing ourselves in relation to our supervisors. We're managing our own thoughts and emotions rather than trying to change the thoughts and emotions of our supervisors.
However, there are two emotions that I think it's really useful if our supervisors are experiencing, and whilst we can't generate those emotions, only the supervisors can generate those emotions, we can put our supervisors in circumstances that make it more likely they will think thoughts and generate these emotions for themselves.
This is true whether we're talking about your PhD supervisor all the way through to your vice chancellor when you're a Head of school. So this is everyone at every level. The two things that I think you should be trying to promote in your seniors is something around secure or informed. That sort of an emotion and something around excitement.
So let's start with secure and informed. Whatever the role of the person above you is, they will be split. As long as they're working in academia, they will be split in lots of different ways. So it might be your supervisor and the usual academic jobs that they have to do, all the way through to if we're talking about your head of school or your vice chancellor, they will have leadership responsibilities that you're not even aware of, externally facing roles outside of the university with the local community, with industry, with government, and so on. There will be a whole load of stuff in their lives that you're not aware of on any level.
If we can give them the best possibility of feeling secure and informed about us and what we're doing, it's one less thing for them to worry about, and they can then trust that we have it in hand. Now what might that look like? It might mean giving the person regular updates at a level that is appropriate to that person. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in project management called stakeholder management, where you really think about, who the different stakeholders in your project are and what information do they need.
And maybe I'll do a podcast about that at some point, because there's a whole lot of other stuff there, but your seniors need to know that you've got things in hand. They need to know that they don't need to worry about the basics of basic progression, basic rules being followed, basic processes being done, all of those things.
So if you can make sure that at an amount that you feel is appropriate, and maybe you discuss it with your supervisor to check how often it should be, you let them know where you're at, what you're doing and what's in hand. This shouldn't be big, long essays, telling them every detail of everything, but it should be this week I focussed on this. I've got this, that draft's coming to you next week. I've recruited this many people, or I've done this many samples. Just updates as to where you're at. We're not talking big wins here. We're not talking like amazing news. Your article got published. We're talking, I've read these articles, these ones I've done notes on, those ones are still to go. I've drafted these sections, this is in hand. And what you're doing here is you're making it easy for them to feel confident because they can see what you've done, where you're at, and that you're monitoring what you've done and where you're at.
The crucial thing here, you're not putting a rose tinted glow on this. So you're not telling them what you think you want them to hear. You must never lie in these things, because then you start to lose their trust as soon as they realize that that's happening. What they want to see here is, you know, I recruited this many participants. This is lower than I'd intended. Therefore I'm going to do this, this, and this. Or it could be, I've read these bits of the archive, but actually there was loads more there than I thought there was going to be so it's going to take me an extra couple of weeks to do these remaining parts. We might need to adjust our publication strategy based on how long that's going to take .
So in this informing that you're giving them, you are telling them where things are behind the original schedule, where things might need to change, where things haven't gone as anticipated but you're showing them that you are on top of where you're at, as in you know where you're at, and you know what you need to do next.
The other reason it's important for them to know what you're doing is you want them to feel invested. I didn't even mention invested. Love invested. Let's go with that too. You want them to feel invested. You want them to feel like what you're doing is important to them too. Now with your supervisor, that hopefully is reasonably included. You should hopefully be doing research that's relevant to them anyway.
But sometimes students do find themselves in a situation where the research they're doing is perhaps something their supervisor's losing interest in or maybe your supervisor inherited you from somebody else because your original supervisor left and it's a bit tangential. Anything you can do to help them feel invested in what you're doing is also really important.
Again, Generating that feeling is their responsibility, but we can make it easier. We can remind them why we're doing what we're doing. We can remind them how it's connected to the things that they're doing. This might be in terms of your project progress as a PhD student, but as a more senior member of staff, this means keeping your heads of school up to date on the stuff that you're getting done. You know, I was head of education, for example. I was head of postgraduate studies, all of those sorts of jobs, making sure that maybe once a month you send your head of school a message saying, this is what we've been focused on this month. This is where we've got to, this is what I'd need to discuss with you at some point, this stuff's in hand, don't worry about it, just means that they are invested in what you're doing. They can see that you're making a difference. They can see where they fit with that and they feel secure. and content that you've got it under control.
The final emotion that I want you to try and generate, and it's connected to that idea of invested, is excitement.
In the current higher education sector, there's a distinct lack of excitement, a lot of the times, and what there's a massive lack of is excitement where you get to just geek out on your actual research. And this is true every possible level. Most academics want to spend more time thinking about their subjects, whether they're research oriented, teaching oriented, we love our subjects. That's why we do what we do. One of the best ways you can use that to bond with and strengthen the relationship with your superiors is by sharing what you're doing with them. My supervisors, when I was a PhD student, were never happier than when I popped around the door with a graph to show them so they could see what had happened in the data.
Share the exciting thing you've found. Share the weird and curious thing you've found. Share the thing that's not working, but in a curious, can we figure out why, kind of way. Let's be two intellectuals sitting together to figure out why this assay isn't working or why we can't interpret this text.
Create situations where they're likely to feel excited about the actual research that you're doing, so that they don't just see you as a student to get through or a project to be managed, but as someone who is working with them on something that they really care about.
And trust me, the more senior the person you're working with, the less time they have for it, but the more they need it. I spend a lot of time with a lot of senior people at universities. And pretty much without exception, the bit they miss... is just talking about their subject. Often they love their leadership roles. Often they're doing lots of really interesting things that feel important and they've run off their feet with stuff to do. But just to have an opportunity to have a PhD student go, look at this cool thing I figured out. I've just seen this for the first time. They want to hear that stuff. This isn't just good for them. The more they see you as somebody who is working on something exciting, who give them that moment of being an academic, a proper academic again, the more they're going to reach out, the more they want to spend time with you, the more they want to be engaged and involved in your projects.
This is why you should take every opportunity you can to present your data. Go to every seminar, ask questions. Anytime they're looking for volunteers to present your data, present it, and have conversations with people about it. Manage the people around you by putting them in environments where they might find you interesting and engaging.
We don't get to tell them how to react, but we get to behave in ways that make it so much more likely that people will then engage with us in ways that feel really good.
If this all feels like a really long way from where you are at the moment, that's okay. I gave you about 20 different ideas there of things you can do. You don't have to do all of them. And many of them might be things that you go, Oh, I don't think that would work with my supervisor. That's okay. Don't do those ones, or don't do those ones immediately, but have a think. Based on what you know about them, based on their strengths, their weaknesses, their interests, their needs, what can you do to make it a little bit easier for them, a little bit more focused for them? To make it more likely that they feel secure and informed and to make it more likely that they feel excited about your research.
I really hope that's useful. Let me know what you decide to do with your supervisors and let me know how it goes, how it changes the relationship. Thank you so much for listening and have a wonderful week.