different styles

My current and my former supervisor are very different personalities -not only in their general character, but especially in their style of leading a research group. 

My former supervisor is a very organized leader, who seems to have everything from deadlines for proposals to latest possible thesis defense date for each of his PhD students always present in his head. He says things like: "If you give me your paper draft until tomorrow at 3:30, I can read it on the plane and send the comments to you next Wednesday before 10am." and that is exactly what happens. He is running weekly group meetings not only to have all his students presenting their stuff once in a while, but he organizes who attends at which conference, who takes care of the next exchange student, the next group BBQ,... during these meetings and he lets his group know way in advance when he will be out of office.

My current supervisor is much more flexible with these things. Everything gets organized well and people know when they are in charge of something. But usually these decisions happen behind the scenes and often enough a new student arrives and only one of the grad students (the responsible one) knows about it. Same applies for his "out of office" times. If you need to be aware of them, because i.e. you have to hand in your thesis soon and there must be enough time for him to have a look at it, you'll know that he'll be away. But there is no general “keep the group informed” strategy as with my last supervisor.

While working with my former supervisor I found his perfect planning and thinking ahead very admirable yet sometimes even intimidating, as it set the standards very high for everybody who worked with him. Now I recognize that this actually brings the individuals in a group much more together. Everybody is on the same page and knows which deadlines, conferences, students, tasks,… are lying ahead. In my current group, the information gets transported where needed, but people work much more separate from each other – which has advantages of its own.

When it comes to my students, I often find myself acting not very strategic or long-term planned. I tell them when I’ll be away, but not very much in advance and I’ll let them know, when I see interesting conferences or workshops coming up, but I don’t have a specific timeline in my head for each of them. Even though I really appreciated that my PhD supervisor had this distinct plan and timeline for me as his PhD student.

I guess this is because I’m not their main supervisor, so I don’t actually make the strategy for them. I just push them, annoy them, motivate them, guide them, cheer them up on a daily basis. 

What is a good point in an academic career to have some deep thoughts and first actions about styles of leading a research group and strategies for successful PhD supervision? While you are “only” co-supervising? Or when you start with you first 100% responsibility student?

ticked off

Sample prep (half a truck full) - 90% done

Equipment check - done

Putting all needed data together - 90% done

The boss' writing task - done
Organization of my absence - done

Not too bad for Friday evening of the "deadline is coming up" week. Just a small bit of work to do on the weekend and a bit on Monday and everything can start smoothly - at least it looks like that at the moment.

And there was even time for an Ayurvedic treatment and a Yoga session - on the expense of two not so important workshops/trainings. Hopefully the good vibrations will last for the upcoming experiments - that would be awesome!

other peoples deadlines

A deadline getting serious because I myself mess up my scheduling is one thing. Bad scheduling that gets additionally messed up because other people can't hold their deadlines and they "need my help" is something totally different:

my boss decided that I should do some writing for him, not much and even a nice task - just that his deadline was already last week, so I have to squeeeeeeeeeeeeeez this task into my already tight schedule of this week. But as I wanted to make "getting up earlier" a habit anyways, this is just a bit of extra motivation ...

rudenesses

I was always pretty lucky with having supervisors and colleagues who were mostly polite and friendly and even if there was need for some clear words, they kept a high level of professionalism. I just know a lot of stories from colleagues in other groups about their not-so-controlled co-workers or supervisors.

Maybe this is why the following incident got me started thinking about the topic, even though it was not an obviously bad situation. I'm not sure if I'm in favor of any of the two people involved or if I just dislike the whole incident:

The professor wrote an abstract for an upcoming conference and circled it to all the co-authors on the list and asked for comments. The topic includes parts of a PhD students work (but not solely), so the student is on the authors list as well. However, the student didn't like the context in which his work was put and the whole abstract wasn't specific enough for him. He found strong words to express his criticism, but that was still ok. But at the end of his email he added a re-written version of the professors abstract. I thought that was odd and out of line. The professor addressed the students criticism very objective in an email, but no changes were made to the abstract.

In their next meeting, the student apologized and explained that he didn't want to appear rude and he had thought, that re-writing the abstract would speed up / assist in the finalization of it. So he had realized that his email was somewhat out of line and had the guts to apologize for it. The process seemed to head towards a happy ending.

But then the professor pulled out some old story, where the student had reacted in a rude way against him a few years back. And concluded that he was not surprised but had nearly expected some kind of not appropriate behavior of the student.

Again, I thought that was odd and out of line. Maybe the professor thought it was necessary to re-install the hierarchy and he certainly was more crossed about the situation than he wanted to be. But if measured in rudeness, I'd say they are even now.

impressive

My current professor and my former professor are setting up a grant proposal together. In this context I was reading through their CV related documents today to do a bit of typo-checking. And I must say, that even though I knew already what amazing careers paths they both have, I was once more impressed by it. They are both very impressive chaps (imagine that I put a lot of respect in this word), each one in his own very special way.