I Think It’s Time To Get Back To The Office
By
Leonard Zwellling
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-lament-for-the-washington-post-a5509d63?mod=author_content_page_1_pos_1
It takes years to make good reporters—people who are trained, who love getting the story so much, who love the news so much, that they will wade into the fire, run to the sound of the guns. They are grown only in newsrooms, not at home with laptops. They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore.
These are Peggy Noonan’s comments in The Wall Street Journal website on February 6. She was writing about the imminent demise of The Washington Post as we know it, and, for that matter, the loss of journalism as a critical part of American life. I want to use her words to discuss something dreadful that I see happening in a different segment of American life, academic medicine. This awful thing is the loss of mentoring.
I was taught that leadership is a combination of vision and will. Managing, on the other hand, is a combination of mentoring and resourcing. I believe both of these axioms are still true.
As a Vice President for Research Administration with an office of over 80 people in the early part of this century, with both an MD Anderson president and a Chief Academic Officer boss to do the institutional leading, my job was mostly managing. The resourcing part of my management job came from institutional funds (salaries and space), grant dollars (we were two of the cores on the Cancer Center Support Grant), and fees we collected from pharmaceutical companies supporting industry-sponsored clinical trials.
The mentoring part was on me. While my Associate Vice President had deep experience in clinical trials management, I did not and neither did many of those who reported to me. We all learned together. I also had to mentor the faculty to some degree as I inherited a very poorly organized research infrastructure that had allowed the faculty to conduct their clinical, animal, and lab-based research, let us say, loosely with respect to federal research rules. The institution was actually called on the carpet by the FDA for poor oversight of clinical research in my first six months on the job necessitating a trip to Washington, DC to beg for forgiveness. That was actually a blessing in disguise as the FDA mandated an institution-wide computer registration of all research subjects and the systematic collection of all clinical trials data that allowed our office to steer the faculty toward greater compliance with the Code of Federal Regulations.
Every person in my office and all of the clinical research faculty had to work together to get our compliance back up to the standard demanded by the FDA. And we all worked together to do just that—IN PERSON!
An achievement like that required the face-to-face interactions of all 80 plus people in my office, all the leaders of the Institutional Review Board, the Animal Care and Use Committee, the Clinical Research Committees, and hundreds of MD Anderson faculty members. My door was always open. My phone was always on. This simply could not have been accomplished on Zoom.
No one is ever going to convince me that one can actually lead, manage, and mentor people in a complex organization from a distance. The quote from Ms. Noonan makes this clear about journalism. I think it is also true about academic medicine. Teaching people to do research, comply with research regulations, successfully submit grant applications, and properly care for vertebrate animals is not done on a computer. It’s endless meetings. It’s regular training sessions. It’s faculty advisory committees to managers like I was so faculty concerns with regulations and my office’s performance had an audience. It’s delivering good and bad news to my boss and to the president. It’s finding solutions that further the institutional research mission, respect the integrity of the faculty, and further compliance with the federal code.
That was my job and I couldn’t have done it over the internet.
I hear those who want to work from home. I understand that they believe they may be MORE productive sitting in their pajamas. I just do not agree.
There is no substitute for in person mentoring and developing real relationships.
I was very fortunate to have two brilliant mentors.
The late Kurt Kohn taught me how to do research, write a scientific paper, and think creatively. I shall always be grateful for his mentorship.
My first administrative boss was David C. Hohn, then the Vice President of Patient Care at Anderson and the first person to give me an opportunity to be an administrator despite my having no track record and being straight out of business school.
Both of these men made my career in and after the lab possible. And I can assure you they did it in person. As far as I am concerned, there is no other way to truly manage and mentor.
I understand the benefits of Zoom meetings across the country or the world. I cannot understand their utility among people in the same city. Yes, it is convenient to not have to get into a car to commute. But the discipline needed to get dressed like a professional, travel to the office, and interact with colleagues all day long benefits the quality of the resultant work product in my mind.
It’s about now that someone says, “OK, Boomer.” Again, I understand. I believe that optimal human interaction and cooperation emanates from interpersonal interaction. Younger generations disagree, and, after all, they are in control now. Let’s see how successful they are in problem solving. Let’s hope they can build a better world or at least a better health care system.
