Show Notes
Description
Dr Karla Zadnik visits the studio as we consider relational leadership in academic medicine. Leadership is often associated with strategy, budgets, and charts… but the most effective leaders know that lasting influence begins with relationships. Discover how relational leaders transform teams, departments, and careers. We hope you can join us!
Topic
Relational Leadership
Learning Objectives
At the end of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Describe the core principles of relational leadership in academic medicine.
- Share strategies for motivating individuals with diverse professional goals and priorities.
- Recognize excellence and deliver feedback that strengthens professional relationships.
- Develop practical time-management strategies that align daily activities with long-term priorities.
Guest
Dr Karla Zadnik
Glenn A. Fry Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics
The Ohio State University College of Optometry
Links
The Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement
The Ohio State University College of Optometry
A Force For Change – Book by Dr John Kotter
Radical Candor: Kick Ass at Work without Losing Your Humanity
The Urgent Important Matrix: What It Is & How to Use It!
Episode Transcript
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of FAMEcast is brought to you by the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
[MUSIC]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of FAMEcast. We are a faculty development podcast from the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
This is Dr. Mike coming to you from the campus of Ohio State. It is episode 26. We’re calling this one Relational Leadership in Academic Medicine.
Want to welcome all of you to the program. We are so happy to have you with us again. You know, leadership is often associated with strategy, budgets, and organizational charts, but the most effective leaders know that lasting influence begins with relationships.
How can leaders create a vision that people genuinely believe in? What motivates individuals with different goals and values? And how can we recognize excellence, provide honest feedback, and prioritize what matters most?
Today, we will explore the principles of relational leadership and discuss how strong relationships transform teams, departments, and academic careers. Of course, in our usual FAMEcast fashion, we have a terrific guest joining us in the studio to discuss the topic. Dr. Karla Zadnik will be with us. She is the Glenn A. Frey Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics for the Ohio State University College of Optometry, and she served for 12 years as dean of that college. Before we get to her, I do want to remind you that we have those additional resources from Fame and the Ohio State University College of Medicine for faculty development.
You can find them on our website. Just head over to FameCast.org, click on the Resources tab up there at the top of the page, and you will find links to two sets of faculty development modules. One is called Advancing Your Clinical Teaching, and the other is called Faculty Development for Medical Educators.
We encourage you to check those out. We do offer group and institutional pricing that is available for both sets of modules and just contact fame at osumc.edu for details. And again, if you just head over to the Resources tab at FameCast.org, we have all that information available for you. Also, I want to remind you the information presented in this podcast is for general educational purposes only. Your use of this audio program is subject to the FAMEcast Terms of Use Agreement, which you can find at FameCast.org. So, let’s take a quick break.
We’ll get Dr. Karla Zadnik settled into the studio, and then we will be back to talk about relational leadership. It’s coming up right after this.
[MUSIC]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Joining us today is Dr. Karla Zadnik. She is the Glenn A. Frey Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics at the Ohio State University College of Optometry. She is a respected educator, researcher, mentor, and academic leader, having spent time as Dean of Ohio State Optometry for 12 years, Interim Dean of OSU’s College of Public Health, and Interim Executive Vice President and Provost of The Ohio State University.
She has spent her career helping people grow, building meaningful professional relationships, and demonstrating that leadership is less about authority and more about inspiring others to achieve a shared vision. Lots to talk about today, but before we dive in, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Dr. Karla Zadnik. Thank you so much for stopping by the studio today.
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, we are excited to have you here. I know our folks behind the scenes in the Fame program several months ago, they’re like, oh no, you’ve got to get Dr. Zadnik on there. So, we are really happy to have you.
They are very sweet and kind. So, when you hear the phrase relational leadership, which is really what we’re talking about today, what does that mean to you? And why is it especially important in academic medicine?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I’d have to say that I’m not sure I would have used that phrase to describe myself. And when I got this invitation, I thought, oh my gosh, that’s exactly the kind of leader I am. And I really am fundamentally that kind of leader.
So, to me, it means if someone asks, how can I get a problem solved? How can I address an issue? What I tend to do is think of, especially, I’ve been at Ohio State 30 years.
So, what I tend to do is think about the person that they should get in touch with to solve that problem. And I think others might give them the name of the office, the title of the person, which is a more generic way to direct them to the resource. But for me, this place in particular is all about people.
I always say that Ohio State, everything’s here and we’re Midwest nice. So that leads itself to relational leadership. And I think in the health sciences, in medicine and the health sciences in general, we’re people professions.
And so, it’s very logical to me that we take our patient care, patient-centric orientation, and extend that to our leadership interactions and our interactions with our colleagues at work.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, so important. You know, successful leadership starts, I think, with a vision. What makes a vision memorable enough that people can easily recall it on a day-to-day and kind of incorporate that vision into their daily work?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I think it should be simple. I don’t think it should be very many words. But it can’t be a slogan.
You know, it can’t be a pitch. It can’t be a brand. So, the example I love to think about dates back to, I think, one of the readings that I usually specify.
It’s an old leadership book by John Cotter called A Force for Change. And in it, it has an anecdote about NASA in 1968, the year before the moon expedition. And the apocryphal story goes that someone’s asking a janitor, night janitor at NASA, what they do for a living or what they’re working towards.
And they say, I’m putting a man on the moon. So, although that’s a particularly easy vision to articulate, I think it typifies what we ought to be striving for. And in optometry, we worked on this when I first became dean.
And we have to put like a word or optics pun in there. So, it starts focused on optometric education and vision research. Like, what else do we do other than to educate the future and create and disseminate new knowledge?
And it’s so simple. It’s so easy. It’s got that little funny optics tagline of focused on.
And I find that my faculty, staff, and students can remember it, can use it to test what they’re doing on any given day and whether it fits that vision. And so, I think those are the important components. It’s fundamentally different than a mission statement, where we use lots of words and we get ourselves all tied up in these aspirational words, but nobody can remember the mission statement on any given day.
So, for me, if people can’t remember the vision, it’s neither visionary nor, in many ways, something that people can adhere to and ultimately achieve. Yeah, yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
I love that. And I love that you use the word focusing, too, in optometry.
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
We love any eye and optics puns. It’s our stock and trade.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
I would encourage listeners to consider, do you have a vision? And that kind of goes in both directions, up and down. So, your leadership who is above you, hopefully they have a vision.
And if they don’t, perhaps that’s something to ask them. Hey, what is your vision? What is the vision of our department or of our division?
So that’s going to be important. And then I think we all should have a vision when we think about our work. And we’re leaders wherever we are in one way or another.
It may be that you are leading a group of medical students on rounds today. You know, there’s all sorts of leadership roles. And so, if you think about vision being important for an entire department or an entire college, it’s also important on that micro level that we have vision as we are going about our day.
Would you agree with that?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I would absolutely agree with that. And I think it’s how we achieve really big, great things. At the end of the day, if we all think we’re doing something slightly different or fundamentally different, then the organization, the unit isn’t going to advance in the way it will be if we’re sort of all steering the ship in the same direction.
Down to rounding with medical students, walking in to give your lecture to the optometry students, creating the externship schedule for pharmacy students. On even all of those little day-to-day activities, if everybody’s focused on the vision, I think we achieve big, great stuff.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So especially as we’re talking larger departments, colleges, you know, where there’s a lot of people involved, once as a leader you have your vision established, how do you help people buy in and sort of see themselves as part of the bigger story?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I think the leader reinforces it in those small examples we just talked about, as well as in a meeting of leaders or a faculty meeting or a town hall meeting. One way is to sort of start with that. If you’re in a unit where there are screens for patients to see, and let’s say it’s a slideshow that’s rotating, if every time that slideshow restarts, it starts with the vision of that unit of the institution writ large, it reinforces it not only for maybe the clients or the patients that are seeing it, but for the faculty, staff, and students who walk by it every day and periodically see that.
I think it helps when you’re, if you’re talking to a group, if you’re doing an annual review with somebody, how does their performance, how does that activity you’re promoting to somebody relate to that overall vision? Because I think it’s that eyes on the prize idea. If we lose sight of what we’re all trying to do writ large, that’s when we sort of devolve and we spend time in our little silos and we become less committed to the overall vision of the place.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, so important. As you try to motivate the folks that you are leading to buy into the vision, to become a part of that vision, what motivates one person may very well be something very different that motivates another person, and yet they can all be, of course, part of the vision, part of that story. But how do you sort of tailor the way that you engage with various faculty members in an effort to motivate them, but maybe in different ways?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
So, one of the John Cotter principles is after the articulation of the vision, the leader’s job to achieve that vision is to motivate and inspire others. And he actually says it in that way. And interestingly, he doesn’t say motivate, inspire, and reward others, but that’s what the motivational part is about.
So, I think the key, even in a big unit, is how do you get to know people as individuals? Let me give you an example. So, let’s say a faculty member has young kids, right there in that phase of life where they have young children, and that faculty member happens to be the person in that family that’s primarily responsible for either drop-off or pick-up from school or childcare or whatever their before-and-after work obligations are.
They have some time certainty to them. So, if you were the person in charge of, say, lecture schedules, perhaps you could say that that person for that period of time, because those little kids aren’t going to be that age forever, might not get the early-morning lecture slot or the last-thing-in-the-afternoon lecture slot, if you can manipulate the schedule in that way. And so that might be something.
It’s not cost, it’s not a raise, it’s not a bonus, but it’s something that a particular phase of someone’s personal life, work-life balance equation, is really meaningful to that person. Now, the flip side of that is, let’s say you’ve got the person who has no kids or they’re empty-nester or they’re single. You have to be careful that in rewarding my first person, the second person doesn’t come to you after three years and say, all right, I am so sick of this 7.30 a.m. lecture slot, I could scream, and you always seem to give it to, you know, you’re giving me that so somebody else can have the later one. So that’s the balance, and that’s knowing what gets people to think about, I love this place, I want to work at this place for a long time. And they even remember it when the thing that you did for them is in the rearview mirror. Like, this place, you know, I didn’t miss a kids’ soccer game.
I had the flexibility to go to my kids’ soccer games or to care for my elderly parent in a flexible way. Now, there are some things in academic medicine where schedules can’t be made flexible, but I think if someone has a sense that you know what would be meaningful to them and you do your very best to create those almost informal accommodations, that’s how you know people better and they say, you know, I want to do what she wants to do. I want to follow her vision because this is a place that cares about me.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. I really think that is just so important and really speaks to the culture of a place. And the more that you want to work where you work, the more likely it is that you’re going to incorporate the vision.
It’s going to be infectious, really. One challenge I think in this, particularly in academic medicine, often vision comes with some change. And that may be added things that maybe you’re not as comfortable doing, maybe switching the way you’re doing something, maybe taking that, you know, 7 a.m. lecture. You know, there may be discomfort with change and with added things. And then especially in academic medicine, where we’re already juggling clinical care, teaching, research, you know, other administrative and leadership roles. How can we support the vision and the motivation toward the vision without overwhelming folks?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I think some of it, I’m going to make it sound simple, and it’s not, but I think some of it is acknowledging that what you might be asking someone to add on is overwhelming. I think acknowledging the potential for burnout is important. I think a trap is to behave as if everybody can do everything and there’s no downside to giving something somebody new to try or something challenging and you just add on, add on, add on.
You never take anything away. So sometimes when you ask somebody to do something new, sitting down with them and saying, so let’s review your portfolio, and maybe there’s something that you started as a younger faculty member that you happen to still be doing. Could we give that opportunity to someone else so that you would have the capacity, the bandwidth, the energy to do this new thing I’m asking you to do?
I sometimes also ask people to do something on a trial basis. Could we try you attending in this new clinic a day a week for one semester? And at the end of the semester, I pledge that we’ll review how it went and decide whether that’s going to become part of your long-term assignment or whether that really didn’t work well for you.
You didn’t feel like you were in the right seat on the bus, if you will, and you don’t want to do it going forward. And think about that overall portfolio. I think sometimes we get hung up on our faculty workload equations and we’re looking at a spreadsheet, and we forget that the rows in that spreadsheet are people with real lives and real demands.
The other thing I see that is just, talk about a trap, is when we have our really busy, ultra-competent people and we just keep giving them things. And people who might have a longer learning curve to take on something new, might come to it slower, candidly, might not do as good a job initially, they tend to get lesser workloads. And that just doesn’t work long-term because it’s almost this perverse reward system for underperformance.
Like it’s a downward spiral rather than a virtuous upward cycle. So, some of it is acknowledging it, but then really thinking about how things ultimately get spread out among the members of your team.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. That becomes a little tricky in terms of walking kind of a line that you could easily fall off of in either direction. And what I mean by that is, as we think about excellence, so, you know, someone who has a higher workload and they can handle it, that sort of drives excellence, especially from a consumer standpoint, you know, from the patient’s point of view.
Like when this person is in clinic, we get through, you know, I don’t have to sit in the waiting room as long if I have an appointment with this person. Versus, you know, equity in terms of, well, let’s spread out who gets those busy times. So, there is sort of this competing interest between excellence and sometimes equity.
How do you balance those things?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I think I’ve had a really interesting conversation recently with someone I mentor about that. And when I really talked about valuing excellence, she says, you sound like a capitalist, which I thought was really an interesting thing to think and talk about. But I will say, let’s talk about annual merit review at Ohio State.
Let’s be very specific. And our recent raise pool was 3%. And we’re discouraged from everybody did great in this unit.
We’re giving everybody a 3% raise. It’s a pretty modest raise. We all know that.
But then you have to stay away from also, you had a great year, you’re going to get 3.1%. And you had a not-so-great year, you’re going to get 2.9%. That is a not a meaningful distinction. And that’s when I think the ideas of other rewards, I love cash bonuses when I’m doing merit, because that really tells someone in a very specific way, hey, really good job on X, Y, and Z this year. But I think you also have to be cognizant of when, for example, somebody’s salary is out of line with their peers that have been there about the same time they have.
And everybody’s doing a great job. And sometimes there are adjustments that have to be made along the way to reward that excellence. I always worry if everything is only about everybody being exactly the same, having exactly the same workload, making exactly the same money, and the person who phones it in on average compared to the person that hits it out of the park and everybody gets rewarded the same, I worry that that promotes mediocrity.
So, I think the key is finding everybody’s excellence getting them the right portfolio of work and allowing them to excel, and then rewarding that, and then rewarding that excellence.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, when we think about individuals who maybe have had an excellent year, they’ve really done a knockout of the ballpark kind of job on a particular project, what sort of recognition is important? And how do leadership folks go about figuring out who is going to be recognized? We have department awards and college awards.
How do you go about deciding?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
Well, a few years ago, we did something we’d never done in optometry. And that was to not just utilize the kind of internal recognitions you mentioned, or bonuses for faculty and staff, for example, but leveraging our external organizations and their award systems. So, we formed a faculty awards committee, and it’s a small college, so we could do that faculty awards committee.
And the chair has this giant spreadsheet of all the organizations in optometry, the awards they give, who we’ve nominated for them, who’s gotten them in the last 10 years. And we make a point of nominating people for awards for which we think they will be particularly competitive. And so, to me, that’s leveraging these external recognitions.
And we just gave a faculty member; we just had a faculty member get an innovation award from the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry. But it wasn’t for what you and I would think innovation means, like, you know, she invented something or something like that. It was for innovation in the way she taught the communication of bad news to patients.
So, imagine you’re the optometrist who’s telling the elderly woman she is not legal to drive anymore. That’s a big, devastating piece of news to people. And she teaches students, has them role play and practice how to do that.
Even sometimes with actors who come in and play the role of an elderly person who’s receiving that news. She got an innovation award. And she’s about my age.
She’s been with the college forever. She’s a full professor. And she sent me an email one day, and she goes, well, this was an unexpected, lovely thing that’s going to happen.
And I went to her award ceremony and she got to accept. There was no money involved. And so, I think leveraging external organizations in your discipline is maybe an untapped resource that people could also use for when somebody’s had a great career, a great five years, a great previous year, so that you can extend the ability to acknowledge people’s excellence.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love that. And, you know, the other thing it does is it helps spread the word of the greatness of the folks at Ohio State in those external organizations.
Like, you know, Ohio State people are always there. They must have a really great optometry program. So, they’re really ambassadors beyond the university, but at the same time, you know, they’re getting recognized as they should.
So that’s really fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about feedback. You know, when I think about the word feedback, often it’s in regard to medical learners as we are teaching in rounds and that sort of thing.
But leaders often have to provide feedback to the folks they’re leading, particularly as surrounds that vision. You know, are we meeting the vision? You know, what could you be doing a little better?
Maybe it’s not, you know, in addition to recognition, there’s also, hey, we need to turn the train around here a little bit. So how do you go about having a candid conversation without necessarily challenging directly, if that makes sense?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
So, I do like Kim Scott’s radical candor concept and envision it as a two-by-two table. That’s really what she writes about. And imagine the columns are whether you have the capacity to give feedback, like whether the leader’s any good at it.
And the rows are how much the leader cares about the person, okay? Cares about the success of the person, you know, wants them to, you know, achieve the next great thing or really get satisfaction in their job. The sort of opposite of her radical candor, which is that you’re good at giving feedback and the person knows you really want them to succeed.
And it is the leader who cares deeply, cares deeply about everybody, but just can’t utter the feedback words. And it’s called ruinous empathy. And I love thinking about that as the opposite of giving the person feedback.
So let me give you an example. So, let’s say I go to a scientific conference, and I try to make a habit of going and hearing optometry’s PhD students if they’re giving an oral presentation. And you go to the oral presentation, and you sit there and you think, boy, the advisor didn’t do their job.
Did they really practice this? Or, gee, this student isn’t the most gifted speaker. So, whether I did that to the advisor or had an opportunity directly to the student, if you were to say, you know what?
I think you would enhance your career long-term so much better if you became a better oral presenter. And the key, though, is, and here are the resources, the services, Toastmasters that could help you get there. So, I think it’s really hard when you just give a piece of feedback and then you don’t have any mechanisms or resources to offer that helps the person use that feedback and improve, because I think it’s delusional to think, oh, I’m going to give somebody one word of feedback and they’re going to become a completely different person the next day.
So, I think it’s important also to have them have the ability, can you tell me more about that? Tell me where, you know, was I too soft-spoken when I gave my talk? Did you think my slides were confusing?
Tell me more specific about you didn’t think that was the greatest presentation you’ve ever heard in your whole life. And so, I think feedback is not tablets handed down from the mountain. It’s not an email sent.
It is really an engaged conversation, that radical candor. I really care about your future and your success, and this is the feedback I want to give you so that you can get there. And it’s not, it doesn’t always work.
I don’t think that there are people, you know, in the same way that there’s people who think they’re good at giving feedback or are. There are people who can and cannot receive feedback, and we all have encountered that kind of thing. So, I’ll give you, I want to give you one more specific example this week.
So, I mentor a woman who is at another optometry school, and she applied to be the associate dean, and she didn’t get the job two years ago. Well, the guy that got the job is now leaving. And so, she called me, and she said, if they open up this job broadly, do you think I should apply?
And the first thing I said was, if you can envision getting passed over for the job again and that not devastating you, then I think you should apply. But the cheerleading thing to do would have been to say, oh yeah, you should definitely apply. The only way to not get the job is not to apply.
But instead, I tried to have her envision, what if you don’t get it? Can you stay? Or are you going to slink around the hallways and not be able to make eye contact with your colleagues because it’s the second time you haven’t gotten this job?
And whether she takes it or not and ultimately applies, it’s up to her. But that was giving her candid feedback on her question. And she does know that I care very much about her future success.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And, you know, showing that you care, I think, is so important. And in order to be able to deliver news that may be uncomfortable to the person you’re delivering it to, but it is important to let them know, hey, I do care and I have your best interests in mind.
I have the organization’s interests in mind. I have your colleagues’ interests in mind. But, you know, my personal interest in you is just as important as all of those other things.
Speaking of those other things, I wanted to ask, you know, if we’re a leader with a vision, there’s always leadership above us that may have different visions. And so, unless you’re on the board of trustees, there is someone above you who may have, you know, a vision that competes with your vision. How do you prioritize that?
And, you know, what’s important to grasp of a particular vision and what maybe we can let go because it’s not meshing with someone else’s vision that’s above us?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
I think it’s all about conversation and communication. So, if you do feel like something you’re doing is in conflict with your supervisor, your boss, two layers above you, the university writ large, I think having conversations about that. How can I adapt my vision?
Now, the example I gave for optometry focused on optometric education and vision research, that’s at higher education, right? That is just fundamentally higher education. But I could imagine if I were told, oh, Ohio State’s decided that your whole third year of optometry school in addition to your fourth year should be outside the college, people out in practices and veterans’ medical centers, et cetera.
That’d be a hard vision for me to achieve. And I’d have to have some conversations about the educational value. Maybe that’s right for the university, but it’s not right for my discipline.
And so, I think it’s all about conversation, communication, thinking long and hard about the larger vision, the vision for your smaller unit, and how to dovetail them. And, I mean, there are times, I think, where you might have to give up something that you absolutely think is right for your smaller unit, but you don’t do it until you’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the rationale and the reasons for why that has to happen. Anytime you are sending a great big, long email to somebody explaining your point of view, stop.
Save the email, make it your talking points for the conversation, but communication directly with real people and people that presumably you care about and who care about you is the best way I could think of to break a logjam like that.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. You know, as we progress in our career and we get more and more responsibilities, take on more and more tasks, sometimes saying yes, you feel like you want to say yes for your leader, who is encouraging you to grab onto a vision, maybe make some changes, but things are getting tight and, you know, the work-life balance may be a little heavy on the work side right now. How do you sort of learn to prioritize what to say yes to and maybe what to drop in order so that you can say yes and just that whole time management piece of all of this?
Where does that fit in?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
So, I try to find my way to yes to anything that I think I can do a good job at, that I think I can have impact, and that I think I’ll learn from. Those are kind of my three things to evaluate when something new crosses my plate. I also will tend to say yes if it seems like at that moment in time, I have some unique skill set and the pool for other people with that same skill set is pretty shallow, okay?
And I’ll give you a specific example. So here I am on sabbatical and the executive director of the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry, which I’m a past president of, asked me, oh, while you’re on sabbatical, would you want to work on this project that’s kind of been languishing a little bit on the necessary attributes to be a successful optometrist and optometry student? Mike, that project doesn’t interest me in the least.
I think, don’t get me wrong, I think the work product would be important to develop, but the process of, I don’t even think I’d be good at it, the process of developing it doesn’t sound very fun, I think the impact is relatively limited, and I just said, no, that’s not something I want to take on in my sabbatical. In contrast, I chair the Biomedical Sciences IRB for Ohio State, and I’m going to do that throughout my sabbatical. It’s a commitment I’ve made, and I wasn’t going to say, oh no, I’m not going to do this suddenly for a year.
So, the other thing I use, and Stephen Covey’s urgent versus important two-by-two table, I know you’re starting to think I like two-by-two tables, you would be right, two-by-two table, imagine columns are urgent and rows are important. I don’t want to spend very much time in the neither urgent nor important box. Asking me to plan the college’s holiday party, you don’t want that.
It’s not a good use of my talents, it’s just not, and there are people who might enjoy that opportunity. But the box that’s hard to get into is not urgent, but important. Writing a grant, working on a manuscript, reading to my grandchildren, right, that’s an example as well, and I use it across both work and personal life domains.
And sometimes at the end of a week, I’ll tell a faculty member, are you really frustrated with what you did and did not accomplish this week? Yeah, I really am. Sit down, take 10 minutes, do a little two-by-two table, urgent versus important, and put the things you spent a lot of time on in those categories.
Let’s say it’s your week on service. Urgent, had to happen, and important, right? So that’s where you spent the lion’s share of that week.
But did you ever get to anything that doesn’t have a deadline, that doesn’t have a time certain, but that’s important to you? And I really use that little time management trick. I also book time out for myself, and it’s just as sacrosanct as this appointment to interview with you was this morning.
And I don’t let people encroach on it, and sometimes I mark it private so that nobody really knows what it is, but it might be time for me to write an abstract for a professional meeting or to write a letter of recommendation for a student that the deadline is coming up. So those are some of my tricks for trying to prioritize and better manage our time.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. So urgent versus important. I think that’s going to be an important one.
I’ve not made that that two-by-two square before, and I think I need to do that.
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
It’s in Stephen Covey’s book. I can’t remember the name of the book, but it’s the one that’s got, I think it’s got like a compass and a clock on the front. It’s not seven habits of highly effective leaders, but it’s, and it’s just, but I’ve summarized what I think is the most important thing, because so another example of urgent but not important would be you get on a committee, you get tapped to do the minutes, and the chair of the committee now wants the minutes the day after the committee met.
Okay, that’s not, that’s got this artificial urgency. It’s important to the chair, might be not terribly important to you. And so that’s an example of something that like, whoa, I gotta get that off my plate somehow.
Now we’ve got AI that can help us sometimes with minutes, but we still have to look at them. And any time, almost any time other than teaching and patient care that somebody’s setting a deadline for you, but the thing isn’t important to you, that to me is a danger zone.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, and hopefully it’s something that you can quickly get off your plate, as you mentioned. Yes. So, as we wrap up, and thinking about this concept of relational leadership, what parting words of wisdom would you have for our audience?
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
So, I have two adages, I guess I’d call them, that really reflect how I feel about this. But they’re both about truly caring about the people who work for and with you. You can’t really fake it.
And it’s about taking the time to listen to them, remembering what they told you the last time, and inquiring how that thing is going, or how they ultimately dealt with the obstacle or the problem that they came to talk to you about. And keep your door open whenever possible. But my two adages are this, everyone’s fighting a battle you know nothing about.
Be kind. And secondly, in the end, we’re all just walking each other home. And I just love that idea as you work with people and interact with people on both professional and personal sides of the aisle.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, really, really fantastic. This has been a terrific conversation. We just appreciate you so much taking time to chat with us.
For folks in the audience, we are going to have lots of resources for you if you’d like to learn more about relational leadership in the show notes. So, if you head over to famecast.org and look for this episode in the show notes, you will find, of course, a link to the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring and Engagement and the Ohio State University College of Optometry. We do have those for you.
Also, the book by John Cotter that we had mentioned, A Force for Change, we’ll have a link to that book for you. Also, Radical Candor, Kick Ass at Work Without Losing Your Humanity. I love that.
And we’ll have a link to that resource for you, too. And then The Urgent Important Matrix, which we just talked about, what is it and how to use it. If you’d like to learn more about that two-by-two square that we were discussing, you can find that in the show notes as well over at famecast.org.
So once again, Dr. Karla Zadnik, the Glenn A. Fry Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics at the Ohio State University College of Optometry. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[Dr Karla Zadnik]
Mike, you are most welcome. Thanks for the invitation.
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[Dr Mike Patrick]
We are back with just enough time to say thanks once again to all of you for taking time out of your day and making FAMEcast a part of it. We really do appreciate your support. Also, thanks again to our guest this week, Dr. Karla Zadnik, Professor of Optometry at the Ohio State University College of Optometry. Don’t forget, you can find our podcast really wherever podcasts are found. There might be an easier way for you to subscribe and listen. We are in the Apple Podcast app, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Audible and most other podcast apps for iOS and Android.
Our landing site is famecast.org. You’ll find our entire archive of past programs there, along with show notes for each of the episodes, our terms of use agreement and a handy contact page if you would like to suggest a future topic for the program, or if you just want to say hi. I love hearing from listeners.
Reviews are, of course, helpful wherever you get your podcasts. We always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show. And of course, don’t forget about those additional resources that we have on the website.
You can find those at famecast.org. Just click on the resources tab. Thanks again for stopping by.
And until next time, this is Dr. Mike saying stay focused, stay balanced and keep reaching for the stars. So long, everybody.
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