You need your very own Circle of Scientists

Introduction

As a scientist, you need a team of independent advisors—a community of scientists—to help you navigate a complex professional landscape. Let me explain why and propose a solution. 

You possess the skills to do or learn to do almost anything, and that predisposition towards independence and self-determination can be detrimental to your career. Our scientific training teaches us to read deeply, then labor gloriously in the struggle to create knowledge through experimentation. Nowhere does the scientific method state: “go ask someone else” or “collect a diverse set of perspectives.” Of course, the scientific method works great when you want to unlock a secret of nature but not so well when you’re exploring a new career path or trying to figure out how to deal with a difficult boss. While I’m a big fan of leveraging scientific thinking broadly in life, let’s leave that thinking in the lab for the moment. 

Teams are stronger than individuals

Diverse skills, expertise, and experience drive superior results. In creative knowledge work, cloning yourself would not be useful, because there’s no scaling required. A team of six copies of yourself would come to the exact same conclusion that you would individually. In contrast, a diverse team of six scientists will bring a much broader set of potential contributions, expanding the collective intelligence of the group. 

The undeniable collective strength of teams is why important people surround themselves with capable teams. CEOs have their C-suite and presidents have their cabinets. As a society, we appreciate that these leaders each need a team of advisors because their duties are both critically important and enormously challenging. A CEO’s senior leaders challenge her assumptions, biases, and reasoning. A president’s cabinet expands his intelligence and perspective. As a scientist, you’re important too, so why don’t you have a team of advisors?

Introducing Circle of Scientists, a community of scientists

Each Circle of Scientists will be a cohort of six scientists that meet weekly for 8 one-hour sessions. Groups will be constructed to maximize the cohort’s experiential diversity and collective wisdom, while maintaining a common thread—like career stage or industry. Circle of Scientists will be a mechanism for you to:

• Build your network 
• Benefit from a team of advisors
• Craft your personal narrative
• Gain an information advantage
• Engage in a community

Already sold? Get in touch here.

If not, let’s continue to explore each of these aspects in more detail and provide some guidance on how to make the most of your experience. 

Build your network

Everyone knows networking is important but most scientists struggle to network regularly. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to assume–and I feel pretty confident in this bet–that you are not networking enough. Like eating your vegetables, exercising consistently, flossing regularly, and saving money for a rainy day, networking will lead to a healthier and more prosperous future. But let’s explore this assertion more explicitly.

Networks increase the likelihood that you will realize your full professional potential.

How do networks work?

Popularized by Milgram’s Small World Experiments or the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, we all sort of appreciate how a network of relationships can quickly expand your personal reach. Less understood is the fact that, when it comes to your professional life, relatively weak connections are generally more important than your strongest connections. Think about it this way: everyone has family, friends, and co-workers who together consume perhaps all of your personal capacity for close relationships (Dunbar’s Number). The truth is that no one has enough time in the day to maintain a vast network of strong personal relationships which leaves you with two options to build your network:

1. Try to strategically choose the right close relationships to invest heavily in. 
2. Build a large network of significant but looser relationships.

Of course the answer is to do both. Invest heavily in mentors and in really exceptional individuals. But recognize your limitations. If I told you I could pick all the best performing stocks next year, would you believe me? So why think you’re wise enough to pick the best professional relationships to nurture? (It’s likely that the utility of your network connections will follow the power law, with a relatively small fraction of your network contributing the vast majority of utility.) Like equity investing, you can make some passion picks, but—given your limitations—diversify your portfolio, exposing yourself to the widest swath of opportunities available. 

Maximize your potential

An effective network won’t magically do all your work for you, but it will put you in a position to maximize your potential. There are two primary mechanisms. First, a powerful network expands your horizons and gives you access to the vast collective intelligence only possible in a community of scientists. Second, a good network will help you overcome professional obstacles by leveraging a large, diverse body of collective experience.

Your community of scientists should empower you to achieve more and do so easier. Furthermore, these network-enabled benefits will compound over time. As your network of primary connections grows, their network of primary connections (your secondary connections) will also be growing. The total amount of collective knowledge and experience within your reach will be growing exponentially. In the limit, if there’s a solution to your problem or some important information you need, you’ll have access to it in this expansive community of scientists. In this manner, your network will allow you to achieve your fullest potential.

How to create an effective network

To create an effective network, balance both quantity and quality. You shouldn’t just bombard LinkedIn or distribute business cards at a conference if you want to increase the quantity of connections in your network. At best, that will create superficial, low quality connections. Instead, create as many meaningful personal relationships as possible. These high quality relationships are usually forged with the following characteristics:

• Presence. Face-to-face is better than phone which is better than email/texting.
• Time. More substantive interactions (think 30 minutes at least) are better than passing conversations (speed networking).
• Consistency. Meaningful relationships are built over time—with each interaction strengthening the roots of a budding relationship. 
• Genuineness. Be yourself. Your goal is to develop real relationships. Starting a relationship based on an artificial self-representation is not a recipe for long-term success. 
• Vulnerability. One of the best ways to forge a lasting relationship is to put yourself out there. Let down your guard and demonstrate some humility. Generally, this gesture will be appreciated and often reciprocated.  

Use these suggestions to dial in the desired level of intimacy. A strong network will consist of relationships at points along the entire spectrum from passive LinkedIn connection to close personal friend. Even if you wanted to, you don’t have the time to go all out with every connection. Just remember that your instincts will likely lead you to sub-optimally allocate your networking time and effort. You’ll have to be disciplined to maintain a really diverse network. I’d recommend that you make every third meeting with someone well outside your comfort zone. Also, remember that relationships can change over time. You can continually reallocate your networking effort, prioritizing budding relationships and perhaps deprioritizing stale relationships. 

Be of service

Networking should always be bidirectional. While much of this section focuses on the ways you will personally benefit from networking, you should always seek to be of service in your community of scientists. In a purely transactional framework, the more value you can provide to a connection, the more value they will seek to return. This reciprocal value creation will ratchet up the quality of a relationship with a connection. However, you shouldn’t openly treat any relationship in this cold, calculated manner. It will undercut the genuineness and quality of a relationship. Instead, you should take the high road, and let the personal benefits flow in spontaneously.

Be of service to other scientists expecting nothing in return. You’re part of a community of scientists and you have a lot to give back. No matter where you are in your career, there are people who need your expertise, guidance, and wisdom. By demonstrating a sense of vulnerability and selflessness, you will forge more meaningful relationships that will create greater bidirectional value. In the worst case, the other person will not reciprocate in your game of increasing incremental personal disclosure. That’s ok. You will have provided them some value, and gained some good karma. However, most of the time, they will engage and reciprocate.

Think long term

The key to networking is the realization that the benefit will be in the future, while the cost is paid today. As a scientist, after years of training, you’re probably well acquainted with the concept of delayed gratification. However, your training had the promise of a definite benefit. You more or less knew that you were going to end up with a degree or a postdoctoral fellowship entry on your resume. In contrast, networking is an investment that compounds exponentially, producing nothing tangible in the short term and enormous (but difficult to anticipate or even define) returns in the future. Like investing money, you have to pay the opportunity cost upfront. But instead of financial investment, your networking investment will be paid in time, diverted from your routine daily work and your leisure time. Your richly connected community of scientists will deliver results if you are diligent and patient.

Benefit from a team of advisors

Many are better than one

Teams are generally better than individuals at brainstorming and solving complex problems. Different individuals will bring a diverse set of perspectives, experiences, and knowledge to a team. The collective intelligence of a group, brought to bear upon your individual situation, will result in a better outcome. The superior outcome may manifest in different ways. Perhaps you’ll reach the same conclusion that you already arrived at, but you’ll be far more confident in your conclusion. Or maybe you will learn some divergent facts that you were previously unaware of that dramatically change your conclusion. You may be completely stuck, paralyzed in inaction, and your group will brainstorm a variety of paths that get you unstuck. Whatever the manifestation of your group’s collective intelligence, it will almost certainly be valuable.

Independent assessors

A common problem with isolated thinking is the reinforcement of faulty assumptions and biases. This is essentially the reason for peer review. It’s easy to fall in love with your theory and end up overlooking some important contradictory fact. When the matter is more interpersonal, the challenge is even greater. It is particularly challenging to remove yourself from a situation and view it from different angles without emotion or bias. Your Circle of Scientists can be your group of independent assessors, familiar with the types of challenges and the environment of professional science, but removed from the emotions of your particular situation. This type of advisor is incredibly valuable. They can help ground you in reality and prepare you for difficult feedback. Everyone needs a red team, a devil’s advocate, and a constructive criticizer. Let your group of advisors play this role for you.

Motivated helpers

Don’t underestimate people’s willingness to invest in you and help you solve your problems. It’s human nature to get a neurochemical high from helping others in. Depending on which side of the interaction you’re on at any given moment, you’ll either be getting the help you desire or that neurochemical boost from helping someone else. You win either way. Additionally, you will get the opportunity to develop your leadership skills. Helping people get unstuck, solving difficult organizational or interpersonal problems, and providing career development coaching is exactly what a people leader does. If you are not yet a leader in your career, this is an opportunity to develop those skills. If you already are, Circle of Scientists will help you take those skills to the next level. You will give and receive personalized help. The benefits shared among all parties creates an incredible positive feedback loop.

Shared purpose and focus

The real magic of a strong team of advisors happens when everyone gathers together at the same time. The team’s collective wisdom will emerge faster when it can collaborate in real time, enjoying the informational cues associated with verbal and visual communication. This level of intimacy will further reinforce the close connections and shared purpose of the group. While coordinating group schedules is challenging, it will be worth it. The group’s focus on one topic at a time will maximize the collective potential of your Circle of Scientists cohort.

Craft your personal narrative

You’re going to tell your personal story thousands of times, but what will others take from it? At the beginning of every networking opportunity, job interview, and cocktail party conversation, you’ll tell your personal story. In each of these cases, you will want to project a slightly different—but equally authentic—version of yourself. How will you know that your intended image was imprinted on your audience? Circle of Scientists will provide you with a venue to discover, test, and hone your personal narrative to make sure you’re projecting the image you want.

Why scientists struggle to develop effective personal narratives

Talking about yourself can be difficult—especially for the shyer among us, but crafting and delivering your unique personal narrative is an essential skill for scientists. There is an element of self-reflection and individual work that you can perform as an isolated individual. However, a compelling personal narrative can only be honed over time with frequent iterations, delivered to diverse audiences in unique circumstances. The best soliloquy delivered in front of a mirror can crumble in an interview when it counts. The elevator pitch designed for your scientific hero will likely be inappropriate when you actually find yourself washing hands at the sink next to the CEO. The improvisational skill required to tell your personal story in the right way to the right person at the right time can only be forged through real world practice.

Two barriers prevent most scientists from developing this crucial improvisational skill.

Limited audience

First, our daily routines inevitably become narrow and homogenous, limiting the diversity of our audience and our need to introduce ourselves. We end up conversing with the same people about the same topics in the same circumstances most days. Your coworkers developed a relationship with you over months and years, and they gradually created their own narrative about you. But the luxury of slowly revealing yourself and your wonderful personal qualities to your audience is a limited approach. Instead, you will need to develop the skill of actively implanting your personal narrative in the mind of someone you just met and will only interact for a couple of minutes during which time you’ll need a first impression to stick.

Limited practice

Second, we seldom get to practice and intentionally work on our narrative delivery. It’s often said that “you only get one chance at a first impression.” While you can learn a lot by studying others’ reactions to your story, you never get to iterate your narrative and test a different approach with the same person. In other words, you’re unable to experiment—an uncomfortable position for a scientist.

Hone your personal narrative thorough practice and iteration

To best develop your personal narrative, you need abundant low stakes opportunities to deliver, gather feedback, and tweak your approach. If you can be proactive and disciplined enough to do this on your own, good for you. For most of us, it’s difficult to generate these quality reps in large quantities. 

Circle of Scientists creates a venue and mechanism to perform this critical work in a safe, constructive environment, among your personal community of scientists. Every week you’ll get a new opportunity to iterate, and every couple of months you’ll get the opportunity to refresh your audience by joining a different group. A small monetary investment and an interpersonal commitment to your group will motivate you keep coming back each week, even if you’re tired, busy, or just not in the mood. The shared mission of self-improvement, mutually beneficial constructive criticism, and information sharing will produce a higher return on your investment than ad hoc informational interviews. Regular, diverse, high quality feedback will create a powerful flywheel effect or positive feedback loop, resulting in an increasingly effective personal narrative.

Gain an information advantage

Inadequate information is a difficult thing for scientists to cope with. Scientists are trained that all information in the scientific literature is immediately available with a simple search. Unfortunately, the standards of academia stand in stark contrast to life beyond your education and formal training. Whether you’re applying for a position in academia, seeking a job in industry, or simply seeking a promotion within your current job, salaries and hiring manager expectations are not transparent for the jobseeker. (Sites like Glassdoor or LinkedIn are better than nothing but can often be incredibly misleading.)

The vacuum of information means scientists are often left guessing and end up making sub-optimal decisions. How can I choose a career when I have little data on the amount I’ll earn, the hours I’ll work, the people I’ll be working with, etc? That lack of good data is especially true when you try to project ahead more than a year or two. Still more pernicious, disparities in career outcomes between those with well-developed networks and those who feel isolated in their professional decision-making get magnified by information disparities. The lack of information can be divided into two categories. First, there is the existential “you only know what you know” problem. Second, there are systematic information asymmetries, reflecting entrenched power dynamics associated with hiring.

You only know what you know

The first information problem faced by scientists is that you can only know the things you already know. Of the many paths and trajectories through life, you traverse exactly one. All the other potential paths and unopened doors necessarily remain shrouded in uncertainty. This philosophical problem is not going to be solved by a professional coach or even the foremost philosopher. Accepting and recognizing this inevitability can lead to action. If you are currently struggling, feeling like this cannot be all there is, you’re correct. There are many more trajectories, career paths, companies, etc. To make an optimal choice for your career, you have to go out of your way to learn about other opportunities and contexts, and an expansive community of scientists is a great place to learn. If you’re lucky, most of the alternative paths that you’ll learn about will be inferior to the one you’re already on.

However, it’s highly likely that there’s a better path out there—one you’ll perceive as superior to your current situation. But you’ll never find that diamond in the rough if you’re not conscientiously sorting through the pile. If you’re unhappy in your current career, you owe it to yourself to investigate alternatives. If you’re super happy with your current career, you still owe it to yourself. No matter how much you love it, it’s highly likely there’s an even better one out there—or at the very least, you’ll discover aspects that you may be able to adapt to further enhance your current career. The problem is that you only know what you know, so go out and explore the unexplored world of possibilities. You owe it to yourself.

Information Asymmetry

The second information problem scientists confront is information asymmetry. Well-established power dynamics exist everywhere. The company you are interviewing with has interviewed many thousands of candidates before you. They understand the labor market better than you, and they know the salaries the people like you are willing to accept. They have all the power in this relationship. That doesn’t make them evil. They’re acting in their best interest, just as you are trying to act in your best interest.

If you think back to an introductory economics class, you’ll recall that markets–like the scientist labor market that you are participating in—are perfectly efficient only when there’s perfect information. Unfortunately, the scientist labor market is very inefficient, because the hiring parties (companies, universities, etc.) enjoy the upper hand of an enormous information asymmetry. For you, that means you’re likely not earning your full value and you’re likely not in your ideal position. The good news for you is that you can close that information gap. 

Where can I find information?

Unfortunately, there is no authoritative source of market information, so you must simply chip away at the information asymmetries. As a scientist, you’ve likely spent very long periods of time in a single lab or working for a single company, and thus have relatively few data points about the labor market. To increase your sample size and better understand this market you need to build relationships and gain information from your peers who have traversed different trajectories through the labor market.

Theoretically, if you collected all of the professional experiences of every scientist in the world (or at least in your community of scientists); knew their salaries; understood their work conditions and the types of projects they worked on; comprehended their experiences with their bosses and advisors; and knew the cultures of the different institutions where they worked, you would have complete knowledge of the labor market for scientists. In this thought experiment, you would surpass the power of the individual company you’re bargaining with. You would know what your fair market value salary is. You would know where your talents could be most valuable and where you’d fit in. If that knowledge database was created and available to all scientists, we would have a much happier, better compensated, productive community of scientists. Of course, this is only a thought experiment, but how do you directionally move towards that ideal? 

Talk to people

To improve your knowledge of the scientist labor market, talk to people. It’s that simple. Build relationships where you and your fellow scientists openly share experiences and information. Connect with people that are naturally somewhat isolated from you, because they work at different companies or in different countries and different fields. Furthermore, talk to them about the good, the bad, and even the uncomfortable topics that scientists often don’t share or discuss openly. Create a safe space where this information sharing can occur and be vulnerable–contributing information that might be somewhat uncomfortable to share. If a diverse group can create this kind of community of scientists and scale it, all of them will reap the rewards of more perfect information, positioning all of them to realize happier, more fulfilling  professional lives.

Engage in a community

Community camaraderie is essential for scientists to advance their careers. While our first experiences in science likely felt exhilarating as we were surrounded by diverse, excited scientists. Perhaps you remember the first meeting you went to, staying up late chatting with scientists from every continent about all of your individual and shared passions. Years later many scientists don’t experience those same highs. You end up working with a small collection of individuals in your lab or company for very long periods of time–years, maybe even a decade. You’re not even in control of who that group of your peers and coworkers is.

While this relatively limited knowledge of the broader community of scientists can be limited to the papers you read, the conferences you go to once a year, the gossip associated with incoming postdocs or visiting speakers, a richer community exists if you can find a way to plug into it. In particular, interactions with those outside of your everyday work community can be highly enriching. With them you’ll be able to let down your guard, collect information, and gain insight without the fear of your vulnerability being used against you.

The implications of your peer group

Most scientists will have heard that they are the average of the five people they spend all their time with. Excluding your family and friends, and simply focusing on the community of scientists that you interact with on a daily basis, are you satisfied with linking your identity to those of your five most immediate peers? If you’re not, then that probably tells you that you need to explore some new fears. On the other hand if you are happy with your peers, are you raising the level of that group?

Jeff Bezos famously hires only those who will raise the average of the organization they are entering. Finding the right balance between being at the top of your peer group versus at the bottom is essential. As in most things, the truth is in the middle. Challenge yourself, but not to the point of persistent failure. Additionally, ambition matching will lead to a more dynamic professional life if you plan to pursue a career in industry, but your lab mates and advisors are all set on the superiority of academia, you will likely be unfulfilled and unsatisfied with your day-to-day professional life. 

Reciprocity

While the previous paragraph focused on the benefits to you of community and camaraderie, high quality, relationships and networks are built from reciprocal benefit. You must be of service to your fellow scientist. You must share both the good and the bad. Social networks and professional machismo provide societal pressure to always put our best foot forward to convey the lives we wish we had and the jobs we aspire to. That’s only a small part of the story.

As you increase your knowledge of the labor market for scientists, you will want to know not only which companies are good to work for but which are bad employers. This requires a willingness to reveal that which is uncomfortable in a safe, trusting space. As your peers make themselves vulnerable–revealing their challenges and information, good and bad, including salaries–you must reciprocate. Relationships and communities form overtime. I wouldn’t expect you to start a conversation leading with your salary and greatest self doubt. That is unreasonable. Rather, you should volunteer small bits of information gradually increasing the intimacy and value of the relationship over time.  This process of relationship and community building differs from the database analogy used earlier. It’s not static and will evolve overtime. However, the quality and value of camaraderie in your community of scientists will inevitably increase overtime enriching your professional, and personal lives.

Summary and Call to Action

Circle of Scientists is an opportunity for you to:

• Build your network 
• Benefit from a team of advisors
• Craft your personal narrative
• Gain an information advantage
• Engage in a community

The call to action is clear. Join Circle of Scientists

Any other questions? Email scott@advancingscientists.com