Why Busy CVs Don_t Always Advance Careers (1)
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[00:00:00] If you're working nonstop, publishing, teaching, serving on committees, and still feel like your career isn't moving forward, you are not alone. I have been there a scattered tv constant exhaustion in the sense that all the effort wasn't translating into recognition or progress. The problem wasn't effort.
It was a lack of strategy and alignment. I'm Dr. Stacey Esman. I work with academic physicians to help them focus their work, build careers with intention and advance without sacrificing their lives outside of medicine. If you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and start moving forward with clarity, this is for you.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back. Today we're gonna be talking about why busy cvs do not always advance careers. And part of the reason for this is that promotion documents tend to give us this false sense of security. They're written, they seem clear, they're in black and white, they look very official, and they're usually easy to find even from the public website.
So look for yours if you haven't already looked at it. The problem is [00:01:00] oftentimes we think if we just follow the letter of the law, advancement will follow. And what's not clear is things like having a reputation. Is it national? Is it regional? Is it international? And what constitutes having an international or regional or national reputation?
Does that mean I've given talks? Do I have to have given grand rounds? How many do I have to give? What do I need to be a visiting professor? Do I need to be on editorial boards? What if I don't like some of that stuff? And so figuring out what mixes and matches and tells your story well is important, but also understanding the local interpretation of those criteria is critical.
Now, hopefully you're having regular meetings with either your promotion committee or a department member who's in charge of people's promotion. Oftentimes the chair or division director. Hopefully having this on a regular basis, so yearly at a minimum is what I recommend, but if you're not, I would recommend including them in whatever your annual evaluation might be.
And part of the reason for this is a [00:02:00] great example of somebody I worked with this past week. We were in a coaching session. This is a faculty member who been a couple years into their career and they really didn't quite understand the criteria. Now, it wasn't because they were disengaged, they were pretty clear that they'd probably heard something about this when they first started.
But there were so many things happening when they first started. It wasn't at the top of their list, and the tracks had changed over time. I'm not even sure that the tracks we were looking at that day were the same ones that were in existence when they were hired. And oftentimes there's no structured reeducation when that happens.
In fact, most institutions will put something out about it. But if you're not paying attention, this may not even hit your radar. So after we reviewed the formal criteria together, another problem became obvious. It wasn't clear how they might interpret some of these criteria. In the internal promotion committee, there was no explicit promotion readiness meetings for this particular faculty member.
And so he didn't have a lot of understanding when he was gonna be considered ready or how to translate those [00:03:00] expectations into practical guidance. Do I need to give three grand rounds? Do I need to give four talks? Do I need to get three papers? And so oftentimes when we are working really hard inside our systems, we may not understand how we're going to be judged.
Now again, almost every institution has easily found published promotion criteria. I can tell you I was looking for an institution the other day and I literally typed it in and found it on Google within seconds. But the problem is this interpretation piece. And oftentimes we have to talk about what promotion track are people, first of all exist, what are the options, and then what are the different expectations based on the track?
So do you wanna be a clinician educator or do you wanna be an educator, or do you wanna be a clinician? Or do you wanna be a researcher or clinician researcher or teaching? There's so many options. So see what are included. What's new is that many more faculty members are able to use a clinician track if that's your interest.
But oftentimes those of us go into academic medicine, find that we wanna do research or education as a primary [00:04:00] focus. And so it's good to know what's expected of you. A great example I had the other day was somebody who required certain CME about education in order to do the education track. Wasn't even on his radar, wasn't something he thought about, something easily implemented.
But if he'd gotten all the way to that track, like ready to do everything else and realized he had to take two CME courses, it would've been very frustrating. And we had the opportunity to look and see what was offered internally that he might be able to do and what was of most interested he could do externally, including some organizations that might be education focused.
Now the other thing is to look at what may be adequate versus strong evidence of whatever it is. So if you're looking to show everybody you have an international reputation, you probably need to be giving international talks or be leadership in an international organization, or be writing in with international collaborations or international guidelines.
But those are the kinds of questions that are important to ask the people you work with. And it's just as important when it says that you have a strong reputation. You understand they mean regional or national because depending on the institution, [00:05:00] some associate professors need a national reputation at one place and an international to be a full professor.
And another place only needs you to be regional for an associate professor and national for a full. So know what your criteria are and how your committee is gonna interpret that ambiguity. And the best way to do that is by asking and going through the criteria and understanding what's gonna work, and then maybe even asking for some examples so you can see what does it look like to have a cv.
That was a strong application for whatever promotion you're going up for. The other thing is to understand when you are actually on track for your promotion, and not simply just busy, and many of us are busy, we're on committees, we're taking care of administrative tasks, we're seeing patients. You may be a proceduralist, but the problem is you don't know if people are gonna see that as just work or a story.
And the key is to have it to be a story. So if I know. My goal is to be on the clinician administrative track, then I wanna make sure that the tasks that I'm doing makes sense. So while a [00:06:00] curriculum committee or an education committee may be something I love and I should do, for that reason, I should recognize, may not be looking as favorably in the administrative track I'm looking at, or it may be perfect because of how they interpret things in other places that may be very clearly in education track.
Or it may be I wanna be on the operations committee and that makes a ton of sense in my administrative track, but I want to actually get promoted. On the education track, it may not have as much meaning or tell as good of a story there. So I really do recommend taking on roles, being on committees, publishing on the things you care about.
And I also wanna reemphasize, if you're thinking about the administrative track or the education track. There are lots of ways that you could take your clinical or executive or administrative or education work and turn it into scholarship or publications. I had to do a webinar at one point with a friend.
Actually it wasn't a webinar. This is the old school. We were workshop. We were in person about billing and coding for the residents, and so we did a pre-survey, we did a billion coding workshop, and we did a post-survey and we showed it was effective. [00:07:00] Then we put it out there in the world. So if somebody else wanted to use it and make it better, they could give the same kind of workshop for the residents.
So I was able to take this administrative piece and turn that into scholarly work. Now, in full disclosure, I was not looking for a promotion in the administrative track. So for me, I enjoyed the education component of it, and I was able to use that. My colleague was actually far more involved in the administrative track, and it was actually very valuable for her on that side.
Now one of the reasons we end up on the wrong track or not knowing our track is 'cause we might have gotten some outdated advice. People who got promoted with us may have different promotion criteria. It may have been different interpretation of those promotion criteria. So it's important to make sure that you're up to date because many of us assume that those criteria are static, but they are not.
And there's great things about that. There's new opportunities, but you need to be diligent and make sure you keep up with them, even if it's just to take a quick peek once a year and see if the date of publication has changed. This can be what we call a structural risk, and that means that your progress may be stalled if you're not actually working on the right [00:08:00] things.
What you want is to have a clear story of where you went, where you're going be it known at the regional or national level. For many of us, this may be giving talks at those levels. Being invited on panels is even stronger. Being a keynote speaker is really strong. Being invited to be like a ground round speaker or visiting professor, also very strong and shows our national reputation or regional, depending on where you're doing those talks.
And then you wanna make sure that you have evidence of your trajectory all leading towards the next level and not going in every direction so that I'm doing administrative stuff and education stuff and research stuff, and none of it plows forward. And I'm gonna give you an example of my own career.
Where I was absolutely interested in doing some things that were broader than just sleep medicine and sleep surgery, but I did make sure that I was on the Sleep Medicine Committee for the academy and that I was president of the International Surgical Sleep Society over time, and that I worked on sleep educational pieces in the education committee that I was on, and that even when I was on the Peds education [00:09:00] committee, I usually worked on sleep focused activities so that most of my talks and panels and keynotes and visiting professors.
All congealed together with my administrative work which was oftentimes in the sleep realm. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is if you're not getting feedback, it's really easy to get misaligned. So if it's not built into your system, I do recommend that you ask for it. This is the best way to find out what's happening, and oftentimes you can start with your division chief for your chair, and they can say whether it's them or point you to somebody who might be very intentionally selected to help take care of faculty and their promotion questions.
And part of the reason this is important is if you think you've done well, if you know you've done a ton of work and you think it's working towards the promotion you're gonna get, and it doesn't. It can absolutely emotionally erode your confidence. It can make you feel like you're disengaged from the department, and oftentimes leads to people looking around and deciding they want to work somewhere else.
So if you are a department chair or division chief or a dean, these are really easy ways by [00:10:00] instituting this initial permission criteria, really good knowledge of when they change and regular readiness meetings to make sure that your faculty, does not feel like they're stuck. Now when we think about how promotion decisions are actually interpreted, I want you to know the promotion committees do not see your effort.
They do not simply confirm check boxes. They look at patterns, so they wanna see a coherent narrative. This makes sense. Why did they do this? Why did they go onto that? Why did they publish this? They wanna see evidence of that impact, whether it's regional or national or international, depending on your rank and your track.
And they wanna see that sign of your trajectory, of your movement over time, and growth in your scope and influence and leadership, which can be seen on paper, and then alignment between their criteria and your outcomes. It's not just about volume, it's about intentionality and making sure that your audience understands you've had increased responsibility, you've had expanded reputation, you've had increased number of requests or asks to be speaking in a different area, and that [00:11:00] momentum is marching in the direction for the rank that you're looking for.
So I do have another example. I had a mid-career faculty who came in worried. They were falling behind and their CV was packed. They had been doing a million things. They were so productive. Their annual reviews were great. Their chair loved them. Their division chief loved them. I think the, like the janitor probably loved them.
They looked amazing, but their CV. Met like lots of different written criteria except not all in one track. And so when they looked they just couldn't see like how they could fit ahead. 'cause they had research and they had education and they had, but it wasn't all in a way that you could tell the story.
And so as they worked through that situation, three things Clear that they were on a different promotion track than they even realized. And that may be 'cause it changed since they started. That the criteria they'd been working towards was outdated. It wasn't anymore. They'd created more tracks, which sounds like more opportunity, but also sliced and diced things a little differently.
And then no one had ever explicitly talked to 'em about promotion readiness. So once we clarified the current tracks [00:12:00] and their expectations for that regional versus national, which they were great at actually, and we knew what the promotion committee was gonna look at, the problem shifted. It was not that they were behind, but they were misaligned.
And so it was more important for us to figure out which things to get rid of and which things to work towards so that they understood what was gonna get them promoted since that was the goal of the time. I also wanna be clear, you can do plenty of things that are not gonna get you promoted as long as you enjoy them and find meaning in them.
And so you wanna map those kinds of things to make sure they fit your values. And if you don't know what that means, please feel free to reach out. I'd be happy to explain it. But if you're a faculty member, don't assume you're being evaluat by the criteria you remember. So I'm gonna say, look and see what the current promotion tracks are and figure out which one you're on.
Almost always, you can Google this. Figure out how your institution defines impact. Is it national, regional, or international? At the rank you're looking at, understand what your trajectory looks like in a successful recent promotion. Get an example and then look and see where your work is aligned or not [00:13:00] Aligned with being able to meet your goal of getting promoted.
'cause if the answer's unclear, it's usually a system issue and not a personal failure. So let's look at the system. Now. The truth I wanna change here is that promotion often stalls because people underperform. In terms of understanding the criteria, but are busy and performing all over the place.
Now I wanna be sure that we're looking at the truth that changes the outcome. You are much less likely to stall in your promotion because you are underperforming. Or not working hard enough, which is almost never the case, but more likely because the system has changed or under explained the criteria, and that criteria without interpretation, creates drift.
So what I want you to do now is to look at your promotion criteria, make sure you understand it. Get it on paper. Ask your questions and ask for regular updates on how you can make sure that you are on track. If you want more support translating promotion criteria strategy grounded in how decisions are actually [00:14:00] made, please join our newsletter and please subscribe whether you're watching this on YouTube or a podcast app.
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