Escaping the Silo
Dissecting the difficult transition to teamwork
By David G. Jensen
"The whole teamwork thing was the most difficult aspect of my first year in industry," he said. This young scientist with two years of industry experience told me during our interview that he felt the changes around him every day of his first six months, with many cultural shifts lasting into his first year. For the recruiter, a person's attitude towards teams and teamwork is vital to the process of candidate selection and it is always a part of my interview routine.
A few weeks later, my friend Bill Lindstaedt called from the University of California, San Francisco. Bill directs the office of Career and Professional Development at UCSF, and he was mulling over seminar topics for a bio/pharma job fair in the Bay Area.
"What would you think of a seminar called Surviving and Thriving In Your First Year of a Dramatically Different Culture?" asked Bill. I replied that it sounded like a great topic; in fact, several panelists came to mind who might be interested in talking about this. After all, one common concern that I hear when reference checking even experienced job candidates is that they have trouble working with teams.
In this month's column, I will relate what I've learned from these panelists, experienced professionals who did a wonderful job of illuminating the audience about important aspects of teamwork, one of the most important keys to success in your professional work life.
Dr. Spencer's Silos
Andy Spencer is a research scientist with six years of industry experience under his belt, both in mid-to-large biotech companies as well as very small startup companies. Andy believes that the university background most people have prepares individuals to work independently (in conflict with the way that companies work). Academic science fosters an approach that this fellow calls "silos."
"Your job in academia takes place within a silo. As a grad student, you are assigned a specific project, with clearly defined boundaries. Everything you do, your entire focus, has to do with the work in your silo. While you work with others in the lab, you don't have any real investment in your colleagues' projects," said Andy to an audience of a hundred job seekers in San Francisco. His belief is that the university is not a very good place to learn teamwork skills.
In a silo, the grain goes in and it comes out when it is later needed. In Andy's analogy, academic knowledge goes in and stays there as well, until it is published. He believes that industry is more like a distribution center. Knowledge is immediately accessible to all others in your group, and used by the company to push projects along.
"There is no sense of 'ownership' by successful team members in industry. The work is more for the common good, and this can be a rude awakening for someone who's been doing stellar science somewhere at the university and who is suddenly looked upon to share that openly and immediately," Andy elaborated. In fact, Andy got hung up on this problem three or four times during his first year in the biotech industry.
"As a scientist doing bioanalytical work that was required for ongoing drug development projects, I was a part of several project teams. It was my job to attend these meetings, gather information and then go back to my group and share. I was supposed to be the knowledge distributor, and yet I kept using the academic approach of holding this information for my own use," Andy confessed. "My colleagues had to come and pry it out of me until, after several of these situations, I finally got the message."
Leave Your Ego at the Door
Dr. Mary Gerritsen is the Executive Director for Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at Exelixis, a growing biotech company in the Bay Area. I asked Mary to join us as she is a scientist who has had high-level success in both academia and industry. As well as faculty appointments and many publications, she's also had her name on over 1,000 submitted patent applications. That's a lot of work, and she's the first one to admit that she was only one member of the team in that kind of exhaustive effort.
"If you are going to succeed in working on teams, the first thing you need to do is to leave your ego at the door," said Mary in her opening statement to our audience. As opposed to Andy's very personal view of the teamwork transition, Mary's presentation and suggestions dealt with this topic from the viewpoint of a hiring manager. She's been hiring and integrating young scientists into her teams for many years.
"Once you have the ego issues resolved, the next issue for developing your teamwork skill is your ability to set priorities and focus on the critical issues. In academia, you can go off into interesting side channels. But your company teammates, who are counting on you to advance their project, would be very disappointed if you didn't stay focused on the project goals, zeroing in on tasks with the highest priority," she advised.
Here are some of the other ingredients that Mary looks for when choosing a new team member:
- Good communication skills,
- Lots of flexibility,
- Proven ability to function in high pressure situations,
- Experience in multi-tasking including handling multiple projects at once,
- Ability to solve problems quickly and execute precisely, and
- A goal orientation.
Skills that Just Aren't Taught at School
A discussion about the importance of teamwork can sound like so much fluff if it doesn't help you move through the interview process and close the deal. It is for that reason that I invited Judy Heyboer, a San Francisco region Human Resources consultant, to speak at the Bay Area event. Judy was formerly senior vice president for Human Resources at Genentech, so her opinion goes a long way on this topic.
"Teamwork is the business world equivalent of 'plays well with others' in kindergarten," says Judy. "Universities just assume you've already learned these lessons, but there is no emphasis at all on this topic there."
"As an interviewer, I'll ask you directly whether you would like to work independently or as part of a team, and then I'll look for examples," she says. "If your team experience is minimal, I pay attention to whether you participated in team sports or joined clubs." She told our audience that a candidate's ability to work with people is more important than the ability to succeed technically.
"I'll even discuss teamwork scenarios with you from your very early training, such as questions that deal with your first projects and how they intersected with others' work. I will ask you about your volunteer activities, and whether there has been a willingness to step outside your own priorities and help others. Behavioral interviewing is the hot technique now, so we are looking for concrete examples of this 'plays well with others' issue. Finally, I may propose a task, and ask how you would construct a team to address it."
The first question above that Judy asks, the one where she wants to get a stated preference on independent work or teamwork, could be considered a trick question, but she asks it in sincerity. All three of my panelists admitted that there are indeed some scientists and engineers in industry who have their own level of independence, but that these are few and far between.
Answering a question like Judy's with that preference would certainly limit your career opportunities in most companies. As she says, "There is the rare genius who is so good that a company is willing to build a little cone of isolation to allow him or her to succeed, but that happens so infrequently you cannot count on it."
The only thing you can count on is that you will be asked to be a part of a team, and that your skills in team participation will lead you to a role in project or team leadership if you've made that cut. The ability to work well in a team is so integral to today's company environment that it is more than just a hot H/R buzzword . . . it's a lifestyle.
