The (empirical) rule of 8%

Dear Pablo, I am a young Faculty member in a Physics Department working hard to establish myself as an independent and successful scientist. My field is not Optics, but I am experimentalist, so I really need the help of good students and post-docs to move forward. I was surprised that even more difficult that obtaining funding was how to deal with the personal issues of my post-docs and students. What is your experience? Do you have any advice on what to do? Is there a practical rule on how to form a good team? Andreas, California, USA.  

Of course, this is not a situation occurring only in science… but many scientists have great difficulties to actually manage their teams. And this is especially important and difficult at earlier stages in the career. To be clear up front: I do not have an answer to you , Andreas (sorry!). However, I have some indications that perhaps could guide you.

Building a successful lab around you is very complicated: no doubt. Assuming you have ideas (first crucial requirement), you have an adequate lab space (second) and you have reasonable funding (third)… yes, you can start looking for people. You have to find people that need you  more than you need them. My experience and what others colleagues told me often is that the rule of 8% typically applies.

But, what is that rule… first, it is of course empirical. It is believed that in most life activities you will find a minority of people (around 8%) that will surely cause you a lot of problems… At first sight, you can think that this is a good number (less than 1 in 10 of your students and post-docs). So initially you will probably be in the safe side; but well, not always... due to the statistical nature of this rule. If you are not lucky, perhaps your very first student can be in that “category”.

The problem is that unfortunately, it is often difficult to detect those persons and what is worse, they are quite difficult to be removed from your group. Typically, they can be nice initially (it is common that they show a bipolar-type personality). It would happen also often that initially you would work hard to help them, training and teaching, introducing to other colleagues, promoting them…  In my experience with this type of persons, their future anger against you will be directly proportional to the amount of your previous help… so, as a general advice, of course, you should help and promote your students, but up to a certain limit. In those cases where you need to do everything with little or none contribution from their side, you should think it is a bad sign...

The good news are that you need to act thinking in the other part of the rule: that corresponding to the good 92%! Building your team, you need to recognize the usually complementary expertise of your people. For instance, do not press too hard a very timid person to deal with patients in a clinical study. Or do not suggest to perform a very delicate experiment to a person not well organized and with poor manual skills, or do not ask to produce elaborate theoretical models to a student better equipped to do data collection, and so on… All this seems quite simple, but it is often the reason of poor team performance. Identifying what your students love to do and re-orientating their activities accordingly is a crucial part of your job as team leader. 

And what can you do with that “difficult” person that is already with you? It is always recommended to offer a short period as training before a longer-time position. However, this is not always possible due to the many bureaucratic constrains of our academic organizations. So, if the 8%-person is already in your group making your life miserable… stay calm. First, offer him/her to leave, even helping financially with the transition to other job. If this is not possible, remove him from important/critical projects for you and be sure that any sensible information is not at an easy access. Talk to the University officials for help and stay firm. If you do nothing and the person is around without control, it is very likely that the other students will get disturbed and confused. The sooner you act the better. And good luck! It is a real pain to deal with the 8%-type persons in any life activity.

In my career, I had of course the 8%-quota…but the most important for me are the exceptional other 92% of past and present co-workers and collaborators. The usual readers already know most of them from being mentioned in these posts.  

 

Bangerter foils… and yes, changing topic, I would like to mention that Guillermo Perez, Steve Archer (from the University of Michigan) and I have recently published a paper in IOVS (http://lo.um.es/publications/PDFs_main/2010-IOVS_bangerter_filters_Perez.pdf) dealing with the optical properties of Bangerter foils. This type of filters is used in pediatric ophthalmology to deprive vision in one eye of the children as a treatment for amblyopia. They are widely used, but their optical properties not well known. Steve Archer suggested the problem to us, and we applied our optical expertise to hopefully bring some light to this issue. There are interesting basic and practical implications that I could cover in some more detail in a future specific post.

Myeuropia (www.my-europia.net) winter school in Murcia. In late January 2010, we organized this very nice event. Students and post-docs from different European labs attended the meeting. We had several keynote speakers, including Prof. Jake Sivak from Waterloo, Canada and Prof. Nick Wade, from Dundee, UK. See a picture of them (Jake in the center) with me taken at the roof of our building. They covered a historic overview of optics and vision and the state of the art of myopia research during the last decades. In the meeting, some new advances on the possible control of myopia were also presented (see, for instance, a previous post: http://pabloartal.blogspot.com/2009/08/can-myopia-progression-be-controlled.html).

… and finally nice flowers are already here! At this time of the year, spring is firmly established here. It is not the case this unusually cold winter, although the signs of the spring can be already detected. The fruit trees are full of flowers: pink (peach trees), white (almond trees)… If you can plan ahead to visit this area in early March, you would be simply amazed. As an example, see this picture I took last Sunday near Cieza, a town  30 km north-west of Murcia city. 

Perez, G., Archer, S., & Artal, P. (2009). Optical Characterization of Bangerter Foils Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 51 (1), 609-613 DOI: 10.1167/iovs.09-3726