AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Bob Williamson: I have a question for Alan which other people might want to comment on as well. When I have been involved in skills acquisition (not mentoring but just specific skills acquisition) one of the interesting things to me is that there is a lot of stuff out there on media, there is a fair bit of stuff out there on finance, a fair bit of stuff on many of the other things we are talking about. And yet I've had a lot of trouble finding what you might call the two-hour short course in how to be a good administrator. I was wondering whether you have any tips, because one of the interesting things for me is that every one of the career development award people who are here will almost certainly be involved in administration, and yet we seem to have difficulty in working out ways to bring people into this. Do you have any thoughts on how we can train people to be good administrators, or mentor people to be good administrators?

Alan Lawson: Well, I agree 100 per cent with you, Bob: there are essentially no training courses that I have ever done. There are some workshops that some peak bodies run – the Australian tertiary administration and managers group of the AVCC [Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, now called Universities Australia] run some, but having been to one or two of those I am not sure that is the sort of thing you are talking about. They are the two-day version, and I quite agree with you that what you want is the two-hour version.

I just agree with what you said. There isn't much training for administration, there is a great need for training for it, and I don't see very many niches being filled in that area. Most of us have learned what management skills we have got by observing and by being thrown in at the deep end, and I think everything that we would say about this topic is like the things we were saying yesterday about so many of the others: there has been no mentoring, particularly – the sink-or-swim method has basically been adopted – and people have learned the hard way.

I feel it's really important to think about administration, management and so on as a formal role. I think it is important to emphasise, as you just did, that every single person in this room already does administration and will gradually do more and more of it as the career develops. There are very few people who can operate outside that zone, and it is a really important part of what you do. I think every other speaker this morning, actually, has emphasised that point as well, that you simply need to know something about the HR environment.

You don't need to have read any of the Acts that Bradley put up on the screen; you don't need necessarily to read a balance sheet. But you certainly need to know who to go to, to help you when the balance sheet appears or when the HR problem arises. There are experts within the university who know those kinds of things. But you need to know that those kinds of problems exist. Sorry, that's a pretty inadequate answer.

Graham Farquhar: I think it would be good to hear from other members of the panel on that, and also maybe from Jake Jacobsen, because I am conscious that the cultures in universities are quite different from the cultures in CSIRO, and in the CRCs that I have been involved with, which have involved CSIRO, we had a lot more exposure to the formal side than the universities typically get. So perhaps I can go through the rest of the panel, asking for their individual responses to Bob's question, but then after that also bring in Jake.

Bradley Beasley: I started off my career as a trade union official, and the way we administer things is very different from what happens in higher education and business. However, when I did my law degree, before you get admitted as a practitioner you have to do a course and through that professional development course they teach you how to be a manager, because you have got to run your own firms, you need to know how to look at balance sheets and all that sort of stuff.

I would think that would be an avenue that is open to those who are guiding researchers to go into administration – that they are the types of bodies whose models could be looked at, to assist them. They are intensive courses, but invaluable in my opinion. Most of my administration that I learnt before I became a lawyer was learnt on the run: if you have a problem, get on with it, deal with it, don't whinge about it. But in higher education, one of the big things is knowing the right people to go to, networking formally and informally to get to know the right people – make that crucial phone call, get onto the issue straight away, don't procrastinate. Once you start to procrastinate, an issue that you are dealing with just gets bigger and bigger, and can end up snowballing.

Among people in administration in higher education you have some extremely talented people (besides myself), and the majority of people that I have dealt with are extremely helpful. They really do want to give you a hand and give you not only 'compliant' advice but also practical advice on how to deal with issues as well.

Moira Clay: I often tell the story of when I started in research management and I thought it was going to be really cushy – big office, nice big chair, all that kind of thing. It was going to be great. Two weeks into my job at the Heart Foundation – remember I had come from a hands-on bench role in Adelaide – the funding round for the project grants closed and I had 300 grant applications, times 12 copies, sitting on a boardroom table. And I had to take all of this through a peer review process. That's when I started to panic. I learned it on the job, as I think a lot of people do, and it came together.

I really think there is a need for both individual institutions and larger bodies such as the Academy and so forth to be providing this kind of guidance in management for young research leaders, because there are a lot of expectations nowadays, whether it's managing budgets, HR, compliance issues, all of those kinds of things – disputes, grievances, et cetera – there are a lot of things to deal with. And actually having some kind of guidance as to how to manage this is absolutely essential, and something perhaps the Academy can contribute to.

Leanna Read: I would just add a couple of points. One is to take the opportunity to take on some task, a manageable chunk that you can bite off, as early as possible, even though it might not seem a particularly attractive thing to do, so that you are learning things by doing something and getting a little bit of help with it at the time, because I think as every one said, really you can do – and I think the intensive courses could be quite useful, but you have to learn it yourself. So one strategy is to do a little bit now and build up on that.

The other thing, I think, gets back to Moira's talk and is really the art of negotiation. Administration can drive people crazy, and if you are trying to implement some administration/management thing you find you'll lose people who get offside. What is important, I think, in being a good administrator or a good manager is making people understand the importance of why it is being done, and, secondly, trying to be constructive – trying to find solutions, not just pose problems.

The administrators that drive me crazy are the ones who will focus on crossing the t's and dotting the i's: the process and not the outcome. I think if you can figure out ways to solve a problem and get on with life, you will be everybody's best friend and you will get a lot of cooperation in anything you try to do in future. Negotiation to me is the art of win-win, and I think that is the sort of skill it takes to be a good administrator.

Graham Farquhar: Jake, did you have any comment to make from a CSIRO perspective about the training techniques? I know that there are CSIRO courses, and I could give the details to people later on if they are interested.

Jake Jacobsen: I began in CSIRO in 1967, when the organisation was to a very large extent unstructured. When we had managerial jobs to do, we made it up as we went along and we used whatever we had, and in most cases it was a matter of our personality and doing what appeared to be responsible. That is how I went through.

But in recent times, for the younger generation of administrators, it is far more structured and there are lots of courses run for our administration and for research administrators – program leaders and subprogram leaders. These people go to courses and they learn how to manage people, they learn about budgets and all of those important things that people have been talking about in this forum.

To an extent now – and I guess I am thinking about the management within this new structure that we have, led by Jim Peacock, called the Science Team – we do a lot of it by sitting down and working out what seems to be reasonable. Nobody teaches us how to do this, but we established what we wanted to do and we simply sat down and worked out how we were going to do it. But within this team we do have people who have expertise when we need advice. We have a member in this team who is a people and culture person, and she keeps us on the right track. She in fact runs the mentoring program within the Science Team.

So we have a system which is partly what we want to do and partly governed by how you really should do it. And we have a lot of advice as well.

Bradley Beasley: There was one thing I did neglect (and I would probably be flogged for it if it got back to the Chancelry). The Go8, the ANU in particular, has been successful in getting a grant with the federal government on workplace productivity, and I was involved in part of the pilot program. What they are looking at doing is instituting a program for researchers coming through, to deal with the administrative side of things, covering a number of the things that we have talked about here. But it is pretty much in its infancy. I think it is going to be launched fairly soon, so you may be lucky enough to participate in it, who knows.

Graham Farquhar: Bradley, you would be a good person to ask this: I thought that under the laws of the land a certain amount of the budget had to be set aside for career development. Is that no longer the case? I understand that at CSIRO, and certainly the CRC I was involved with and, my understanding is, at the ANU, there is money set aside for career development and in fact not enough people of our ilk actually take the time to use the funds. I would be interested to hear whether they have suddenly disappeared.

Bradley Beasley: No, they are still around and there are quite a few programs still running, particularly for staff. We have got a development unit which sits two doors away from me and is involved in developing the programs, which are quite extensive. It is a matter of making application and going along to them. They have wide-ranging courses that are available. The program that I am talking about is specific and being tailored for the sector. But yes, there certainly is funding out there for our researchers and so on, and if you are with the ANU I would encourage you to take advantage of it.

Alan Lawson: That is correct, and all universities have a staff development committee or something that provides courses of that kind. I guess the reason I gave the rather more pessimistic answer earlier is that having participated in a lot of those, it seems to me they are 'training' courses in the most instrumentalist fashion, and they focus on telling you what the university policies are and what the compliance regulations and so on are. As I said, they seem to me to be technical skills such that you need to know they exist and you need to know who to ask.

I can actually use my literary training at this point. Dr Samuel Johnson, the person who produced the first English dictionary and who produced many of the pages for dictionaries of quotations, said, 'There are two kinds of knowledge. There are things you know yourself, and there are things you know where to find out.' And the second kind of knowledge is actually the more useful, which is the final point he made. I think that is really important.

I guess the one other tip I would like to pass on is that when people come to you with a grievance, which is certainly part of being a manager and being in charge of a group, it is often quite important to ask – not at the very beginning, perhaps, but after they have had the five-minute introductory rant – 'What would you like to come out of this? What is the best possible outcome?' And the real warning sign is when people just look at you absolutely blankly when you ask them that question, 'What would you like to come out of this?' They just look at you like a stunned mullet. What you can deduce from that, I think, is that they want to vent. They want to rant, they might hope that you or they or the Universe at large will punish the person who did them wrong. You can explain to them, if you like, that it is not your job to punish them and it's not your job to make everybody love them. But there are some things you can do and some things you can't do, and it's quite important to get to that stage in the discussion relatively early.

The second thing somebody already mentioned, I think: the procrastination issue. A problem deferred is a problem multiplied, there is no question of that.

And the third thing is that when most people come to you with a problem they come to you with a multiple problem. They will usually describe it as, 'This went wrong and that went wrong, and somebody else did this,' and essentially it becomes like a conspiracy theory after a while. Many of the people who present to you, whose problems have been deferred, really genuinely have multiple problems. It is usually appropriate and productive to try and disentangle those problems and solve them separately, because the solutions will often lie in different domains within your institution or your system.

Question (Sarah Meacham): I think the theme that I have gotten is that today was all about negotiation. Everyone sitting up there, you are negotiating all the time. In terms of getting to that central point where both parties – or however many parties are involved – agree, quite often there is going to be disagreement and conflict resolution. I guess I would just like to go through the whole panel and perhaps some of you can give us your insights and thoughts, or tips and tricks, on when you come up with conflict and how to resolve conflict.

Leanna Read: It is a very important issue. It often can be quite contentious. For example, when we were setting up my company, or we were getting venture capital into my company, we got a venture capitalist who wanted to have all sorts of controls and things, and the other shareholders were saying no, they didn't want it. How do you come to a point of agreement?

I think the starting point has to be to think about and understand the other person's position – and really understand it, not just ask them. Ask them three different ways, because quite often you get an answer and you've interpreted it one way when they're actually meaning something else. So really getting down and understanding where the other party is coming from is crucial in that, and making sure that they understand where you're coming from, so at least you are starting out with understanding your position.

As you have heard before, respect is clearly there. If you start to sound cynical in discussion with people, you've kind of lost it. Treating people with respect goes an enormous way to getting a solution.

I think another approach in doing this sort of thing is to say, 'Well, let's jot down the key points that are the most important and where we will agree on what we will do' – a heads of agreement, in a way – and then you've got a basis to come back to, because you find, 'Okay, yes, we've agreed these are going to be this way.' And something crops up, and you suddenly find you're back on that same round again. If you can say, 'Look, we talked to each other and we understood each other, we agreed this or we identified that something has to be done further and I am going to do it,' that is often good. So you are taking things chunk by chunk.

An example of having to do things further is that my venture capital investor wanted my shareholders to warrant that there was nothing happening in the company that shouldn't be happening. I said, 'They can't do that. They're shareholders. I can warrant that; I'm happy to warrant it personally. But how can you expect that from my shareholders, who have no more information and probably a lot less information than you already have, having made me do site tests and everything else?' And he said, 'Well, we don't actually expect them to know. We just want them to accept the liability.' I could have argued with him and told him whatever, but I said, 'Okay, I'll go and ask them. I am going to ask them all and put your viewpoint, but we are going to have to come back and discuss it.' And sure enough, several of the shareholders said no. But by my going through that process and showing that I was willing to at least appreciate it and go forward – knowing very well what the answer would be – he ended up giving on that.

Then there is also compromise – give and take. As Moira said, you have to know what you absolutely need, not what you want. There are going to be things in any negotiation or whatever that you are going to have to give up, so work out which ones are your must-haves and in some respects you can then keep the others up your sleeve for a bit of compromise: 'I give on this. What are you going to give on?'

I think you can apply that kind of process to anything you are doing.

Moira Clay: You are absolutely right, Sarah. I think in any process of negotiation there is inevitably disagreement. To my mind, there are several key things for conflict resolution. The first thing is to unpack the issues, as Leanna has mentioned, and to understand expectations. What are the expectations of the parties involved, and what are the abilities of the parties involved to actually deliver on outcomes?

In my role at the Children's Cancer Institute I lead the career development work for the institute, and the younger researchers do have issues along the way: they should have been included as an author on a paper, they haven't been heard about certain issues, and so on. It is very important to make sure that people can be heard, in terms of voicing their conflicts, because I think one of the issues is that when things bubble along they can often grow into something which then becomes 'bigger than Ben Hur'.

The other tip I would give is that if there are conflicts along the way, as the issues are unpacked and you are really wanting to know what the expectations are and what the actual issue is, to keep a record – keep a written record of management of that conflict, because sometimes it can come back to bite you.

Be simple, be clear, understand expectations, be professional about it, and keep a record of things – they would be my suggestions.

Bradley Beasley: I suppose it depends on where you are negotiating from, which is one of the key factors. In my role I am normally either reviewing a problem, so I am dealing with the parties related to the conflict, or I am representing one party against another, and in those roles it is quite different.

When you are the third party reviewing what is going on, you are making the evaluations and all that sort of thing, and you are required to go there with an open mind, no fixed views or anything like that, to review the evidence and so forth, and give a recommendation and a finding.

When you are doing mediation you try to get the parties to come to their own conclusions in regard to what is happening, give them some feedback in regard to what the issues are and so forth.

When it comes to being a negotiator in a situation, the important thing is, as the other speakers have indicated, to know what your position is. But you have got to give yourself room. If you go in there with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, either you are going to win or you are going to lose. The thing that needs to be remembered is that in any negotiations that take place there is always one party that is weaker. The rhetoric that [former Treasurer] Costello came out with, with respect to employees being equal with employers, is rubbish. Who do you think is going to employ you, who do you think is going to say, 'Well, you can work here for this, that and the other,' if you have unreal expectations? You won't get the job; that's the harsh reality of it.

So you have always got to give yourself a bit of room in regard to what you are going in for. I learnt this a long time ago. I was negotiating with the Employers Federation in New South Wales over our members who were working at a company out at Botany. The rep from the Employers Federation, who was a well-respected chap – and I had a great deal of respect for him – said, 'Oh, there's no basis for what you're asserting,' and all the rest of it. So I just dragged out all my documents and I said, 'Well, here you go. What do you think of that? Got you on toast. Okay, this is what we want.' Well, that was great; I won my argument. I got what I was after. But you live another day, and you'll end up negotiating with someone else another day. I didn't give him any room to save face, to manoeuvre in any way. The next time I came up to negotiate with him, I was crucified – and it was the most humiliating experience I have ever had. I learnt a very valuable lesson.

So, when you are going into negotiations, have things mapped out, work out what it is that you are really after, what you can give up, give yourself some room to manoeuvre, and, crucially, have respect for the other party. Don't degrade them in any way, even if you think they are an idiot. Always treat them in a manner such that, the next time you come up against them, at least you will keep some form of dialogue going.

Another experience I had was when I was doing my practical legal training. One of the courses that we did there was in negotiation skills, and we were doing internationally – my team was representing a country negotiating with another country and so on. And another thing that is really important is having trust and confidence in those who are on your team. We went in to negotiate certain points. We knew exactly where we were tracking, and we knew what issues we could pick the other side off on. But we also knew the consequences of doing that, in regard to future relations with this country.

Our two sides were even in regard to what was going on, and one of our players went in there and she thought she would go for the goal. That was great. But if we were in real negotiations internationally, there would have been a war between those two countries. The consequences of what you do are significant.

When you go into negotiations, have confidence in those players who are going to go in and negotiate with you, and also make them accountable for what they are putting forward, and know what they are going to put forward.

Alan Lawson: I agree with every word. The only thing I would add is that it is usually said in conflict resolution that there are two sides to every story, and that is not correct. There are almost always more than two sides to every story. The one conflict resolution workshop I did that was really valuable was one that simply produced some scenarios and asked those of us in the workshop to identify just how many different interests were actually at stake. Even if the number of individuals apparently involved in the conflict is small, there are always – I think always – other people outside the conflicting parties who have interests at stake in the outcome, and it's pretty important to remember that as well.

Bob Williamson: May I make a point on this. I agree with what was said but, Sarah, I do think there is one additional point that is important, based on experience over time. Occasionally you will have an issue come up which presents as a conflict but which actually involves an illegal act. So, for instance, if there is racial discrimination, gender discrimination or serious misconduct, my experience is that an attempt to deal with it as if it is not illegal, and as if it is not a serious act, in the long run almost always gets you into much more trouble. If anyone wants stories, I can tell them stories over lunch. But if you are dealing with something which is unlawful, the right way to deal with it is as if it is unlawful, and not to try to do conflict resolution on it.

Graham Farquhar: I know I am not a speaker here, but I did have an interesting experience in 1997. I was a science advisor and a delegate at Kyoto for the conference of parties on climate change, and so I was able to see various levels of negotiation, both formal and informal. One thing Leanna said which struck a chord is that in a lot of the negotiation they actually use a particular technique when you come to forks in the road. Unlike Woody Allen, who said, 'Yes, I'll have the fork,' people would disagree about whether to go left or right, and so that would be discussed. But then there was a system where you would say, 'Okay, we don't want to go down the left fork but, were we to go down the left fork…' and then you move on and explore what your view is about what would result if, for some reason, your side changed its opinion about this or something affected it. And so the negotiation would actually progress a long way, despite all those headlines along the way having been highlighted as ones where there was 'not yet' agreement. That was quite interesting to me, because that was not something I had struck in life as a scientist.

The other thing that really struck me was the ability of the professionals, who often were really quite passionate – they weren't cynical – to get together out of session with the negotiators on the other side and maintain a social relationship. And this continued. They knew they were negotiating over many years; negotiations continue today. So, as Bradley said, they had to maintain a personal relationship with these people, even though they were arguing strongly against them. That was an interesting experience that I had.

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