ダイバーシティ推進について
Griendling教授講演録（平成26年3月19日，第87回年会ランチョンセミナー）
Dr. Kathy Griendling’s Talk on Managing Family with Work
- Hiroshi Hibino
- My name is Hiroshi Hibino from Niigata University. It is a great honor and pleasure for me to chair the talk from Professor Kathy Griendling in Emory University School of Medicine. She is not only an outstanding scientist in the field of cardiovascular system, in particular NADPH oxidase, but also an affectionate and a sweet mother of five children. She is going to give a special talk in this afternoon about her excellent work and experiments, but in this session she will kindly talk how she has balanced her research and family life, and how she has developed her successful career.
First of all, let me introduce her biography briefly. Dr. Kathy Griendling received her Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology from Johns Hopkins University in 1982, and performed her postdoctoral training with Robert Cox at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Wayne Alexander at Harvard University.
She is currently a Professor of Medicine in the Cardiovascular Division of Emory University, and a Fellow of American Heart Association. She served as an Associate Editor for Circulation Research and The American Journal of Physiology-Cell Physiology, and is one of the executive editors of Antioxidants and Redox Signaling. Recently, she became the Vice Chair for Research and Faculty Development in the Department of Medicine and also she is currently an Assistant Dean for Faculty Development in Emory University. - Kathy Griendling
- Thank you very much. It’s really an honor to be here speaking to so many distinguished Japanese scientists.
So, Chihiro Yabe-Nishmura came to me and asked me to talk about how I balanced my life and my career. I think that would help to start to tell you a little bit about my family.
These are my five children and my husband. This is when we were in Costa Rica several years ago. My children are now grown− the youngest is 19 and she is in college and the oldest, right here, is a mother of two children. These are my two grandchildren. Since most of my children have moved out of the house, I now have three dogs and a cat, so that’s what’s kept me busy outside of science.
In my job, I run a research lab that has about 10 people, mostly students and postdoctoral fellows. I do a lot of administration and a lot of career counseling for new scientists and physicians in the Department of Medicine and the School of Medicine. We have about 2200 faculty and my job is to help them be successful in their careers. Also as mentioned, I serve as an editor at Circulation Research and the Journal of Physiology.
I’ll try to map out what I’ve done for the last 25 years and how I did actually spend my time. If you take away the time to sleep, I spent about 57,000 hours at work, which turned out to be a little bit more than the 1,200 hours I spent leading my children in boy scouts and girl scouts, or 4,000 hours helping my husband coach soccer and baseball with our children, or the 5000 hours I spent on homework with the children, or the 45,000 hours that we spent on taking care of our home and yard. There was a little bit of time left for personal time. It really balances out fairly well, but it also means that we have a very busy life.
My advice to many of the new faculty who I speak to in my job: Number one is to be organized. It’s very important that you prioritize what you need to do at work, and what you need to do at home. There is no way that I could have completed all the work that I needed to do for my career as well as have had the time for my children and husband if I had not been able to prioritize what I needed to do.
Something I tell our faculty is to work smarter, not longer. We can come to work and we can spend many hours at work, but if the time we spend at work is doing things like chatting in the hall or taking an hour-long lunch, we’re not very productive. When I am at work, I spend my time working. I know exactly what I need to accomplish every day. That’s what I focus on during the day.
Importantly, you can’t prioritize all your work if you don’t know where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing, so keep track of it. It sounds very simple, but it’s essential to being able to schedule all the things you need to do at work and all the things you need to do at home. One tip that someone told me that works for many people is that you actually schedule time for yourself, because the first thing that goes away when you’re busy is time for yourself. Schedule that on your calendar and keep it as something sacred. It also helps to occasionally work from home because you have many fewer distractions and you can be very productive and focused while you’re at home.
Another thing that has been very important for me and for most of our junior faculty is to have a support network. You don’t have to do this alone. There are many people who are happy to help you with your career. You need to have a mentor. You need to have someone who’s guiding you within your system who can tell you the things you need to do to be successful. For many people, that’s not just one person.
Sometimes you have a mentor for your scientific projects, you have a different mentor for your clinical ones and a different mentor for your teaching responsibilities. You also need to find that person who can provide you with emotional support, because we all have times when the experiment doesn’t work, the children are sick, nothing is going right and you just need someone who can help support you.
You should create networks for yourself at home and at work. We all do better when we have many people to talk with, to bounce ideas off of; we need people who can help care for our children when our children are sick and we have an important meeting at work. Your life partner is very important and should be sharing your workload with you.
My husband splits all of our responsibilities 50:50 with me, and that was extremely important for both of us to be successful. He is now the Chief of Cardiology at Emory University. He has his own research lab and he is in charge of about 110 faculty and all of their clinical responsibilities as well as our research program. We’re both very busy, but the way we manage is by helping each other.
I also think it’s important to set limits and expectations. Make it very clear when you are on call at work, and when you’re not. You need to guard the family time that you have jealously. It’s something very precious. It’s not okay for people to expect an answer to an email at 1 o’clock in the morning, and it’s not okay to be constantly available to be contacted by your boss at any hour of the day or night.
It’s also important that you understand what is expected of you. Many of our junior faculty haven’t looked at the promotion guidelines and don’t understand what it takes to get to the next step in their career because they haven’t read the guidelines. You can’t be successful if you don’t know what the rules are to get there and what’s expected when you get there. As a researcher, as the head of a laboratory, it’s also important that you let the people who work for you know what you expect of them.
I think it’s also important to be realistic. We all want to have that Nature Medicine paper. We all want to be at the top of our field, but sometimes we have to prioritize life over work or work over life. You have to know what you can actually accomplish. There’s a lot you can do and you can be successful in both the places, but sometimes one will take priority over the other.
A successful career doesn’t happen by chance. It’s something that you have to work at. There are many things that we are asked to do over the course of a scientific career, we do our research, we teach, and some of us take care of patients. You have to know how to focus on what’s important for you to be successful, what’s important for you to reach the expectations of your employer.
You’ll have many opportunities and you should take them when they come. Some of them will only come by once, so you don’t want to lose an opportunity. So, volunteer. When you’re given an opportunity, volunteer to take it. But when you make those choices, choose the ones that you enjoy doing. If you join a committee just to be on a committee, and you hate the whole topic of the committee, it won’t be something that will be fruitful for either you or for the committee.
I think it’s also important that you learn what’s called the art of graceful self-promotion. That doesn’t mean that you have to brag about what you do or every time that you have a success make sure your boss knows. But it means to be able to say, “Look what I’ve done. How can I help you do something more?” in a nice way. As an example of that, I heard someone give a talk recently who is an editor of one of the important ophthalmology journals, and he was talking about how difficult it is to deal with papers that are rejected.
In his story, he said, “Well, the first two papers I wrote were accepted without revision”, and I thought, “Wow.” As you know, that’s a very big accomplishment. But then he went on to say, “But the next one was five pages of revisions that I needed to do.” So, he was able to tell us a major accomplishment that he had, but put it in the context of one that was more like what the rest of us experience, so it didn’t sound like he was just bragging.
It’s also important to learn when to say no. You can’t do everything. Choose those things that you enjoy and that are important for your career, and sometimes you just have to say, “No, I can’t do that. But thank you very much for asking.”
Having said that, I think it’s very important that you make your family your first priority. You need to be there for your children. When they have something in school, it’s important for you to attend it, to let your children know that you’re interested in what they are doing. You need to help with their homework. I have done my share of homework after five children. But I think one way to do that is to have a meal together every day where you can talk about your day and talk about the things important to your children. You have to be there for your children and for your spouse. Just as they need to support you, you need to support them.
You need to take care of yourself, and that means good diet, good exercise, and sleeping well. Also leave time to decompress; leave some time for yourself to relax at the end of the day and to think about what’s ahead.
I’ll just leave you with this thought: You have to enjoy what you do. You have to enjoy what you do at home. You have to enjoy what you do at work. If you do, you’ll be happier and you’ll be more productive because you’re happier. I’m sure that all of you can be successful in your careers with just a little bit of forethought into how you balance work and life. Thank you. - Hiroshi Hibino
- I’m pretty much sure that a number of young women scientists get motivated by your talk. Now this talk is open for discussion, or any comments or questions from the audience.
Yes, please. - Female Questioner
- You should have had a very busy life, but have you ever thought you want to quit giving up your job and if you have, how did you overcome it?
- Kathy Griendling
- That’s a very good question. And yes, I’ve wanted to quit several times. Every time I had a child, I decided, “This is it, I’m staying home with the children.” And then I would think about what would I do if I stayed home? Would I work at a daycare center and take care of children? That would not have been a good idea; I wouldn’t have had the patience to do that.
I thought about what I would give up, if I didn’t work. I would give up the intellectual stimulation. I would be more worried about whether the sheets were clean and the towels were folded than thinking about how NADPH oxidases work. The way I overcame that frustration − sometimes grants don’t get funded and papers don’t get accepted and I think, “Why am I doing this?” But by just thinking about what I would lose if I didn’t have science in my life I was able to overcome those frustrations. - Male Questioner
- Thank you very much for your brilliant talk. Your talk should be very helpful not only for young scientists but also for many established scientists who are spending very busy days every day. My question is: How do you organize schedules in everyday life? You clearly illustrated how important it is to organize schedules to make the work efficient. I’m wondering whether you may have some special time only to make a nice scheduled arrangement.
- Kathy Griendling
- It is actually a complicated question because I think how you organize your life and your work changes every day.
In a sense your priorities are probably different every day, but one thing I do at the end of each week is to sit down and look at my schedule for the next week and figure out which things I need to prioritize and work on first. Then I make sure that if there’s something coming up at home that I have do, I realize I won’t be able to work at night, say on Monday night because we are doing my granddaughter’s birthday party, or whatever it is. So I think weekly looking at your schedule is one way, and also remembering when you do look at your schedule, to make sure that those things that are important to you happen first.
For example, I need time to write. I write in the morning better than I write at night, so I know that if I put 2 hours aside in the morning I am a lot more productive than if I put 2 hours aside at night because I am tired and less productive. I think knowing where your strengths are and then prioritizing things according to that is what I would suggest. - Male Questioner
- Thank you very much for the nice talk. I have one question. My daughter works so hard because her supervisors give major main tasks to her, and she should know when to say ‘no’ as you say. Could you tell me a good method, how to say ‘no’?
- Kathy Griendling
- I wish I had a very good answer for you, but I’ll tell you one strategy, and this is how I deal with my children sometimes when they don’t want to hear no. You say, “I can do that for you, but if I do that for you, I can’t do this.” If she’s being asked to take care of patients or to teach a class, and they both take a lot of time, she can say, “I would be happy to help you, but is it okay with you if I don’t do this other thing you asked me to do?” Sometimes that works.
- Male questioner
- Thank you so much for your impressive talk. Let me ask you in Japanese. I’m sorry.
[Japanese] - Hiroshi Hibino
- Yeah. This is also my question. He is asking the administration or operation management of the university. In Japan, we have lots of meetings which starts from, let’s say, 5 o’clock or 6 p.m., so if you have some babies or kids to yourself, you have to get home early but we have a lot of the meetings that starts from 9-10 and you stay longer, you know, till 12. How the university managed these meetings?
- Kathy Griendling
- Many of our administrators are older people, so they don’t have young children and so they will schedule meetings at night, and then expect everyone to be able to attend it. But our young mothers will say, “I can’t come at night. I have to take care of my children”. If it’s important to have younger people there, we can reschedule the meeting.
Part of it is culture: Your university has to be aware that timing is a genuine problem that people need to deal with. As my children have gotten older, I do work long hours. I do work now in the evenings that I didn’t do when they were younger, but it was a choice that I made. I wouldn’t change that decision. At the time I couldn’t go to those evening meetings--I missed them--but it hasn’t hurt my career in the long run. - Hiroshi Hibino
- Any other questions?
Let me ask one question regarding some sort of a common sense or some general tendency of the US regarding the responsibility of the husband to take care of the kids or children. In Japan, there is some tendency that the women take a major role in nursing and taking care of the kids. What about the United States? I have heard that even husbands take a major responsibility in caring for the kids? How about that? - Kathy Griendling
- In my mother’s generation, the mother − the woman -- stayed home and took care of the family and the father worked. In my generation, maybe 25% to 40% of women work, and responsibility is shared. In my children’s generation, men expect to be part of their children’s lives. They have learned what a joy it can be to raise children, and so they want to be there for their children. But when they’re there for their children, they’re there to do the housework too. So, they do help with that.
- Hiroshi Hibino
- Any questions? Okay. If not, let me close the session. I’m pretty much sure that a lot of young women scientists get motivated by Dr. Griendling’s talk. I hope that young women continue to have motivation to science and get very important position in the future. Thank you very much.
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