What I envision for my future, is to work as a translational scientist, as a bridge between performing fundamental biomedical research –building new basic knowledge- and launching the development of new therapeutics through patenting processes and initiating clinical trials. Therefore, I anticipate that I will have to take on leadership roles and responsibilities. Consequently, I believe it is important that I take the time to build and understand my leadership philosophy in order to be fair and efficient in these roles.
The importance of empathy, inclusion, compassion, fairness, acceptance and adaptability.
Being a leader means working with people. I have a very social personality, and one of the major values I identified as important for me as a leader is empathy. I like meeting a lot of new personalities because it brings me what I could call “social experience”. By this I mean that it is building my tolerance, it makes me understand different point of views, it gives me the opportunity to communicate and exchange, as other people tell me about their life experiences, and all of this results in me having a lot of empathy. I want empathy to be one of the core values of my leadership philosophy because to me, a good leader should not be rigid, but should take into account every team member and consider them as humans with their own feelings, experiences, qualities and weaknesses and make the team work, depending on these traits. Alongside empathy, inclusion, compassion, fairness, acceptance and adaptability are also part of my leadership philosophy. To me, it is even more important when dealing with a very diverse team or an interdisciplinary team since members are more likely to come from different backgrounds and disciplines with sometimes little understanding in regards to other member’s fields. What was interesting to me after filling my LPI report is that “enable to act” was the practice I scored the most in, with “foster cooperative relationships”, “actively listen to diverse viewpoints” and “treat others with respect” being my top 3 actions. I think this shows that in a leadership situation, the people I am working with are the most important factor to me and that empathy is one of my core values.
A good leader is inspiring.
Envisioning the future of a team or a teamwork and looking forward should be one of the major qualities of a leader. To me, one should be very inspired to be able to envision a future. Inspiration gives team members the grit to accomplish a task or a project in the future. I have noticed that the most successful leaders inspire others because they are very passionate and invested in what they decide to accomplish. Hence, my leadership philosophy is to inspire my coworkers, by showing them how passionate, realistic and driven I am. To inspire a shared vision of the future, I identified some of my weaknesses with the LPI report and some of the readings we discussed in class but I now consider it part of my leadership philosophy and will try to make it one of my strengths.
Challenges bring strength.
I think the last core component of my leadership philosophy is accepting challenges and being open to and optimistic about its outcomes. Being a scientist means to me wanting to find solutions to -in my field- health problems and diseases. Moreover, it also means being curious and ready for adventures and new discoveries. Challenges are part of the daily life of scientists. Thus, a leader in biomedical sciences -from my point of view- should be able to accept them and tackle them. Nowadays, scientists tend to be very specialized in a very specific field or niche, and we need interdisciplinary teams to come together to find different solutions to a problem. It means that people from different background will need to work together, and that is a challenge a leader in interdisciplinary biomedical sciences should be able to accept and be optimistic about. Finally, I think that being innovative in biomedical sciences is the key to solve a problem and so challenging the process and making my team members challenging the process as well is part of my leadership philosophy.