Great Manager Profile: Giselle Martin

reposted from http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2011/12/11107/great-manager-profile-giselle-martin

by Aja C. Duncan

Editor's Note: This is the first in an occasional series to highlight UCSF's great managers as determined by the scores in a recent employee engagement survey.

Great managers come in all shapes and sizes. “Everyone has a different style,” says UCSF’s Giselle Martin, “the key is to embrace your style and build on your strengths.”

Giselle Martin

In a recent UCSF employee engagement survey, Martin, management services officer and chief administrator of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in the UCSF School of Dentistry, received one of the highest overall engagement scores by her staff.  

It is not hard to imagine why Martin’s team members posted high engagements scores in the employee survey. An enthusiastic manager, Martin talks about her staff as if they were family. “I truly care about the people I work with,” she says. “I care about their feelings; I care that they do a good job.”

Her recipe for success comes from her own experience. “Since I started my career in entry level positions and, at times, performing similar roles, I know what it takes for them to get something accomplished. I’m a bit more sensitive to their needs. My staff knows that I recognize how hard they work. They know I appreciate all that they do. This is key.”

Martin spent the first five years of her life living in a small town in Mexico called Juchitlan in the State of Jalisco. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, she watched her parents work two, sometimes three, jobs. As the oldest daughter of five children, Martin was managing her siblings at an early age. “I made sure that when my mother came home from work, the house was in order.”

When she began her career at UCSF in July 1995, Martin worked as temporary employee in the Buchanan Dental Center. Eventually she worked her way into a position as an administrative assistant II. She decided she needed a greater professional challenge, but felt she didn’t have the education to back it up. So she went back to school. She worked full-time, took evening and weekend classes, all the while parenting her two young children, ages six and two. It took many years, but by the time she graduated with her bachelors degree from the University of San Francisco, she was class representative, on the Dean’s honor roll, and asked to give the graduation commencement address for which she spoke in front of approximately 2,000 people.

“People ask me how I did it,” she says, “I simply made it work. There were times I had to take my kids to class. Sometimes the teacher would kick us out, but I always went back. Plus,” she laughs, “my family had evening homework hours for years.”

Through it all, Martin maintained a goal sheet, outlining key steps and celebrating the small successes. “I still have those,” she says. “I use them to remind me of where I was, where I am and where I am going.”

Creating a Roadmap for Success

Knowing where to go and creating a plan to get there is a fundamental practice for every successful manager. For her final graduate research project — Martin just completed her Master of Public Administration in Health Services Administration for which she was a merits scholarship award recipient — she wrote a paper on “UCSF Successful Managers Career Track, Effective Management Styles and Leadership Dynamics.” [PDF]

In the course of conducting that research, Martin read widely in the fields of management and leadership and interviewed 15 effective managers at UCSF. What she found was this: successful individuals defined their goals and created a roadmap for getting there.

Setting goals is an area where Martin excels. This skill is also important to the success of her team. The area where her staff scored Martin the highest was regarding setting expectations, specifically in ensuring her staff knows what is expected of them at work.

“I have really great staff,” Martin says. “They know their work and are passionate about their jobs. I don’t need to micromanage them.”

To put together such an excellent team, Martin makes sure she hires the best staff and puts them in positions in which they can be successful. To lay this foundation, she sets high performance expectations at the time people are hired. She uses regular staff meetings as an opportunity to check in with her team regarding expectations and to ensure everyone has what they need to succeed. A resource guide for managers on setting expectations is available here. [PDF]

Martin also has an open door policy. She is flexible with her staff, enabling them to deal with life’s emergencies so they can return to work able to give 110 percent. She uses available campus resources to bring in experts whenever possible to ensure her team is knowledgeable, skilled, engaged and successful.

“My staff knows that I recognize how hard they work. They know I appreciate all that they do. This is key.”

Martin’s strengths is her ability to get the group working together, says Lee Rogers, an academic personnel analyst in the department. “There are lots of things beyond our specific jobs that need to get done,” Lee says. “She [Martin] creates an informal atmosphere where people come together as a team to help each other out.” 

When asked what is the most important thing for supervisors and managers to do, Martin has a fairly simple prescription, ““Listen, listen, listen. Listen to their concerns, their ideas.” Beyond listening, she lets her staff know that their jobs are important. “We expect a lot of them,” Martin says. “I really feel that everyone wants to do a good job. All we need to do is let them and acknowledge them when they do. A thank you goes a long way.”

Tony Pogrel, DDS, MD, William Ware Endowed Chair in Orthognathic and Reconstructive Surgery in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the UCSF School of Dentistryepartment of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, has witnessed Martin’s growth as a manager. When she came into the position more than three years ago, she had some areas that needed development. He notes that her persistence and commitment have made a big difference. One area where her effort has really paid off, Pogrel says, is in the monthly staff meetings, which Martin leads. The meetings provide a great opportunity to communicate with clinical and non-clinical staff.

Susan Schultz, associate dean of Administration and Finance for the School of Dentistry, recognizes Martin’s excellent people skills. “She genuinely cares about her staff,” Schultz says, “and supports their development. She wants them to move forward.”

Understanding the Big Picture

Schultz says that it can be difficult to balance driving for results while genuinely valuing the needs of people who are being directed. For Schultz, the solution lies in understanding the big picture. “It is important,” she says, “to not get mired in the details. We need to be able to step back and see what is important, where we should be investing our time.” It is from this place that expectations, in alignment with the broader organizational needs, can best be set.

It is essential that managers connect individual staff members’ roles with the needs of the department and the overarching goals of the organization.  Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, in her State of the University Address this October, indicated that the University’s three-year plan provides a guide to UCSF employees, outlining a clear set of things they can act on every day. And this, according to the chancellor, is where great managers come in. “We have to have great management. It’s not just nice to have; it’s essential to have because great-minded people with passion and talent who want to be committed to the institution need to know what exactly the institution needs from them.”

Across the University managers are rising to the challenge.  In the words of Martin, “even though I am not a researcher, educator or clinician, I have always felt my role supports the mission of UCSF. I love UCSF and am a strong believer in what it stands for.” 

The Single Most Important Practice of Leaders

After spending the last few weeks coaching a number of leaders in various roles and industries, I was struck by the commonality of each of their needs. “I just need time to step back and think more strategically,” was the refrain I heard over and over again.

It seems simple enough, give yourself some quiet, focused time to think and strategize. Certainly the research and leadership scholarship identifies reflection as a critical practice for successful leaders. Schon defines “reflection-in-action” as a process that consists of developing strategies of action, understanding phenomena, framing and reframing situations encountered in day-to-day experience. Sounds like something every leader should engage in.

At its root, reflection requires time. And here is the rub. Who has the time? The answer is of course that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It is how we use it, what we attend to, that makes or breaks us. If sleep was optional, there are some who would skip it. They would of course get seriously injured or ill, but they would have a few extra hours over the rest of us. Reflection is like sleep in its criticality. But unlike sleep, it is optional. But without it, we often find ourselves on the reactive rather than proactive side of the equation. We can certainly survive. The question is, can we thrive?

To be an effective leader, to be a strategic leader, we need to carve out some time each day, or, at a minimum, each week to take stock of things, to look out toward the horizon, to anticipate what’s coming and make preparations, to define where we are going and forge the path ahead. 

This reflection can take many forms. It can be narrative, bulleted, illustrative. The form itself does not matter – use whatever works best for you. But be sure to take the time to think through your past, present and future circumstances so that you learn from past mistakes, gather the necessary information to make good decisions now, and chart a course for the future.  

Being strategic is not so much a skill as a practice. Give yourself the time to practice yours.

Authentic Leadership

Joseph Castro is a tall, robust man with dark hair smoothed back off his forehead. Young for his position as Vice Chancellor for Student Academic Affairs, he carries an old world elegance, simultaneously appearing both charming and wise. This is what one sees on first meeting Joe. But what is so compelling about him, what inspired me to write this profile about him, is something else entirely. It is his heart, the giant muscle which guides Joe in everything he says and does.

I first met Joe many years ago. He was new in his role at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and had discovered a scholarship fund for Native female medical and nursing students which was being underutilized. Calling a meeting with the Native American Health Alliance, of which I, as a Native staff member at UCSF, was a member.  We spent an hour together, Joe, a first year Native medical student and I talking about the ways in which UCSF could best utilize the scholarship funding and advance participation of more Native people in the health sciences. Later, Joe covered the expenses for my attendance at a meeting at UCLA, where Native staff across the UC system were working toward the creation of system-side Native American Staff Development Conference. The conference was recently held for the third year and UCSF, more accurately Joe, sponsored the event.

These are small examples of the kind of care Joe takes in his relationships with students and staff, with following through on his commitments and priorities. These are minor examples of the authenticity of Joe’s leadership. When I asked Joe what he considers his strengths as a leader, he indicated four things: good listener; open and accessible; creative; and focused on serving others (staff and students). But I would describe his strengths differently. I would say he listens with his heart and he problem-solves with his eyes on the best outcomes for everyone involved. His words are worth their weight in gold. As for weaknesses, Joe is comfortable naming these as well. He avoids conflict. He struggles with self promotion. He has a hard time turning down projects that align with his values and thus finds himself sometimes overcommitted.

Recently I heard Joe speak on the topic of leadership. He told the audience that much of what he learned about working with others came from the grandfather who raised him. He also indicated he had learned a great deal from childhood adversity. From his grandfather he learned how to get things done by building positive relationships with others and from adversity he learned resilience and the ability to focus on long-term outcomes rather than short-term concerns. But the most important leadership lesson that Joe ever learned was not to focus on himself. In his words, “It’s not about me.  It’s all about whom I am serving." That is something else Joe learned from his grandfather, the value of service. It isn’t always easy, he acknowledges, but he is committed to this principle.

Enlarge Your Sphere of Influence

“Leadership and learning,” according to John F. Kennedy, “are indispensible to one another.” And yet over and over again, we as leaders think that `what we know’ is our greatest asset. It is not. ‘What we know’ provides a robust frame through which to interpret new information; it provides the structural support on which new things can rest. But without learning, there is nothing new. There is no growth at all.

Leadership then is not a role or a  pre-existing skill set but a practice. It is the practice of asking good questions, of learning from our environment and the people around us. One way to deepen this practice is to train in the art of shifting frames. Frames are the way we see the world, the borders we put around life experiences so that we can focus on the content therein. But the process of framing is reductive and thus limits what we can see. As a leadership practice, take a moment to ask yourself “what is the meaning I am constructing about this situation, person, challenge? What solutions or actions am I leaning towards?” This will give you a sense of the frame you are in. But to shift the frame, you must actually see an alternate point of view. Stand up. Walk to the other side of the room. What do you notice here?

There are a multitude of frames, as many frames as there are people. Bolman and Deal, in their book Reframing Academic Leadership point to four core leadership and organizational frames: structural, human resources (people development focused), political and symbolic (cultural). Each of these frames is associated with a particular kind of situational analysis. In the structural frame, leaders often ask, “what are the critical rules, roles and policies? How can I establish effective procedures, lines of authority, and technologies to ensure the best possible outcome?” In the human resource frame, leaders attend to people’s needs, developing skills and growing capacity, enhancing relationships between individuals and teams, and ensuring the overall health of the system. In the political frame, leaders focus on power as displayed through conflict, resource constraints, constituency interests and agendas and group alliances. In the symbolic frame, leaders ask themselves, “what are the cultural beliefs being displayed by this person, team, department? What stories would be most compelling to them? How can I create practices, celebrations, rituals that would effectively bring them together around a shared vision? Which symbols best convey this vision?”

The next time you find yourself facing a situation that is all too familiar and yet the outcome you are seeking eludes you, shift your frame and see what new focal areas, new solutions become available to you. The more attention you pay to the diversity of frames, the more effective you will be as a leader. Learning is the key to enlarging your sphere of influence.