Managing a team in times of infertility
“True leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed” — Sheryl Sandberg
I work on access to vaccination in Africa. Managing others is my favourite part of my job. Since January 2015, I have a small team of five very smart young women. I like to do what Woodrow Wilson said: “use not only all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow”.
But managing a team, even small, requires a lot of communication on one’s whereabouts. You need to be attentive when a colleague asks for your advice, and review the work they have done at short notice. As we are based in different countries, we are expected to travel together frequently. This isn’t so smooth when infertility treatments force you to be close to the hospital very frequently. At first, I tried to think of plausible excuses why I suddenly wouldn’t be able to make certain trips or couldn’t stay the full length of a conference. There were none.
So I told my boss and my direct team about our difficulties to conceive, which made it easier to then tell them once the medical protocols became really heavy. For some of my IUIs and the IVF, I had to go to the hospital every other day. The African hospitals I attended, whilst being more clean and modern than the stereotype, seemed to have little interest in appointment times. It could take up to three hours for me to see the doctor. Of course a lot of that time was spent typing away on my computer in the waiting room or in conference calls from the blood test lab, but still that is a substantial amount of time I’ve had to protect from in-person meetings in the office. Being open with my team has been a gift.
Sheryl Sandberg writes that “recognizing the role emotions play and being willing to discuss them makes us better managers, partners, and peers”. She believes “leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection”. The New York Times ran an article about “Psychological safety” which we discussed as a team. The main idea is that if someone feels “psychologically safe” to say what they are feeling inside and outside of work, they will be able to be a better team member. There are many examples of this. The Podcast Invisibilia reports a great story about this: when oil rig workers at Shell’s deepwater platform in Ursa were asked to share personal stories and fears with each other, accidents dropped by 84%.
The experience of vulnerability, of feeling totally imperfect, has changed me as a manager. Prior to my infertility years, — and I am ashamed to admit this- but I felt somewhat special, having been a top student at university and spent four years in a top consulting firm. This was dangerous: as Moise Tshombe wrote: “Watching my father, I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room”. Infertility reminds me on a daily basis that I have defects, in mind and in spirit.
It helped me to treat other people with more compassion. As Kate Gross , an amazing aid worker who died at 36, wrote, “we are all like icebergs, presenting only a small part of ourselves for view. Underneath the water is a dense mass.We can choose what we reveal of ourselves, but we can also choose how much we want to see of other people. The more you show, the more you seek, the more involved you are with mankind”
By revealing more of my own struggles, I’ve had more appetite to ask myself of each of my teammates “in what way is this person smart?” and find colourful capabilities hidden below the surface.
Comments from my team have also helped me to perceive my own struggles differently. My team and I organized an outing together to Cape Town, which was one of my best memories of 2016. I was travelling with my cold box full of fertility drugs, and this meant having to check in my luggage (not sure how the airport authorities would react to syringes and cold water packs in the carry-on luggage scan, but my guess is not well). Given the first commandment of frequent travelers is never to check in any luggage, I had to explain this to my team who was waiting for me the airport. I even showed my cold box to one of my colleagues. “It’s exactly like what we work on, these cold boxes!” she shouted. It was true — the vaccines we strive to keep cold reach the last mile children being kept in cold boxes with cold water packs closely resembling my own fertility cold box. I kept this outlook and somehow it made me feel an even stronger connection to my day to day job on vaccination.
