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Boost your confidence with leadership skills in 2025! Or send your team members to improve their skills! My career was propelled forward with my participation in leadership training for senior women in academia in 2015. I founded Epistimi in order to provide this training to a younger version of myself based on the course I teach in the MIT LEAPS Program. In Spring 2023, the LEAPS Program was awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for the “Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education” by the MIT Graduate Student Council. This training is for all career choices, academia, industry, government or a start-up. #AWIS #WomeninSTEM #WomeninEnergy #STEMEducation #WorkforceDevelopment #womensleadership #Engineering #womeninstem

In the US, we just celebrated Thanksgiving. I was hosting family and friends and a great deal of eating took place. As the cook and the mother, I am usually the last to sit at the table. I began to think about the connection between mothers and leaders and the ideas presented in the book “Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek. As I was reading this book, I became aware of a gender hole, maybe even a gender black hole, with respect to Sinek’s presentation of his ideas. Sinek’s big idea is that we need to feel safe in order to be most productive in the workplace. He talks about the military and “the culture of sacrifice and service in which protection comes from all levels of the organization”. He wants to understand where individuals who risk their lives come from and he postulates that if the conditions in which we work meet a particular standard, then each of us is capable of exhibiting the courage and sacrifice of his hero. Sinek imagines a workplace where the leaders prioritize the well-being of their people and, in return, their people give everything they have to protect and advance the well-being of one another and the organization. Such organizations achieve the greatest success and this final state can be achieved with trust and empathy and a willingness of the leaders to listen to employees and treat them as people. It is about organizations that are more like families where people feel like they belong. Sinek states: “when the people have to manage dangers from inside the organization, the organization itself becomes less able to face the dangers from the outside … when we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers.” Sinek’s book goes on for 350 pages but not once does he address the safety issue at work from the perspective of a woman, a person of color or any other under-represented group. Women and many other groups often do not feel safe in the workplace. In 2024, my students are still telling me how they cannot just focus on their work because they are not inside the Circle of Safety. Maybe, they have just realized what safe means in the safe space we create for the MIT LEAPS Epistimi classes. Without a Circle of Safety, there is fear, stress, paranoia, cynicism and self-interest. Without a Circle of Safety, there is no peace of mind. Without a Circle of Safety, there is less effective cooperation and innovation. Sinek concludes that being a leader is like being a parent: one should commit to the well-being of the group and make sacrifices to advance their interests. I agree with Sinek: we all deserve to operate inside a circle of safety. Angela Merkel’s nickname “Mutti Merkel” or “Mother Merkel” implies that her country views her like a parent because she cares for her people. Leaders in science who are in the Circle have a responsibility to keep the Circle of Safety strong and include all of their team. This strategy will benefit everyone, including the leaders themselves.

Boost your confidence with leadership skills in 2025! Or send your team members to improve their skills! My career was propelled forward with my participation in leadership training for senior women in academia in 2015. I founded Epistimi in order to provide this training to a younger version of myself based on the course I teach in the MIT LEAPS Program. In Spring 2023, the LEAPS Program was awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for the “Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education” by the MIT Graduate Student Council. This training is for all career choices, academia, industry, government or a start-up. hashtag #AWIS hashtag #WomeninSTEM hashtag #WomeninEnergy hashtag #STEMEducation hashtag #WorkforceDevelopment hashtag #womensleadership hashtag #Engineering hashtag #womeninstem

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Last week, we had our first leadership workshop in Japan funded by the US-Japan Foundation and also sponsored by the energy company Jera and the pharmaceutical company Takeda. I was so delighted that the language barrier (which was greater for some participants) did not hinder engagement and discussion. Everyone participated very eagerly and had a great deal to say. I think the best part of the five day workshop was the fact that there were women from both the US (one US born, one from China and one from Iran) and Japan including a student from India and several from China. The cultural exchange which the workshop encouraged was an important learning experience for all those present, including myself. My four month stay in Okazaki, Japan, at the Institute for Molecular Science in 1990 was the fuel for organizing an Epistimi workshop in Japan. At the time, there had been only one Japanese woman scientist in my building and she worked for free in her husband’s lab while her children were in school. I felt that Japanese women scientists needed more support than they were getting. Before arriving in Japan, I tried to better prepare myself for this workshop by reading the book “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer. I highly recommend this book to all since we invariably work with people from different cultures than our own. Meyer creates culture maps along 8 dimensions: 1.     Communicating – low-context vs. high-context 2.     Evaluating – direct vs. indirect negative feedback 3.     Persuading – principles first vs. applications first 4.     Leading – egalitarian vs. hierarchical 5.     Deciding – consensual vs. top-down 6.     Trusting – task-based vs. relationship-based 7.     Disagreeing – confrontational vs. avoids confrontation 8.     Scheduling – linear vs. flexible time According to the Japan-US culture map I drew from the information in the book, our two cultures have large gaps in seven of the eight dimensions. Only in the dimension of scheduling are we operating in sync, with a preference for linear scheduling. Our largest gap is in communicating with the US favoring low context communication and Japan favoring high context communication. In low context communication, messages are precise, simple and clear and expressed and understood as spoken or written. In high context communication, messages are sophisticated, nuanced, layered and unclear and include what is spoken or written as well as what is not. The most important point is often implied but not expressed plainly: we have to “read the air”. In Japanese, kuuki yomenai is the person who cannot read the air and is therefore not a good listener. Our time in Japan gave us plenty of opportunities to improve our “read the air” competency but it is no easy task!

Thank you to Hitomi Taguchi, PhD, CPCC, ACC, Maryam Alsharqi and Stephanie Ford for being part of the Epistimi team in Japan last week. What an amazing experience for all involved.

Day 3 of the 5 day Epistimi-US-Japan Foundation workshop for women in STEM. We are growing our cultural intelligence day by day as well as our leadership skills.

Read our latest blog on STEMM leadership written by Janet Hering and Patricia Maurice. https://lnkd.in/ec79ye35

Meet 2024 Epistimi-US-Japan Foundation leadership participant Akiko G.! I earned a master's degree in Virology/Molecular Biology and a Ph.D. in Neurochemistry/Biochemistry from the University of Tokyo. I joined a Japanese pharmaceutical company as researcher/pharmacologist in the therapeutic area of their Central Nervous System (CNS) research department after completing my master's degree, and I took advantage of the company's work-study program to obtain my Ph.D. Since then, I transferred to a department for planning R&D strategies in the areas of CNS and autoimmune diseases and in a business development department for seeking new drug-candidates from global partners. Currently, I am a project manager for clinical research in neuromuscular diseases in the company’s R&D department. #womeninstem #womeninscience #womeninleadership