In this episode I discuss five ways that you can improve your relationship with your PhD supervisor. This relationship is one of the most important aspects of your research experience yet we so often leave it to chance. The good news is that you can improve things so much without expecting them to change at all - find out how in this episode!
***NOTE - this is NOT talking about abusive, problematic and/or unacceptable supervision. I will talk about this more next week, but the strategies in this episode are mainly focused on enhancing supervisory relationships that just don't feel as good as they could right now.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 18 of the PhD Life Coach, and today we are going to be talking about how to have a great relationship with your supervisor. I find this a fascinating subject because I've really seen it from all sides. So obviously I've been a PhD student myself with my own supervisors. I had two supervisors. I've seen it as a supervisor. I've seen eight ish, something like that, PhD students through to successful completion, but I've also seen it as a coach when I hear PhD students talk about their supervisors. I've seen it as a co-supervisor when I've had students talk to me about the other co-supervisor as it were. And I've also seen it talking to my peers and colleagues about their experiences with their students and how they're managing those and how it affects them.
So what I've really seen from this kind of multiple perspectives is that no supervisor-supervisee relationship is the same. There's no such thing as a kind of objectively great relationship. Different people want different things from relationships. What could be super helpful from one person is claustrophobic to somebody else. What's kind of hands off and freedom giving for one student is neglectful for another student. What is proactive for one supervisor from their student is overexcited and annoying to another supervisor. Everybody in these relationships is a human being and every relationship is different.
That said, I think there is some really, um, I think there are some really basic things that we can ask ourselves and consider that really will help improve whatever relationship it is you are in with your supervisor or indeed your supervisee, if you're listening to this as an academic.
I'm going to start with a big fat caveat though. I, in this podcast, I am going to be talking, as usual, about the thoughts that we have, how they create our emotions and the actions that we take, and to some extent our results. And I'm going to be thinking about reframing some of these thoughts. So if you’re feeling is that your supervision is actually wholly inadequate, or is inappropriate or is threatening in any way, is discriminatory in any way, all of these things, I am absolutely not saying that what you need to do is work on your mindset and reframe those things. And in next week's episode, we're going to talk in more detail about how you might recognize some of those issues and how you can seek support and minimize the impact on yourself and on your studies.
The focus of today is thinking about supervisory relationships that don't fall into actually fully unacceptable, but perhaps don't feel like what you came for or feel like they could be better or that you want to feel better about it.
That said, even if you are in one of these really toxic relationships, I would still listen today because I think there'll be nuggets that you'll get that will help you look after yourself while you are navigating the rest of the complications that come from having to untangle a potentially really difficult relationship.
So I'm going to give you five tips in this episode to help you have a great relationship with your supervisor.
Tip one, explore what you mean by a great relationship. Like I said at the start, this can vary hugely from person to person. What are you expecting from your supervisor? What do you want them to bring? What do you want them to do? How do you want them to act? How do you want them to make you feel?
And I would actually take some time to grab a piece of paper and a pen and start to write down some answers to some of those questions. What do you want from your supervisor? I want you to get as many things out of your head as possible, because actually we talk about wanting a great relationship, and we don't always necessarily define what that means to us. So just getting some clarity on that situation can really help to start to untangle some of these complicated feelings that we sometimes have about our supervisors and our supervisees.
Now, once you've listed these, I want you to have a look at your list, and I want you to ask yourself a bunch of questions. I want you to ask yourself, is this realistic? Can one person do all these things? One I see quite a lot from students that I coach is they want their supervisor to be an eminent expert who can connect them into the discipline and take them around the world and all of these high flying things, but at the same time, they want somebody to be comforting and supportive and attentive and get feedback regularly and to see, um, and to see them in person regularly and so on. And sometimes that can exist in the same person, but sometimes what we're doing is we're asking for quite contrasting things.
It's the same as in any relationship. You know, if you are looking for a personal relationship, you might want somebody who's got an amazing job and successful, but who's also super attentive and there when you need them, and never, never has to work in the evenings or the weekends, for example.
Sometimes these things are, if not in conflict, but difficult to find all in the same person. So is it realistic? Is it universal? If you showed people your list of what you think a great relationship would be, would everybody else agree? Or are these things that you want in a great relationship but that somebody else might interpret differently or it might not be important to them.
Now, that's not to undermine your preferences. Your preferences are your preferences. That's absolutely great, and it's brilliant to figure those out, but accepting that those things are preferences and not necessarily a universal truth about what makes a great supervisor, is a really important step towards figuring out how to either improve your relationship or to improve how you feel about your relationship.
I want you then to ask yourself, how are these in line with university regulations? Do you even know what university regulations are? Does your university specify how often you should meet your supervisor? I bet it does, most do, at least in terms of formal recorded meetings. Does your university specify how long your supervisor should take to get drafts back to you if you've submitted drafts for feedback?
Most universities have guidance around that. If not, full-on rules, then guidance, recommended durations. How does what you are expecting from your supervisor relate to those? Are you expecting or hoping for more contact than is specified by your university?
Again, it's not a problem. Many, many, many supervisors and supervisees meet far more often than the university specifies, but this is a really good way of trying to figure out, okay, am I being unrealistic in my expectations? Is my supervisor even meeting the basic requirements of the university? And if they're not, that's the point to listen to next week's episode and to really think about, okay, how can I move this to a situation where I'm at least meeting the basic requirements?
I also want you to ask yourself, is it true that you need all of those things? So if you said, I want my supervisor to make me feel confident, isn't it true that that's your supervisor's job? Or is it something that you can work on in yourself so that whether you feel confident or not is not dependent on what your supervisor has said to you.
Is it true that you need your supervisor to be an expert in your discipline and in your method and in science communication and in writing skills and in statistics and in everything else? Or actually does your supervisor just need to be the one who can pull that together and you can get stats training from somebody else, or ethics training from somebody else?
So I want you to go through and query whether it's actually true that your supervisor needs to do all of these things. One thing you might like to try is prioritizing, which are the most important things that you really need, and that really need to come from your supervisor. Then you can start prioritizing what you're really asking for here, what you are really looking for.
Tip two follows on from this, and this is going to sound like I'm doing this from the perspective of a supervisor, but trust me, I'm not, because it goes both ways. That is, don't expect the person to be anyone other than who they've shown themselves to be. An awful lot of pain comes from expecting somebody to behave differently than the way they always behave.
That you are constantly trying to get more reassurance from somebody. You are constantly trying to get somebody to be tidier than they are. You are constantly trying to get somebody to micromanage you less, whatever it might be. And again, this is not about accepting unacceptable behaviour.
But instead, one of the best ways to have a great relationship with your supervisor is to really know them, know what they're really good at, know what they're less good at providing, and to accept that and to accept and revel in and make the most of all the things that they're really good at. And figure out ways to get the support you need for the other stuff outside of that supervisory relationship.
If your supervisor is super well connected and brilliant at helping you network and get to know different people and opening up opportunities for you, and making sure there's a huge amount of money in the laboratory so that you can carry out your research, then perhaps you find some of the day-to-day support where you just need some reassurance, you need people to sense-check whether your paragraphs are clear and those sorts of things. Maybe you try and find that support somewhere else.
It's about knowing that your supervisor gives amazing feedback, but it sometimes takes them a while to do it. So ensuring that during that time you've given yourself other things that you can be getting on with so you don't feel like you're being held back by the fact that they've been slow to give feedback.
It is about knowing your supervisor and expecting them to be who they have always been. And as long as that's within the realms of acceptable, then we accept it. They're human beings.
If you're a supervisor, exactly the same goes the other way. I've seen a lot of supervisors have constant frustration that their PhD students aren't a particular way when that student has never been like that. They've never been someone who's fast at writing or they've never been somebody who speaks up in seminars, but they have a whole ton of other qualities which make them an amazing PhD student for you.
We get to accept and nurture all of those sides while helping them develop some of the things they find difficult, but not expecting them to be different than the way they are.
My third tip is be really careful what you make things mean. I coach a lot of PhD students. I have free monthly group coaching. If you're interested in that, you can sign up on my website at www.thephdlifecoach.com/work-with-me. and I have just launched a membership at the University of Birmingham where they have 18 months of two sessions a week, of live coaching with me. If that's something that you think your university should do, get in touch, show them my website, tell them all about it.
But during that coaching, one of the things I see a lot is the stories that students generate about the behaviour of their supervisors. So if a supervisor doesn't reply to an email, I see students make that mean that they are a low priority to the supervisor, or they make it mean that they must not be very good at their PhD because otherwise the supervisor would take more time and attention. Or they make it mean they must have written something stupid in their email and the person just doesn't even want to respond, rather than taking it at the face value that they haven't replied to your email.
There's a whole lot of reasons that have got nothing to do with you and nothing to do with the relationship as to why they might not have replied to that email.
I see the same thing with supervisors who take ages to get their comments back, and we all know they exist. I've been that supervisor sometime, I've seen those supervisors. I've had students talk to me about waiting several weeks, several months for comments on their drafts, for example, and making that mean, “oh, the supervisor must just be too busy. You know, they'll get to me when they can get to me. They're just too busy at the moment”, or making it mean I'm not a priority or I'm not important.
And even the one that sounds kind, the sort of understanding, “oh, they're just super busy at the moment. They'll get to it when they can”, even that is a big assumption. You are trying to kind of second guess why, you're creating meaning from the fact they haven't got back to you, when it's possible that the reason they haven't got back to you is because they have forgotten entirely that they said they'd do it.
So it might not be that they're too busy and that they'll get to it when they can. It may not even be on their to-do list anymore because they have rubbish systems and they have no idea who they've committed what to. We've seen that. So just be really careful the meaning that you're putting on things.
Again, I feel like I'm putting caveats into every single one of these, but I think it's super important because this is a really, it's a really delicate issue, this relationship between supervisor and supervisee. And unfortunately there have been many occasions where the supervision hasn't been acceptable, the behavior hasn't been acceptable.
So just to be clear, again, if somebody is saying inappropriate things or things that you find offensive or upsetting, this isn't about gaslighting yourself, about that, about saying, “oh, I shouldn't interpret them like that”, but it is thinking. What am I making those comments mean about me, for example. So if you are experiencing inappropriate comments from your supervisor, you might find that you find yourself thinking, “and this means I can't finish my PhD and this means I don't belong in this department and this means that no one will support me”, and those sorts of things.
So this is not about talking you out of interpretations that you are making of behavior because you're experiencing what you're experiencing. It's about thinking about what you're making that mean about you and your future.
Tip four, focus on what you are bringing. So all of us spend probably too much time thinking about what other people should do better and not necessarily thinking about what we can do. And sometimes the belief that the other person in the relationship, so the supervisor in this case, is not doing their side of the bargain, sometimes gets in the way of us doing our side of the bargain.
So one example where I see this a lot with PhD students is where they believe that the supervisor isn't interested in their research. So they have this belief, it feels very real to them. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Who knows? But the belief feels very real to them. And what that does is it starts to affect how they interact with the supervisor.
They start telling the supervisor less often what they're doing. They avoid talking to the supervisor. They don't send them a cool new graph or a cool new document that they found. Um, because. Believe that the supervisor isn't interested in what they do.
So focusing on what you're bringing, I think, is really important. What would you do iff you had a great relationship with your supervisor? Try and embody that as much as you can. So if you believed your supervisor really cared about your research, how would you behave?
You'd probably update them more regularly with more enthusiasm. You'd probably look forward to your meetings so that you can tell them all about it. You can create that anyway. If you spend less time believing that your supervisor's not interested and more time believing that you are someone who has interesting research, then you can really create an environment where you feel much more interesting and feel like you're doing interesting research.
So focus on bringing your side of the supervisor supervisee relationship.
Tip five slightly different. Treat them like a sense check rather than like a boss. So there's a massive transition going from an undergraduate, a master's, into a PhD. You go from having really strict assessment criteria, clear assessment information, through to having much more control over the direction of your research, the progress, the timeline, and all of those things. And for a lot of people, understandably, that can be a real challenge and something that you really need to get used to.
And again, I've seen this from both sides. I've had students saying, I've really just wish my supervisor would just give me some more guidance. And the supervisor saying, oh, they just don't have direction. They come and expect me to tell them what to do, but really I want them, I want to see them telling me what they want to do.
And then sometimes the flip happens that the supervisor decides that the student perhaps lacks direction and needs more guidance, and so they start giving more guidance and then the student feels really controlled and as though the supervisor doesn't trust them. So I want you to really think about here is how can you treat them as a sense check.
One bit of advice I always give PhD students is ask yourself, what would I do if I didn't have a supervisor and go to your supervisor with that. So instead of saying, I've got too many things on at the moment. I don't know whether to focus on the paper or on the presentation, go to your supervisor and say, I've got too many things on at the moment.
I've got the paper, I've got the presentation. I think it's a priority to focus on the presentation because actually that's coming up more quickly and once that's out the way, I have a good few weeks to focus on the writing. Does that sound good to you, or is there something else I should take into account?
Similarly, when you're asking for feedback on writing saying, it's too long. Can you give me some ideas about how to shorten it? That's okay. At least you're giving some specific requests to your supervisor, but much better to say it's too long. I've marked in blue where I think I could shorten it, bits that I think I would remove. Can you have a look and see whether I'm omitting anything that could be really important or whether I'm leaving in things that actually could go.
So when you start to switch it up, instead of saying, what should I do, you are saying, I think I should do this. What do you think? Is there anything I've missed? Massively changes the relationship and sometimes your supervisor will go, nah, sorry, think you're wrong. We need to do this instead. Other times your supervisor will go, yep, cool. Sounds good. Let's go.
Either way, they've seen you take ownership over your project and suggest ways it could be improved or directions for the future, which means you are demonstrating to them that you have the potential to be an independent researcher.
It also gives you both information. It tells you, oh, actually hang on. We are not on the same page with this. Why are we not on the same page? How do we manage that? Whereas when we just go, I think it's too long, what should I shorten? The supervisor's got no idea what you would do if it wasn't for them.
If you say, which should I prioritize? The supervisor's got no way of knowing which you would've chosen if it wasn't for them. So treat your supervisor like a sense check rather than a boss.
So the five tips.
1) Explore what a great relationship means to you. What exactly are you looking for? Is it reasonable? Do you need to get all of it from your supervisor? And how can you nurture the bits that you really, really do need?
2) Tip two, don't expect them to be anyone except who they are. Not accepting unacceptable behaviour, but know your supervisor, know their strengths and their weaknesses, and make sure you're asking them for the right things.
3) Number three, be careful what you make things mean. Be aware of the stories we build in our head and the the interpretations that we bring to things. It's not saying you have to reject them, but be aware that they are a story in your head and be careful which ones you choose to focus on.
4) Number four, focus on bringing your side. How can you be the best student in this relationship and be the best version of yourself?
5) And number five is treat your supervisor like a sense check rather than like a boss.
I really hope you found that useful today. I would love to hear more about how you're getting on with these things. Always contact me on Twitter @drvikkiburns. Um, you can check out my, um, website, www.thephdlifecoach.com to find out more ways to work with me to sign up for my newsletter, all of those things. Hope to see you all at monthly free coaching as well, and you can get information about all of that on my website.
So next week we're going to think about what you should do if you've got an actually problematic relationship with your supervisor, where you should go for support, what you should expect, how you can manage yourself in that difficult situation.
Look forward to speaking with you next week and thinking more about how we can improve these supervisory relationships.
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