During a career in science, you may be put in the position to work with difficult people. This can run the gamut from people with tricky personalities to abusive or toxic personalities. This can be difficult enough if they are just coworkers, but sometimes these difficult people will be your boss.
Obviously, toxic or difficult personalities are not limited to academia or science. I worked for seven years for Radioshack (remember Radioshack?). This was an ideal job for me in high-school and college, and I made great money (for a part-time job) selling cellphones and TVs and computers. I had six managers during that time, and they ranged from the best and most influential mentor I have had in my life, to downright verbally abusive. On the positive side, I had a manager at Radioshack who assigned readings to broaden my horizons (Malcolm X’s autobiography!) and challenged me to do better in my college classes. I also had a manager who showed up drunk and stumbling, and was frequently verbally abusive (he was eventually fired). I had another manager who was a creep, not towards me, but he said many things that made me uncomfortable. I had another manager who was as dumb as a bag of hammers. So when I started graduate school, I was looking forward to having mentors that were experts, and who I could respect.
I also have experience with mentors in science who were bad people. I am going to be vague about career stage for privacy reasons, but I had one mentor who was just a terrible person. Their transgressions included abusing research animals, sexually harassing students, verbally abusing and belittling everyone in the lab, and sleeping around in a department where their spouse also worked. I reported all of the awful behavior to the department chair and other faculty, and absolutely nothing was done about it. I have a decent capacity for suffering, so I just gritted my teeth and tried to leave the lab as quickly as possible.
A substantial minority of the people that I know in the sciences have worked with a bad person, and almost everyone has worked with a difficult person. Sometimes even good people treat people poorly during period of stress (like being a pre-tenure faculty member, or high-stakes field or lab work). I think for decent people who may not be aware that they are having a bad impact on trainees, setting boundaries and explaining the bad impact of their behavior can help reduce any issues. However, for bad people, this may not work.
There are steps that you can take if your mentor is irredeemably bad. First, you can just try to power through, like I did for a while. This may not be a good choice depending on your personality, if you have a long time to completion, or if the abusive behavior is really bad. I am not sure that it was the best choice for me, but it is what I did.
Second, you can try to get help resolving the situation from sympathetic allies that are in a position of power. My experience is that this works best if you can actually remove yourself from the orbit of the toxic mentor (e.g., complete a chapter of a dissertation in another lab), as the toxic person is unlikely to respond to criticism from someone else. They might ease off just enough to let you finish and be done.
Third, you can try to seek help from someone higher up the chain (e.g., if your undergraduate advisor is being abusive, you can reach out to the department chair). I think whether or not this works has a lot to do with the institutional culture around such things. Institutions are usually most interested in protecting themselves, and in my experience prefer to suppress reports of bad behavior, rather than solve them. I also think that the presence of a toxic personality in an academic unit might well be a signal that the unit does not care about reducing abusive behavior. My personal experience was that my reports of illegal and unethical behavior were ignored. But this happened back in the mists of time in the early 2000s, and I do think that awareness of bad behavior by mentors has increased, and tolerance for abuse has decreased. I also think that if something illegal is happening, and you have evidence/documentation, the institution may be forced to act. Whether or not you formally report bad behavior depends a lot on the specifics of your circumstances.
Finally, you can always leave an abusive mentoring situation. This is what I did when I could, and I think it is often the best choice. After all, why choose to continue to work with someone who is being a jerk? I think many people, including myself, fall for the sunk cost fallacy when making these decisions. If you are two years into a five-year dissertation, it may feel like you wasted two years if you leave the lab. But those two years are gone, and suffering through another three years can have profound impacts on your mental health. Also, those two years are not wasted, even if you switch fields, because you have likely completed classes and learned research techniques that you can bring to a new position. Also, in the grand scheme of your life, two or three or even five years is not that long, and my perspective is that life is too short to be miserable for very long.
However, you may well encounter difficulties leaving a toxic situation. Often the personality traits that make someone abusive also makes them want to sabotage your ability to leave. In my case, my toxic advisor tried to make me stick around longer, and I informed them that I was leaving at a certain point, regardless of completion. You might also be threatened with career sabotage. All I can tell you is that reports that a trainee is terrible are met with a lot of suspicion, and at least in my corner of integrative biology, nobody has such centralized power that they can scuttle careers at will. My only advice to you is that you deserve to be treated well, and if you have decided that leaving is the best course of action, then you should feel empowered to do so.
Nobody deserves to be treated poorly or abused. And I think that the preponderance of mentors in our field are humane and decent people, even if all of us stumble sometimes in our mentorship of junior scientists. So if you are in a bad situation, reach out to people that you trust, and consider leaving if it is possible for you. You will be amazed at how life improves without a malevolent force in your life. And choosing to stick around in an abusive situation can have far-reaching negative impacts. All of us should take the lessons learned from all mentors, even the evil ones, and incorporate them into our mentorship to make sure that we treat our mentees in an ethical way.
Obviously, toxic or difficult personalities are not limited to academia or science. I worked for seven years for Radioshack (remember Radioshack?). This was an ideal job for me in high-school and college, and I made great money (for a part-time job) selling cellphones and TVs and computers. I had six managers during that time, and they ranged from the best and most influential mentor I have had in my life, to downright verbally abusive. On the positive side, I had a manager at Radioshack who assigned readings to broaden my horizons (Malcolm X’s autobiography!) and challenged me to do better in my college classes. I also had a manager who showed up drunk and stumbling, and was frequently verbally abusive (he was eventually fired). I had another manager who was a creep, not towards me, but he said many things that made me uncomfortable. I had another manager who was as dumb as a bag of hammers. So when I started graduate school, I was looking forward to having mentors that were experts, and who I could respect.
I also have experience with mentors in science who were bad people. I am going to be vague about career stage for privacy reasons, but I had one mentor who was just a terrible person. Their transgressions included abusing research animals, sexually harassing students, verbally abusing and belittling everyone in the lab, and sleeping around in a department where their spouse also worked. I reported all of the awful behavior to the department chair and other faculty, and absolutely nothing was done about it. I have a decent capacity for suffering, so I just gritted my teeth and tried to leave the lab as quickly as possible.
A substantial minority of the people that I know in the sciences have worked with a bad person, and almost everyone has worked with a difficult person. Sometimes even good people treat people poorly during period of stress (like being a pre-tenure faculty member, or high-stakes field or lab work). I think for decent people who may not be aware that they are having a bad impact on trainees, setting boundaries and explaining the bad impact of their behavior can help reduce any issues. However, for bad people, this may not work.
There are steps that you can take if your mentor is irredeemably bad. First, you can just try to power through, like I did for a while. This may not be a good choice depending on your personality, if you have a long time to completion, or if the abusive behavior is really bad. I am not sure that it was the best choice for me, but it is what I did.
Second, you can try to get help resolving the situation from sympathetic allies that are in a position of power. My experience is that this works best if you can actually remove yourself from the orbit of the toxic mentor (e.g., complete a chapter of a dissertation in another lab), as the toxic person is unlikely to respond to criticism from someone else. They might ease off just enough to let you finish and be done.
Third, you can try to seek help from someone higher up the chain (e.g., if your undergraduate advisor is being abusive, you can reach out to the department chair). I think whether or not this works has a lot to do with the institutional culture around such things. Institutions are usually most interested in protecting themselves, and in my experience prefer to suppress reports of bad behavior, rather than solve them. I also think that the presence of a toxic personality in an academic unit might well be a signal that the unit does not care about reducing abusive behavior. My personal experience was that my reports of illegal and unethical behavior were ignored. But this happened back in the mists of time in the early 2000s, and I do think that awareness of bad behavior by mentors has increased, and tolerance for abuse has decreased. I also think that if something illegal is happening, and you have evidence/documentation, the institution may be forced to act. Whether or not you formally report bad behavior depends a lot on the specifics of your circumstances.
Finally, you can always leave an abusive mentoring situation. This is what I did when I could, and I think it is often the best choice. After all, why choose to continue to work with someone who is being a jerk? I think many people, including myself, fall for the sunk cost fallacy when making these decisions. If you are two years into a five-year dissertation, it may feel like you wasted two years if you leave the lab. But those two years are gone, and suffering through another three years can have profound impacts on your mental health. Also, those two years are not wasted, even if you switch fields, because you have likely completed classes and learned research techniques that you can bring to a new position. Also, in the grand scheme of your life, two or three or even five years is not that long, and my perspective is that life is too short to be miserable for very long.
However, you may well encounter difficulties leaving a toxic situation. Often the personality traits that make someone abusive also makes them want to sabotage your ability to leave. In my case, my toxic advisor tried to make me stick around longer, and I informed them that I was leaving at a certain point, regardless of completion. You might also be threatened with career sabotage. All I can tell you is that reports that a trainee is terrible are met with a lot of suspicion, and at least in my corner of integrative biology, nobody has such centralized power that they can scuttle careers at will. My only advice to you is that you deserve to be treated well, and if you have decided that leaving is the best course of action, then you should feel empowered to do so.
Nobody deserves to be treated poorly or abused. And I think that the preponderance of mentors in our field are humane and decent people, even if all of us stumble sometimes in our mentorship of junior scientists. So if you are in a bad situation, reach out to people that you trust, and consider leaving if it is possible for you. You will be amazed at how life improves without a malevolent force in your life. And choosing to stick around in an abusive situation can have far-reaching negative impacts. All of us should take the lessons learned from all mentors, even the evil ones, and incorporate them into our mentorship to make sure that we treat our mentees in an ethical way.
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