Leadership skills for statisticians represents a common theme across many episodes of this podcast. As leadership consists of many different aspects, it is important to learn from other statisticians, that exhibit these skills.
In this episode, we talk with Gemma and Margaret, who have run successful leadership courses within PSI. We cover the following topics:
- What are the core leadership skills that statistician need to be fluent in?
- What are common mindset issues, that block statisticians from being more influential?
- How can statisticians overcome these blocks?
- Why it’s beneficial for statisticians to have a tailored course for them?
- What courses are available from PSI?
Gemma Hodgson
Qi Statistics
Gemma has worked as a statistician, project manager, trainer and consultant for over 20 years across a wide variety of projects within large and small multidisciplinary teams and in several industries. Gemma has an MSc in Medical Statistics and began her career in the pharmaceutical industry. After working as a statistician at Pfizer for over 10 years Gemma joined the Takeda Global R&D as a principal statistician in 2006. Since 2012 Gemma has worked for Qi Statistics and now jointly owns and runs the business with Anne Hasted. Gemma now works both as a consultant and trainer across many other disciplines as well including manufacturing, sensory & consumer and business statistics. As a consultant in these industries, the interface between client and statistician is one of key importance to securing new business and so Gemma has done a lot of work understanding how statisticians can be perceived negatively, where they have recognised strengths and the key differences between different types of thinkers.
Margaret Jones

UCB
Margaret is currently head of Early Development Statistics at UCB but has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for nearly 20 years and led a wide variety of projects ranging from pre-clinical through to phase 3. Before joining the pharmaceutical industry Margaret worked in Oncology clinical research, engineering and finance. Working in several pharmaceutical companies Margaret has worked with a wide variety of statisticians and project teams and witnessed both good and bad partnerships. There is currently work being undertaken at UCB to improve and develop the interactions between disciplines and teams in order to maximise knowledge and partnering. Margaret has been a key driver in this work and so is keen to share some of these skills and findings wider with statisticians outside UCB.
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Transcript
Why and how to invest in your leadership skills – Interview with of Gemma Hodgson and Margaret Jones
00:01
You are listening to the Effective Statistician episode number 29, an interview with Margaret and Gemma on influencing as a statistician, also known as leadership skills. Welcome to the Effective Statistician with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske, the weekly podcast for statisticians in the health sector designed to improve your leadership skills.
00:28
widen your business acumen and enhance your efficiency. We are doing something new so please subscribe to the newsletter as we would like to survey you or listeners to actually provide better value to you. You know data is the best source for getting good decisions so we would really like to get your advice on what we can do better in the future to even increase the value of this podcast.
00:58
We are also planning to give you weekly short and actionable advice through this newsletter in the future. Another reason to subscribe to the newsletter.
01:09
In today’s episode we’ll talk all about leadership. And we have two very, very nice guests here. Both have participated extensively in leadership trainings, both within the companies, but also in PSI. And we’ll talk about all kind of different activities that PSI is offering in terms of leadership. But we also go into all kind of different details about
01:36
leadership, influencing as a statistician, and what you can do better to be more effective and more influential at your job. This podcast is created in association with PSI, a global member organization dedicated to leading and promoting best practice and industry initiatives.
01:57
Join PSI today to further develop your statistical capabilities with access to special interest groups, the video on demand library, free registration to all PSI webinars and much much more. Visit the PSI website at psiweb.org to learn more about PSI activities and become a PSI member today.
02:28
Hello, this is Alexander Schacht and I’m again here with Benjamin Piske for another episode of the Affected Statistician. Hi Benjamin. Hello Alexander. And we have actually two guests today. So we have Gemma and Margaret. Hello together. Hi. Okay, so let’s first start with a little bit of an introduction Gemma. What is your role at the moment?
02:58
What have you brought to the table in terms of leadership? Why is that interesting for you? I currently run a company called QI Statistics Limited, and I run it with the founder, the co-founder of QI Statistics. She started it about 20 years ago. And we’re a consultancy company to many types of statistics.
03:24
that are needed, not just pharma, but the food industry, manufacturing, etc. So I do get to see quite a variety of people who’ve got problems that need to be solved. But my background is actually pharma. I worked at Pfizer for about 15 years and then for Takeda. So I’ve still got a very active interest in the pharmaceutical industry and I’m a member of PSI and the RSS and things. So this topic for me has come up a number of times.
03:53
in that certainly in the last five years that there’s a bit of a gap in the market for people to be able to develop their leadership and influential skills. And I know it’s something that I’ve been working with Margaret at UCB where her group certainly have taken this on and done lots of work in this area. Okay, very good. That nicely leads over to Margaret. So Margaret,
04:21
What has your career been looked like up to now? And why is leadership important for you? Well, Alexandra, I’ve been in the pharmaceutical industry for almost 20 years now. And prior to that, I worked in academia, in oncology research, engineering, and finance. And so had a varied career. But in the pharmaceutical industry, my current role now is at UCB.
04:49
I head up the stats group there which includes early phase statistics, an innovation group and the late stage group. The leadership, as Gemma mentioned, we’ve been working on this in UCB for a couple of years now and I think for me leadership in terms of statistics is around being more influential. My interest in this area has been sparked by seeing that technically…
05:17
Usually the technical issues are not the problems that we have in being influential on teams, but often it’s the influencing skills to get our ideas or even sometimes identifying issues and correcting them with the teams. That’s where we seem to somehow fall short. And I’ve been fortunate to be involved in leadership programmes within Pfizer, within Lily in the past, and really seen the impact that it can…
05:46
have on the effectiveness of both individual statisticians and the statistical organisation as a whole? Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think back in the day, I was at Pfizer too when they did this stats training in terms of consultancy skills and we had courses on communication, leadership, supervisory skills. And I think we were really lucky because in those days there was lots of budget for training people.
06:14
wider than just the technical skills, but I’m not sure that that budget’s there anymore. And so actually the role has become even more of a consultancy role perhaps than it was then. So it’s even more crucial. And the old role where statisticians just sat there and crunched numbers has moved on now. And we need to recognise that and give people the skills that they need to be able to go out there and influence project teams with confidence. And I think I sort of observed it
06:43
PSI a few years ago that really, you know, the vast majority of the talks are focusing on our technical expertise. And as I say, this is really the area that limits our impact. And this is, I think, how we got involved in some of the leadership sessions that we’ve had at PSI recently. Yeah, which have been excellent last time in Amsterdam, actually. And you already mentioned that some of the skills for statisticians, I mean, or…
07:13
listeners are primarily statisticians or related in the related fields. You mentioned being influential communicative leadership in general. What other skills would you say would be kind of the core skills that statisticians need to be taught? Certainly for me, I think it’s about self-awareness. So we need to understand who we’re dealing with so we can’t give the same message to a…
07:41
highly trained statistician as we would to somebody who works in a completely different field. So we have to understand who our audience is and how we come across because if we can deliver a message that we think is okay but isn’t understood, that’s not good enough. And so to do this we’ve got to have social skills, we’ve got to be able to communicate technical information in a clear and a concise way because ultimately…
08:08
what we’re doing is helping people make decisions. So it’s our duty to make it understandable. We’re not there to baffle people and show how clever we are. But of course, to be able to do that, we need to, all statisticians need to have confidence, self-belief, the ability to hold their own in a meeting and sometimes be able to push back. Yes, and I think sometimes we think of leadership as leading other people.
08:35
But I think often it’s really about having leadership skills ourselves, even as individual contributors, so we can exhibit those skills that allow us to be influential within a team, being an effective member of that team and really owning the accountability for our contribution. And not, you know, it’s not sufficient to have the technical skills and to try and communicate them when those things, when we’re not effective in that communication, we really have to own that and own.
09:04
that what people take away from our interactions with them, not just what we’ve tried to communicate. So you just mentioned social skills as kind of one of the key aspects. Can you expand a little bit on what you mean by social skills? I think statisticians are often given a bit of a bad press that they can’t communicate. And I think statisticians can communicate, but they do it in perhaps not the usual way. So
09:33
We have to, the social skills we need is to work out what form of communication is appropriate for the audience we’re dealing with. So it can’t always be just how you as a statistician like to communicate. You might find you’ve got to get better at giving presentations or explaining things to groups or joining in in discussions when perhaps you’d rather just listen and feedback to people later. So when I say social skills, it’s really about the art of communication
10:03
and recognizing that your own style may be different from the style of the people that you’re trying to influence. So there has to be some way that you can meet in the middle. Do you have an example where kind of that skill had a big impact or where the lack of that skill led to problems? So I think that in terms of I think one of the things about communication
10:31
that I’ve observed about how we often communicate as statisticians is that we tend to communicate, we go from A to B from the data to an answer and we often communicate in that way and when we think about the audience and we think about how they actually might want to receive that information they may come at it from quite a different way. So I think it’s thinking about
10:57
different approaches and getting into the mind of the people that were trying to influence. I think one example I have from very early on where this, you know, where I had an experience of this is that often we have situations where we’re aware of, for example, a study design that the team are wanting to go ahead with is not optimal or in some cases not really right.
11:24
and our job as the statistician is to influence them in the right direction. The example I have was an interaction study very early on in my career in the industry where the team wanted to go with only three arms, not use the full four arms, so no placebo arm, just the drug A, drug B and the drugs combined. And despite a lot of escalation in the organisation from the statistics organisation and a lot of support.
11:51
and we failed to influence the team to do the full design. And I clearly hadn’t communicated what the possible failures, if you like, of that approach were. And so they went ahead with this abbreviated design, and we did have some unexpected adverse events in the test drug arm, which we couldn’t explain because we didn’t have a placebo arm. And so unfortunately the study had to be rerun.
12:20
And so that’s an example where not being effective in really explaining to the team what the possible outcomes were, meant that the study went ahead in suboptimally and then actually had to be repeated. Yeah, and actually I’ve got a similar example which luckily for me worked the other way, where I also, I had to step back and think differently.
12:47
It’s a simpler example. I was trying to convince a project team that they needed to increase the sample size on a study they were running. And obviously they didn’t want to increase it. Um, it’s always the way. Um, but in the end, after many meetings, just tearing my hair out, my supervisor, who actually I was really lucky. I’ve always had very good supervisors. And I think this is key to developing communication skills and all these types of skills we’re talking about.
13:16
in people as they go through their careers, sorry, to sidetrack. But my supervisor suggested that I present scenarios of the end result of possibilities that could happen with each of a range of sample sizes and what they would and wouldn’t be able to show. And this kind of scenario method worked really well because it was just a concrete answer for them. They didn’t care how I got the numbers and which formula I’d used and variances and the assumptions.
13:45
They just wanted to see what different numbers would give them at the end. And the how I realized was actually only important to me. And I think we have to remember that statisticians that sometimes we want to give all the background and the information and why I did it and what I needed to input, because we think that that’s useful and interesting and shows that we did a thorough job, but actually the audience doesn’t care about that. They just want to see how it’s going to affect them.
14:13
And so I think we have to try to be a bit more creative. And certainly that example where we thought about it from a different perspective and use these different scenarios worked really well. And the project team after that used to say, give me scenarios, give me scenarios of what would happen. And so then that became their preferred approach for everything that we wanted to change. Talking about the different…
14:37
aspects or the different skill set for the statisticians. I think you mentioned, for example, the confidence. And confidence is some, you know, where people need to get, you know, more secure or overcome their insecurity and everything. So what are the usual mindset issues? I mean, where do people, statisticians, struggle from being more influential or to take the leadership on their projects, for example?
15:07
I think from my experience, I think that often we do think differently, often to the rest of the team, but often we use this phrase, start with the end in mind, and I think that’s something that we absolutely do as statisticians. We’re thinking about the analysis, we’re thinking about what we’re going to do with the data, and I think that mindset can actually be very powerful in helping us see what we
15:36
you know, the impact of what’s being proposed in terms of design, et cetera. And it’s back to this communication of how we can communicate in the right language to the rest of the team so that they understand. Because often we’re able to avoid issues rather than just repair them afterwards. So I think we do think differently. And I think there’s also a piece about working with the teams to help them.
16:05
that we need to develop better questioning skills, because we tend to want to rush to action sometimes as statisticians, and we think we’ve got that and we want to start working on it. And I think developing the questioning skills so that we really understand what the team or the individual needs rather than what they think they want. And I think those questioning skills become very important because many times I’ve seen that, you know, the statistician’s gone off and, you know, right, okay, I’ve got that.
16:34
gone off and done a whole load of work only to come back and find that really that isn’t what was required, it hasn’t solved the problem or answered the question. And I think also sometimes by doing that questioning we can sometimes avoid redundant work. So I think it’s understanding the bigger picture sometimes that we struggle with and I think what we’ve done within UCB is to develop some sessions on
17:03
on questioning styles, et cetera, that can really help with that. And some of that we shared at the P.S.I. We worked on at the P.S.I. meeting in Amsterdam. And I think that for me, another thing that I see quite commonly, and it’s happened to me also in terms of mindset, is that it’s quite common to meet statisticians who think that perhaps everyone else on the team knows more than me.
17:30
I’m not senior enough to speak up at this meeting, or even they won’t understand it because the stats are too complex, so there’s not really much point me saying anything. I think generally as a profession, we live with the bad press that goes along with any technical or very scientific job role, particularly that statisticians are basically just a group of people who try to manipulate data in a way that shows what they want it to show. And so having this is a starting point.
18:00
when we go, when, you know, when we start our careers and when we go into a meeting, having that backdrop constantly there, it is not easy. And I think that’s something particularly we’ve got to try and educate people and get rid of that and overcome that.
18:18
Yeah, I think it’s really about being a true team member of the cross-functional team and not being kind of a consultant or advisor or some kind of outsider. And I think if you are that, then you really want to understand why do you do things. So you want to see the bigger picture.
18:48
engage with the other people that you understand what specifically will be the result that we want to achieve. Because I think I found that really interesting what you said, kind of we look from data to the results kind of part, whereas lots of other functions are more trained the other way around. They want to say, okay, this is what I would like to communicate.
19:16
give me the data for that. And so being able to switch between these kind of two ways going from data to results, but also going from kind of results back to how the data would need to look for that, that helps a lot. You also said that kind of, it’s really important to not assume that you understood everything.
19:44
because then you may say, oh, yes, thanks, I understood what you want from me, go away and come back and then you kind of completely missed the point. That’s a quite difficult one because how can you make sure that you are aware about this blind spot? I think we often, I’ve certainly sat in meetings where possibly a clinician will say, I need to know this. And then…
20:14
statistician just writes down they need to know this and goes away and does it and does what they think the clinician has asked for and by the time they bring it back to the clinician, the clinician can’t even remember asking for it because it was just a throwaway comment, it was a thought they had, it wasn’t necessarily a please go away and generate an analysis that delivers this and so I think sometimes by engaging more in the conversation and teasing out the bits that are
20:44
actual pieces of work, why they’re required, we sometimes end up at a very different place than the first comment that was made by the clinician because often what they’re asking you for isn’t really going to give them the answer that they think they’re going to get. So I think what Margaret was referring to is that by using effective questioning and teasing out what it is their ultimate goal is, we often realise that what they really want is something completely different than their initial request.
21:13
And I think that that touches on two things back to what you said, Alexandra, about being a really effective member of the team. I think when statisticians get into that position of being a really effective member of the team, they are incredibly invaluable. And we see in a number of organisations, statisticians taking on the role of clinical leadership for a programme. But I think that’s very important because I think our skills are much more transferable than we realise sometimes.
21:43
Yeah, and it goes full circle because I think if you work in a project team where you’re valued, you become more willing to make suggestions and push back and question and become more engaged. And so therefore you gain more confidence and with confidence comes the ability to ask more questions. And it’s kind of a vicious circle and it works both ways. It works upwards and it also works downwards. And it’s trying to ensure that.
22:09
we feel supported and that there are people around us that value what we do, I think helps massively. And I think I would just add one more thing around the kind of understanding. I think sometimes we assume the other members of the team understand more about statistics than they do. And so when they’re asking for something, we assume that they’ve understood what that is and the implications, etc. And I think we should always question that.
22:38
because sometimes they don’t and actually our questioning to help our understanding can often help them better understand what statistics can bring to the table. Yeah, what I usually do in these kind of situations, I try to rephrase what I understood in, let’s say, more non-STATS language. So that’s…
23:07
they can actually then reflect on it and can see, is this really what they wanted to hear?
23:18
rather than just, yeah, you want an ANOVA? Okay, I’ll do an ANOVA. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And I think it goes back to what Gemma was saying earlier about, you know, like presenting scenarios. I think when we can communicate back the consequences of what, you know, they’re describing or requesting from a statistical perspective, communicate it back in their language, whether it’s visually or simulated studies or whatever.
23:47
I think we end up with a much better conversation. And the conversation is, I mean, a slightly different point, but it’s also important to avoid misunderstandings, especially if you work across different companies or departments where, for example, approvals may be completely different. So starting a discussion is always an excellent point in avoiding any issues in communication. Yeah. And understanding. And generally, I’ve certainly found in any project team, once you’ve
24:16
It’s a bit like in any company, if you can show a cost saving next time, they’ll definitely listen to you. It’s exactly the same on a project team. If you show them something and you help them save money or save time or come up with a better outcome the first time, the next time they come to you, you don’t need to put that hard work in again. It’s almost about having the courage to prove yourself the first time. And after that, it gets easier and easier and easier. Yeah.
24:46
In terms of developing all these kind of different skill sets, we touched on some sessions at the last PSI conference in Amsterdam where there was some leadership program and some leadership training in these regards. I could only participate in one of them because I had a chairing in another session, a parallel session, but I found it really, really good.
25:17
But in general, there’s lots of different leadership programs. And some people believe that leadership is very general, and we could send statisticians to these general leadership programs and put them together with the sales and the marketing people all into one leadership program. Why is it actually beneficial for statisticians to have a tailored course for them?
25:46
My personal opinion is that by the nature of why they went into their job or just their personality type, most scientifically minded people, they’re quite interested in having these tools and seeing how they work associated with these types of skills we’ve been talking about, but they’re not necessarily interested in the lengthy explanations and the history and the…
26:13
about where it came from, who derived them and how they developed over time, which is often the focus of these general leadership programs. They just want to know quickly so that in their mind, they can get back to what they call their real work. So I think we we’ve tried to address that. I mean, that’s certainly based on some feedback we’ve had is that they they are interested, but they don’t want to spend all day discussing where it came from. They just want to know what they need to do. So we tried to give enough background to make it.
26:43
you know, stand up and be real, but not the unnecessary detail. So we and we are also able to focus on the particular real issues and examples that we’ve seen as statisticians in the farmer industry and how you can apply them to situations that are believable for these people. Whereas generic courses, they don’t usually manage that as well, because they haven’t got the luxury of having actually lived through.
27:11
living through those types of scenarios themselves, things like, you know, how do I influence the project team that they need to use a different technical method? That’s going to be very different for a group of statisticians than it is for a sales team or some other group like that. So for me, having it run by people who’ve actually lived through these things brings an extra layer. And certainly from my perspective, having experienced both now,
27:38
I think that focus is really powerful and has meant it’s more efficient essentially. At UCB, one of the things that was particularly helpful was we had Andy Grieve come in and talk to us about his experience when he was a young statistician and some of the challenges he faced and how he overcame them. And that was an incredibly powerful session, you know, to have someone like Andy prepared to stand up and, you know, be clear that, you know, at the beginning of his career, it wasn’t all…
28:07
wasn’t all easy and plain sailing, you know, the young statisticians in our group found that very helpful. And, you know, they’ve got tips and tricks from various folks on how to help in the interactions with our clinical teams. And we’ve seen real positive benefits from that. And I think one other thing in terms of your comment at the beginning about, you know, mixing all the different backgrounds together.
28:33
One of the things that we look at on the course is about how different people communicate and receive information and sort of process information. And I think in some way, because we’re bringing like-minded people together, we’re giving them a chance to do it in their way. Whereas I think perhaps adding too much diversity to the group would mean that they might, some of the personality types in the stats groups might become a bit overwhelmed with
29:02
perhaps marketing or sales type people who might dominate the session with the way that they like to communicate and receive information. So I think in tailoring it to particular personality types, even though there are still a range across statisticians, obviously, allows it to be more manageable for the people who are receiving it. Yeah, I think in terms of that, I think we just need to acknowledge that
29:31
If you think across all statisticians, we are a rather introvert, detailed, technical folk of people. And having leadership trainings that are specific to such type of people helps a lot. So for example, as you mentioned, speaking up is really important. I’m pretty sure that…
30:01
There are not a lot of salespeople that have problems with speaking up. Exactly. They wouldn’t get a chance if we had a salespeople, the statisticians wouldn’t say a word. Yeah, but maybe this will be part of the leaderships to learn during a mixed function leadership course. In some of the sessions, we do try to put people on the spot and say, well, we know this isn’t your preferred style, but you got to have a go. See how you do it.
30:30
And then the other way round, we get the people like me who can’t stop talking and we say, right, now you’ve got to be quiet for five minutes. Are you going to manage that? Yeah, I think what it also helps is kind of it breaks it down to real everyday examples. So like, you know, interactions with physicians or interactions with project management, interactions, you know.
30:58
with more senior executives, which in the pharma industry are very often very specific. I’m pretty sure very, very similar discussions and struggles happen in whether it’s UCB or whether it’s Lilly or whether it’s Pfizer or whether it’s any of the other pharma companies.
31:28
situations occur on a day to day basis.
31:36
So what courses are actually available from PSI for this leadership program? So up to now we’ve had, we’ve run a one day course open to all PSI members that was run last year. We’re planning another one day course which will probably be early next year and that will be an expansion of the kind of things we were covering in the PSI conference in Amsterdam.
32:05
Gemma has also run a half-day session for the introduction to industry training group. And we’re thinking about sort of alternative training mediums and perhaps some bite-sized sessions. Okay, you already mentioned that about alternative media. So what exactly are your plans? Do we have any more information on it?
32:32
Nothing specific, but certainly, you know, any suggestions or thoughts, very welcome on things that, you know, people might find useful. We did, you know, the obviously the podcast is one medium that we’ve been considering having some specific sessions on. But yes, nothing concrete at the moment. Yeah, I think the Effective Decision podcast has actually lots of sessions about leadership. And so I’m happy to.
33:00
have further sessions in the future there. In terms of this one day course, can you speak a little bit about the content and how it’s run and what is kind of the outcome for the different people that are attending? Yeah, I mean, they’re designed, but to be very interactive because I think we all accept…
33:24
that most people struggle to learn and to be able to then apply learnings just by sitting listening to some kind of PowerPoint presentation. They have to actually live through it, especially with these types of communication and people skills. So we usually start, we usually divide the day into say four different topics or something. And we start each topic by showing why a particular skill might be useful, usually in a slightly mystical way with some kind of game based on a farmer scenario, something like
33:54
doing a jigsaw or having to colour a page in or build a tower and people are at that stage kind of wondering what on earth we’re doing. Then we sort of, obviously issues arise whilst that’s going on and then we talk about where and why the problems arise and draw parallels to their work situation and how to, perhaps then how to tackle and overcome them.
34:20
Often it’s the participants who actually come up with their own best solutions and people share the tips and the tricks. So it’s really more of a workshop than a course. And often you sort of, we try to make it memorable, but in a good way. So they have fun doing the game and it’s usually a bit silly and they get to work with people they’ve never met before.
34:46
And in doing that and sharing experiences from different companies, just as you said a moment ago, we usually recognize that everyone has the same experience, even if they’re in different companies and different stages in their career. And so then they can actually share, well, this is what I did in that situation. And other people can then take from that and think, actually, yeah, that might work for me or, you know, something they’ve seen somebody else do. So it’s very much a hands on learning as we go through the day and the topics.
35:16
I mean, so far we’ve done things about the Myers-Briggs personality type. We’ve looked at questioning styles, as Margaret said. We’ve looked at how to work in a team effectively and the different roles that team members can take. What else, Margaret, have we done? I can’t think now. We’ve done, or we did the visualization of data and looking at the conference about how people perceived things differently when they looked at data.
35:42
and putting the statistician now in the role of the other people that they often try to influence and making them see it’s not quite as easy as we perhaps make out it is. Yes, that session was actually the one I attended at the PSI conference. Yeah, it really was really memorable.
36:03
And I was really wondering why everyone else was so much easier able to provide the results. We don’t want to tell too much at the moment because otherwise we convince them. We can’t do it again. I do remember colouring the nice pictures. Yeah, colouring the pictures, showing teamwork and we have another one that we’ve done in a one, which you can’t really do at the conference, but we’ve done in a one-day session where we get people to build a tower.
36:31
And it’s a competition, everybody likes a competition, and they have to balance a marshmallow on the top of the tower. So all the kind of things that you do in these, you know, you go on these team building events, and for four days that we used to, and you do strange things, we tried to kind of offer cut down versions of those, but tailored particularly to a particular problem that we think often arises as statisticians. So it’s not really a course that you sit down and listen to slides.
37:00
one day course had about 20 slides for the whole day. And that included things like pictures of marshmallow towers. Very, very nice. I like such interactive days. These are the things. Yeah. And certainly that the feedback we’ve had is that, you know, for these types of skills where it’s not, it’s not a matter of saying to someone, you need to communicate better.
37:28
You have to actually practice doing that and do it in an environment where you feel safe. And we always make that clear at the start of the day that we’re not going to embarrass you or make you do something you’re uncomfortable with, but actually you’ll get more out of it if you practice it here and then if you just sit and listen and don’t join in. So who’s the target audience for these courses? Who would benefit most? I think that’s the easiest question because it’s everyone.
37:58
Yeah, certainly it really is. I mean, I suppose that if you if you really had to pick a group, if you wanted to focus, it would be people that perhaps would say less than 10 years experience, purely because anyone who’s been around perhaps more than 10 years may have seen some of these things before in trainings that they’ve had. Whereas I think more recently, there hasn’t been as much training given in companies.
38:27
But actually having people on the training course who’ve already done these things before is usually really useful because every time you do the training, it’s never exactly the same. And you usually learn something new about yourself or other people. I mean, I certainly every time I give the training or similar types of training, which I do, you know, as a job, I always find something new that comes up that somebody will suggest as a response to something I’ve said. And I think, oh, crikey, I hadn’t thought about it in that way.
38:56
So Margaret’s right, it’s literally everybody can benefit from these types of training. Yes, certainly. And I think even within UCB, we’ve done this a number of times with different groups and even almost skeptical attendees who were not at all wanting to be engaged at the beginning. I’ve had people come back and say, really enjoyed that. Didn’t think I would get anything from it, but actually I did.
39:26
It wasn’t as bad as I thought. Exactly. I maintain really, you know, I enjoy it and every time I do it, I get something else from it. So I think it’s something we can all benefit from. And even if you’ve done it before, it’s good to have a refresher. Yeah, it’s really, I think this leadership and influencing skill set, students can never stop learning. There’s always further things.
39:56
you know, things that you weren’t aware about. And also, kind of sometimes you just see a different way to how it’s explained. And if you then wanna, you know, if you’re more experienced, if you already 15 years in the company, you see how you can actually also teach it and explain it to more junior other people. So take the learning and, you know, hope you’re…
40:25
mentees to understand that. So I think it’s brilliant. So it’s for everybody. Absolutely. And even if you have 15 years or whatever experience and had these topics many times before, it is the audience or the interaction that is changing. So the people are changing, different teams, different personalities. So you never stop learning. And I think that’s absolutely right. And as Gemma said, it’s the format of the day.
40:53
the learning is not really coming from the person standing at the front, it’s coming from the group dynamics and what you learn as a group from each other. Yeah, I mean, quite often I’ll put a slide up with a question on it and I don’t know the answer. I’m just hoping someone in the room does. We see ourselves more as, you know, we’re not claiming to be experts, we’re claiming to be people who’ve recognised that these are issues and wanting to facilitate a session on overcoming the issues. So…
41:20
We’re more facilitators with experience, I would say, than we’d certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. Yeah, but again, it’s important, what we mentioned before is to raise the questions. I mean, without raising the question, and that’s our job as well, it’s difficult to get the answers. Thanks so much. That was a really, really helpful interview on this important topics that we have here on the podcast from time to time.
41:49
And so for all the listeners, look out for the PSI homepage at psieweb.org. There you will find new events that are coming up in terms of leadership courses. And of course, stay tuned to this podcast because we will have further interviews and sessions about leadership like we had already in the last episodes of this podcast.
42:19
Thank you Gemma, thank you Margaret for being here and I hope to have you back again online soon. Thanks very much, bye. Thanks a lot. Bye.
42:36
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42:53
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