it’s not directly connected with my work.” Be thoughtful about ways you can be
generous, and generosity is much more likely to come back at you.
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: PUTTING WORLD-CLASS
INFLUENCING SKILLS TO WORK
Marcella is an immunologist, an expert in the
way the human immune system
functions. Her work is central to the global search for an effective HIV vaccine.
As a senior scientist, she could have decided to focus on her own research, but
she decided to step up to a far bigger challenge: persuading HIV laboratories
around the world to use the same processes and standards so that their results
could be compared and aggregated. It would help accelerate the discovery of that
all-important vaccine.
But it was a huge undertaking, since most labs have their own culture and
their own ways of doing things. Marcella had
a mandate and funding from
several sponsors to establish this “global quality system.” But that on its own
wasn’t going to be enough to convince skeptical lab workers to change the way
they worked. And since she had no direct authority over any of them, she needed
a sophisticated approach, one that recognized where each lab was coming from.
She knew that once she had a few respected labs on board, others were much
more likely to follow—an example of social proof in action. So she started with
three from her own academic network. “They were each doing different things
with their antibodies and cells. They’d simply never coordinated with anyone
else.” If standardization could be achieved across those three laboratories, she
knew that it would send a strong signal that it could work for other labs. And
within each laboratory, the same principle applied: it was important to get some
key influencers on board. “We needed buy-in from the leadership group of each
lab, for anything to change with their colleagues,” Marcella says. “So I created a
committee, with two leaders from each of the labs, to drive everything.”
Still, not everybody in this inner circle was convinced
by the arguments for
the project. And even those who were intellectually supportive needed
encouragement to take the leap and embrace a new way of working. “In the short
run, we had to acknowledge that it might feel like standardization was slowing
them down, but we showed that it would eventually benefit them hugely.”
Marcella painted a vivid picture of its future benefits, highlighting things that
would help the labs do good work—for example, by strengthening their
reputation, the standardization project would
help them attract talent and
funding. Marcella also took care to highlight the personal benefits for those
involved. She told everyone that they’d be seen as pioneers, and that they could
put this prestigious work on their CV. “For many people, that was a big thing.”
And of course, she emphasized the cause that they all really cared about. “We
made sure everyone recognized that they were going to improve the landscape
for HIV research for everybody by participating.”
Marcella also made sure every lab felt they had ownership of the process,
even when that complicated matters. “I got each lab
to list their own existing
standard operating procedures, and got everyone involved in creating templates
for our standard processes. Of course, it meant we were swamped by
documents!” But she knew it was better than a central team swooping in to do an
impersonal audit and imposing ideas that did not reflect day-to-day operations in
the laboratory. Marcella was also clear on where there was flexibility. “I told
them that even once we’ve got the templates in place, deviations from standard
processes aren’t always a bad thing. Sometimes mistakes can teach us things.
They just need to be recorded and documented so we can track them.” Framing
mistakes in this way was a great way to keep people in discovery mode, even if
things went wrong.
It wasn’t always fun. “It was hard on me at first. It was very intense, and I felt
disliked by people at times, rightly or wrongly. But my husband said, ‘You have
the right kind of mind for this—embrace it.’
” And it was worth it. “From a point
where it was me working alone in an old building, to two of us working together,
to a huge team of people—we’ve come a long way. Those original three labs
connected with many more, spreading the
new techniques to many other
laboratories in the US, China, Thailand, India, South Africa, Uganda, the UK,
and Germany. We created almost five hundred clear best-practice processes to
follow. We have a unified system for quality control of specimen collection. And
now our sponsor wants to take the HIV experience
and apply it to other
infectious diseases.” It has been, and still continues to be, an inspiring example
of international collaboration.
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