3.44 Understanding how power affects student-supervisor relationships

Today we’re thinking about the relationships we have with our supervisors/advisors. These are one of the most complex and important elements of your PhD experience yet we rarely consider the nature of the relationships. In this episode, we think about how power is distributed in these relationships and how this affects how we each behave. This episode is relevant for PhD students AND supervisors, even if you think you have a great relationship!

Links:

You might also find these episodes on managing your supervisory relationships useful. 

How to have a great relationship with your supervisor

What to do if you have a toxic relationship with your supervisor

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, ex professor and certified life coach. And if you were listening last week, you will have heard me, slightly before I intended to announce some important stuff about my membership.

But I thought this week what I would do before we get into the main topic, which I'll tell you about in a sec, there's a whole load of new people now listening. I wanted to remind you all about what I'm talking about when I mean the membership. So I provide a whole bunch of stuff completely for free for all of you for the podcast and one workshop a month that you can all attend with no expectations, no strings.

It's there for the PhD in academic community completely free, so that if you can never afford to buy anything from me, you will always get that input and support. But if you want more intensive support and you're in a position to spend a little bit of money on that, then I have my membership program.

This is for PhD students, now masters. I do have some master's students that come along in, you have very similar issues, postdocs. That's fine. I draw the line, if you are an academic who's supervising other PhD students and things like that, then it's not for you. But if you are essentially an early career researcher, it is absolutely for you.

And we run on a quarterly basis. Now, I'm not gonna give you the full rundown. You can look it up on my website, the PhD life coach.com, but we run on a quarterly basis. It's a three month membership, you get access to group coaching, you get access to like mini teachings. You get access to a whole bunch of self-paced materials.

You get community, the community organized co-working sessions. I organize a few. It's a wonderful, wonderful place. You are gonna hear more about it over the next few weeks because my next quarter starts at the beginning of August, which means it is going to go on sale at the end of July. So this is going out at the beginning of July. We are gonna open at the end of July. The waiting list is already open. The waiting list has no obligation, but if you're on the waiting list, it makes sure you get sent all the information and it makes sure that you get any of the freebies that I'm gonna give away over the next few weeks. So make sure you sign up on that.

The bit that I announced earlier last week than I was intending to announce, but there we are. I was excited, was the theme of the quarter. So every quarter we cover stuff to do with the PhD experience. We have open coaching sessions where you can bring anything you're struggling with at the moment, but each quarter also has a distinct flavor to it.

So quarter one, we looked at building your time and task management systems. Quarter two, we've worked on procrastination focus and motivation. And quarter three, we are gonna be working on academic relationships. How to improve things with your supervisor, how to build the communities that you need, how to network, and kind of get to know people in your discipline.

Okay, so we are really getting into the interpersonal this time. Now, if you are listening and going, oh my goodness, the other stuff sounds really good though. I kind of need that too. Even better because when you join in quarter three, you get access to all the materials from quarter one and two, and we can obviously still coach on that stuff too.

So make sure you check it out. I'm not gonna be one of those coaches that hides the prices. It costs 149 pounds per quarter, so it's about 50 a month. Okay, that's Great British pounds. Translate it out. It, it does it internationally. So take, translate it out to whatever works for you. If you have questions, make sure you're on my newsletter so that you can ask them. But I wanted to make sure that all of you were up to speed. You'll get loads more details over the next few weeks.

The topic of today's call, though, is inspired by that theme and actually comes from some supervisor training that I did a while ago. So I designed a bespoke supervisor training, and one of the things that I was really keen to think about was the nature of power in supervisory relationships and the implications that has for the ways we behave.

And so that's what we're gonna think about today. We're gonna think about where does the power sit in a supervisory relationship? In what ways does the supervisor have power? In what ways does the student have power? And from there, think about how that affects how we work with each other, what we will say, what we won't say, what we believe about the other person and we'll help you draw some lessons there to help you improve that relationship.

So let's get into it. I think the PhD supervisor student relationship is one of the weirdest relationships that exists. Now, don't get me wrong, I actually had a really good relationship with my supervisor. I had really good super relationship with my students, although they differed from each other quite dramatically.

But it's still a very weird relationship because it's sort of hierarchical, right? Your supervisor is more senior to you. Uh, they are supporting you, helping you to learn and develop and build your career and all that good stuff. But on the other hand, they're not your direct boss. They're not intended to tell you exactly what you must do because there's this whole thing of independence and coming up with your own research and all of that.

So you've got this weird thing where the supervisor is senior, but you are expected to take autonomy and make the final decisions about the content. But sometimes your PhD might be attached to an existing project, particularly in the sciences and engineering and things, if it's attached to a grant. When a lot of the content will have been fixed, and other times you've got complete control over it. So you imagine the other extreme might be like a self-funded arts PhD, for example, where you've picked the topic and just found someone who can support you. So that's a very strange balance.

You've then got the balance that because PhD students come from all walks of life and all stages of life sometimes. The two are the same age as each other. Sometimes there's an age difference, a dramatic age difference in both directions, right? You could have a relatively new academic, supervising somebody who's come back to do the PhD in their retirement years. You could have a professor who's right towards the end of their career supervising someone that came straight out of their masters. Or you can have people supervising each other who are the same age as each other.

There's then also very blurry lines as to how collegiate collaborative slash friendly you would be with your supervisor. Some people maintain a very kind of, I don't wanna say distant, but like formal relationships. Some people don't see each other that much. Some people only see each other in those supervisory official meetings. Others have a much more collaborative experience all the way through to almost acting like friends or maybe even acting like friends, you know, going to the pub together, going, you know, traveling to conferences together, all those sorts of things. And so that can make it a bit weird and blurry too.

Across the podcast for the next few months, and within the membership specifically, we are gonna dive into all of that a lot more and how these different characteristics can really make a difference in that supervisory relationship and how to manage it. But the bit I want to think about today is power.

So we are thinking here in terms of where does one person hold influence over the other? So let's think first about the supervisor. In what ways do supervisors have power over their students? And I know people listening, you will either be PhD students or supervisors. Sometimes you might even be both supervising undergraduates while also doing your PhD. But put yourself in that position and think what power does the supervisor have over the students? And the answer is generally quite a lot. The supervisor might have power over the physical resources that the student has access to, whether that's laboratory space or archives or money for travel, or any of those sorts of things. You may have access to all of those and be able to control the extent to which the student is able to get to them.

You are likely to have access to what I'm calling community resources here, so access to other experts, access to opportunities, whether that's publishing or reviewing or grant applications or any of those sorts of things. You also have some softer power, so students often perceive that their supervisor's opinion on their work is like king, is the most important thing.

If their supervisor thinks they've made enough progress, then they've made enough progress. And if their supervisor doesn't think they've made enough progress, then they haven't. And so supervisors have probably more power than they sometimes realize over the extent to which the student thinks they're making good progress, whether they are a good student or not.

Similarly, students often get their sense of whether their work is of high quality or not from what their supervisor says about it. Now in the membership, we work a lot on learning to evaluate your own work and getting your own kind of sense of reassurance from yourself so you're not so dependent on that external validation, but in reality, a lot of students are dependent on the supervisor reassuring them that what they have done is good enough.

The extent to which the supervisor has power over what is done varies massively, depending on the discipline, the stage of career of the supervisor, and kind of their own personal perspectives. People who have a more kind of functional approach to supervision where the job is to get the student through a project may actually take quite a lot of power over saying, no, no, you should do this study, and then this study, and then this study.

And yeah, the nuances are up to the student and the way it's written up, it's up to the student, but the actual direction of the project may well be quite dictated by the supervisor all the way through to others of you who'll be sitting this now. I have no influence over that at all. It's entirely up to them. So that's one that can vary a bit, but it's a place where supervisors can have lots of power in certain situations.

Supervisors also potentially have power over their student's future. And I say potentially because I think sometimes students think their supervisors have more power than they actually do. But there is certainly the perception that supervisors have a lot of power over what they're gonna write in your reference in the future, who they'll introduce you to, what they'll kind of push you forwards into. That if your supervisor likes you and if your supervisor thinks you are worthy of opportunities, they potentially have power to put you in places, introduce you to people, give you recommendations that will give you more opportunities in the future.

And then finally, the supervisor also has power over all the kind of implicit knowledge that academics tend to know or figure out or assume that often PhD students, particularly PhD students who come from backgrounds where their families and their friends haven't done PhDs before, where they don't necessarily know kind of what's acceptable, what's the norm, what's the way of doing things around here, all that stuff. And supervisors have a lot of power. Again, often not recognized by the supervisor, but the supervisors have a lot of power as to how much of that stuff they actually stop and think about explaining to the student or checking at least that they understand. Can you think of anything that I've forgotten? Do let me know. Those are the kind of areas that I can see where supervisors have considerable power over their students, and so what implications does that have?

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Well, I see the implications that it has with my members all the time, so students who are scared to contact their supervisors at an early stage because they're worried that the supervisor will think that the work's not good enough, and that they'll therefore tell them that they're not good enough and so they won't contact them with early drafts, for example.

They won't risk making mistakes because if they make a mistake and the supervisor sees that it may risk the supervisor's perception of them, which may then shut down future opportunities. May then affect the personal sense of quality of the work. That if the supervisor doesn't think I'm good enough, then I definitely can't think I'm good enough. So it really impacts communication and the ways that people interact with you.

That perceived power can also really influence what a student says they're willing to do. So often a supervisor will assume that if a student. Agrees to a particular project or agrees to working particular hours or agrees to any of these decisions, then they're agreeing because they agree, right? Otherwise, why would they agree? Where actually often students are agreeing simply to manage that relationship. So a supervisor asks them to help out on another project in the lab. The student says, yes, the supervisor assumes that's 'cause they're happy with it. Whereas in reality, the student didn't feel they had the power to say no to that. They were worried about managing their supervisor's emotions and so they didn't feel that it was actually a free question that they had to say. Yes.

And for those of you who are out there going, you know, oh no, but I'm a really nice supervisor. I always tell people that it's okay. They don't have to do it if they don't want to. They don't believe you often. I know I'm making sweepy statements here. There's nuance, but please remember that even if you are the Lovingest Squishiest gorgeous supervisor in the world, you still have power over your students. Your students still perceive the power that you have over them. And for all the time that you say it's okay, you can always be honest with me. They might believe you and they might try that. And if you then respond in the ways you intend and you have good interactions, then that might carry on. But the students still perceives that power.

And I want you to be particularly careful with this, where your supervisees, where students are professionals, you know, they're part-time PhD students. They're professionals in another field where they're the same age as you or older as the supervisor, it's really easy to forget that there is even a power differential there. 'Cause as far as it feels, often you're talking to a peer. Those students often perceive the power differential even more markedly than junior students.

And the reason for that is that whilst these part-time students are experts in their professional field, a lot of the time, that often makes them feel particularly novice as academics. Whereas our full-time students, they may feel novice as a student, but that's kind of their norm. That's their reality. The comparison of how confident and how knowledgeable and professional they feel in one context for part-time students really emphasizes how novice and how junior they are in the academic field.

If you are a part-time student listening to this, I know I have lots of you, so, hi. Um, I want you to know what you think of that. Is that something you recognize in yourself? I want you to really reflect on it. It's something I have seen a lot in the people that I coach.

These things also get even more blurred if you have quite a collaborative relationship, you have quite a friendly relationship, perhaps even a social relationship. Again, it can lead to this situation where the supervisor thinks there's not too much hierarchy there. The supervisor thinks it's quite an equitable partnership when in reality, often the PhD students don't perceive it that way. So thinking about how it affects how you interact with each other, how it affects what the student is willing to tell you, and how it encourages the student to sometimes say things that they don't mean, that they consider to be the right answer.

If you are the student, think about how it affects you. How do you behave differently because of the power that you know your supervisor has over you.

Now, this episode is mostly about awareness. We are not gonna leap into tons and tons of solutions to this. That's something that we'll talk about in the membership in a lot more detail, but even the awareness on both sides can help even with no other tactics in place. Because once we're aware of this power differential and we're aware of how it's potentially affecting how each of us are behaving, then we can decide whether we are intentionally choosing that. We can ask ourselves question like, is it true they have power over this? Is it true that me saying these things may involve a withdrawal of influence or withdrawal of resources or withdrawal of approval, or whatever it might be. So we get to query whether the assumptions we are making are true.

And if they are true, we also then get to decide what do we want to do with that information? How do we want to behave? And sometimes it may be that you decide, you know what? Recognizing the power differential, it's accurate. It is. There is a real threat there that I might lose access to some of these things.

And you know what? The way I'm behaving is exactly right. Happy days. That's fine. Let's keep going in that direction. But for a lot of you, you will be avoiding academic honesty in the sense of saying what you mean, admitting when you don't know things and things like that as an attempt to kind of manage the power in that relationship, manage the extent to which the supervisor thinks you're good, and I want you to ask yourself whether that's really helping or not.

I get why you're doing it. The power makes it really, really hard. I want you to consider, in what ways would being honest about your perceptions of the research, being honest about what you don't understand, being honest about your opinions about what you wanna do next might actually improve the relationship rather than take away from it. So be aware of how power manifests here.

Now we have to remember that there is power going the other direction too. And I think this is something that students are often very not aware of and supervisors are very aware of. And it can impact how all of us engage with each other.

So ways that students have power over supervisors are things like if the supervisor is invested in your data, for example. So again, I think this is more common in the sciences and engineering where there's more team approach often, um, and where you're more likely to be working on part of a bigger trial.

Um, but often the supervisor needs the data that you are collecting because they will use it for a future grant application. Okay. Often the supervisor needs the data you're collecting because they need a certain number of publications for whatever assessment they've got coming up. And so they could really do with a PhD student coming through with publications to help them on those missions.

It's not quite the same in arts and humanities where there's more of a tendency towards single author monographs, single author papers. But it's certainly the case across the more sort of science end of things.

Whatever discipline you're in, the supervisor may well be invested in you completing successfully. Often things like promotions and so on are contingent on having PhD students finished. Students not finishing can sometimes be seen as going against the supervisor's record. Now that varies a bit, the extent to which that's true, but there can be a, certainly a perception of that.

Sometimes supervisors get really invested in their students continuing in academia. I have known people who are really, really invested in the future careers of their students. And that sounds lovely and supportive until such as a point that you realize that if you don't take the path that they think you should take, that they withdraw support. And I've seen that happen in a variety of different settings. And so sometimes supervisors are really invested in you progressing in academia that might be so that you stay on in their laboratory so that you can continue to contribute to their work. I see that a lot supervisors who encourage their students to stay because you've just trained them up, right? And they're really useful and your lab runs better because they're there and then they encourage them to stay. Sometimes it can be because supervisors take really seriously the notion of sort of being grandparents and great-grandparents out into the academic world. So your student goes off to some prestigious laboratory and then they have PhD students. And then those PhD students go to a prestigious laboratory and do the same again. And like your influence and your network are out there in the field. There's a lot of supervisors that get a real kick outta that. And sounds great, but if you then don't fit their expectations, that can have a negative impact on both sides.

So let's think a bit about how that affects how the two of you interact with each other. That the student's got this power, that the supervisor really needs you to do this work and really needs you to complete often. And at the same time, they can't do it for you. At the same time they feel like you have to earn your PhD, but there is some pressure on them as a supervisor to ensure that you do. How does that influence the relationship? One of the ways I've seen is that some supervisors can get a bit controlling. Some supervisors as they start to lose faith or as they start to feel stressed for their own reasons, they start to take more control. They start to get a bit more dictatorial about exactly what needs to happen and things. And sometimes that can be useful, but sometimes that can make the student feel like they're losing control. Right.

Sometimes it comes across in a more nuanced way that the supervisor is just a bit stressed about it all that the supervisor's just getting a bit time urgent, is getting a bit pressuring, those sorts of things. So they're not like making the decisions or anything, but they're sort of really saying, you know, you've gotta get on with this client, you've gotta get on with this. And the trouble is that certainly in my experience, the problem with the vast majority of PhD students is not that they don't register that time's getting short and that they've got a lot to do, it's that they really, really register that time is short and that they've got a lot to do.

And that is in many ways paralyzing them because of the emotions they're sort coming up in that. So one of the ways that the power that students have gets sort of visualized in a relationship is the supervisor getting really stressed about the things they're outta control of and that negatively affecting the supervisor and their experience, but it also then having this knock on effect and influencing the students too.

And that's when it then becomes reciprocal, right? Because the supervisor starts getting stressed because of the things that they're outta control of, that have influence of over them. So the power the student has, but then because the supervisor gets stressed and the supervisor is the one that's higher in the hierarchy, that has the more power, has the influence over all the things that we've discussed. That stress then gets passed back down to the student, and it can lead to a really high pressure environment where communication is really challenging and it is all coming from these perceptions of power, these perceptions of who holds which power, and then these sort of misguided again, I guess, attempts to manage that power.

As I say, not loads and loads of solutions for you today, but I want you to think about this in relation to your specific supervisory relationships, whichever side of it you are on, and in the newsletter that you can all sign up to get there'll be a couple of reflective questions as usual that will help you work through. Where you think power is sitting at the moment in your relationship and what impact that has?

Awareness with all the things we talk about is the absolute first step towards understanding, interpretation and strategic change. So have a think. Let me know. You can always reply to my newsletters and tell me what you've been thinking. Ask any questions As you'll have heard last week, I do answer listener questions on the podcast from time to time. So get those sent on in. Have a ponder. Where's the power in all your relationships and what impact is it having at the moment? Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.

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