Develop Your Diplomacy Skills Posted on May 2, 2006 Wayne Drevets (bio) talks about departmental politics and other uncomfortable situations.

I think it’s almost inevitable that one runs into political disputes, political feuds between individuals, where one runs into difficult individuals to deal with, either within one’s department or within one’s area of expertise. And sometimes, those individuals will control some resource; in my case, access to radiopharmaceuticals or access to patients or access to certain scanning technologies, and so it was imperative to be able to deal with those difficult situations in a manner that didn’t burn a bridge or that didn’t alienate that individual so that I would lose access to that critical part, the resource.

And I think, in that regard, developing diplomacy skills, and I remember one case in particular, where I was having difficulty with somebody else in the lab, and my mentor, my primary mentor, who was a neurologist, advised me to use my skills as a psychiatrist to deal with this other individual in a diplomatic way.

And I think that was good advice, and so I did actually follow his advice and ultimately developed some working relationship with that individual. I think there are times also where some political difficulties end up getting in the way of productivity, and so you decide that, at this institution, I’m just not going to be able to develop further or develop sufficiently well. And, sometimes, those kinds of political problems end up constituting a good reason to switch institutions.

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