Co-PI Relationships Posted on December 3, 2007 Michael E. Thase (bio) discusses the challenging task of addressing under-functioning colleagues.

Investigators are people first, and occasionally interpersonal tensions and interpersonal frictions do erupt, and just as you may have performance issues or difficulties with a staff member, sometimes a site is under-performing.

And this could mean that one of your favorite colleagues has got his or her attention diverted to something else, either personal or a different project, and that you must deal with one of your sites not functioning fully, the same way you must deal with one of your employees under-functioning. And so typically a heart-to-heart talk at a one-to-one level, not observed by the larger group, is the best initial way to start to make an intervention, because as I’m sure you know, people are prideful about how well they do things, and sometimes a prideful person is even unaware that there are problems emerging.

Or if there are problems emerging, has made an attribution that it’s outside of his or her control, and so is innocent. And then, obviously, whether he or she is innocent, the site not performing is hurting the overall study, and more creative ways of intervening need to be taken into account.

So I've had to do a few of these heart-to-heart talks over the years. They are not pleasant, particularly when it’s fairly clear that the principal investigator’s been distracted or under-performing and some kind of remedy is needed. And on occasion, fortunately a rare occasion, in the course of a multi-center study, a site needs to be closed, either from under-enrollment or on one occasion I can think of, consistently poor quality control of the work that was being done.

And our outcomes are only as good as the reliability of the way we implement the protocols, the assessments, the treatment interventions. And if a site is not able to conduct reliable research, the validity of the study begins to suffer. And so the more sites you have in a project, the greater the likelihood that this rare, fortunately, event might happen.

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