The question about what career
accomplishments I am most proud of makes me reflect on the answer I readily give.
My answer has always been that I am most proud of my mentees, who reside in
different parts of the world, and their amazing leadership. However, a recent
question posed by my Philadelphia Transitions group was more targeted toward leadership
journeys. My immediate answer to this question is that my journey as a reluctant
leader, who held many leadership roles, such as deanships, chairmanships and
directorships, stems from accepting serendipitous opportunities and integrating
those opportunities with the needs of my family at different life stages. While
I did plan my educational trajectory and academic path, in contrast, I did not
chart nor design my leadership path.
While deeply rethinking what I am
most proud of, I realized I am most proud of finding my own authentic voice and
using it to make a difference in the lives of women and nurses. Two articles I
published earlier in my career reflect what I really wanted to achieve without deliberately
articulating specific goals. The titles of these articles were “A passion for
making a difference: ReVisions for empowerment” and “Does nursing intervention
make a difference? A test of the ROSP,” which I wrote to convince legislators
of the significant role nurses play based on a clinical trial for nursing
interventions.
Reflecting on what helped develop my
voice, I uncovered three main strategies:
- First,
I developed my voice through listening.
As a child, I listened to women who came to my mother’s midwifery office. Then
I listened to my childhood friend, Saidia, the daughter of the doorman who
suddenly disappeared when she was 12-years-old. I found out her family sent her
back to their village to marry her cousin. Girl/child marriages are still
practiced in many countries. I also listened to women in Colombia, Brazil,
Sweden, Egypt, and many more countries, where I continued to hear similar
messages. Women felt oppressed, violated, burdened, undervalued, under-supported
and definitely under compensated. Then I listened to nurses, and I heard about their
sense of devaluation, the lack of equitable compensation and disciplinary
oppression by physicians and administrators. I listened to caregivers and heard
about their uncertainty, under-supported transitions when becoming caregivers,
as well as the paradox of being burdened and transformed by caregiving. These
messages profoundly affected me and shaped my goals, my research and my
academic and leadership roles. I pondered what could be done?
- The
second strategy involved building
connections, investing in partnerships, nurturing relationships globally,
and then leveraging them to facilitate and support others. My colleagues and I
developed global conferences that empowered women and forged connections. I continue
leveraging my global connections in my current roles as a board member and a
trustee. While mentoring deans and faculty in nursing, medicine and other health
fields, I make use of the wonderful global relations I forged and nurtured by
connecting mentors and mentees, facilitating connections between experts and
those who can benefit from their expertise. I connect those in need of developing
certain capacities to those who can meet their needs through my global networks.
The vast repertoire of incredibly accomplished colleagues in my life and the
relationships I cultivated are assets to those who benefit from shared wisdom
and experience.
- The third strategy that led to leadership roles developed from a lesson I learned
from my parents, to step outside of my
comfort zone and indulge in new roles that require abilities and actions I
know little about. I had to develop these uncertain capacities while always
finding ways to enjoy and embrace the processes and the outcomes, uncertainties
and all.
I have been privileged to get amazing
leadership roles that provided me with
platforms for my voice. Several instrumental milestones in my career allowed
me to gain the necessary skills to lead and to have a voice that made a
difference. When Mahmoud finished his Ph.D., I was already an established assistant
professor at UCLA, just beginning to develop my academic portfolio, and I had
no plans to leave. From his several employment offers, he wanted to accept a position
in San Francisco, so we needed to move. I thought I would get a lateral move, from
UCLA to UCSF (the UC system has 9 campuses). The dean and faculty at UCSF
insisted the only open position I could move to was as an assistant dean. I
reluctantly interviewed and got the offer for this difficult new role,
particularly for someone like me who just completed my Ph.D. three years earlier,
with two babies under 3-years-old, and with a minimal readily available support
system for childcare, which was the norm at that time. The challenges of the
new administrative role and the challenges of integrating these demands with a
growing family taught me a great deal about organization, finding resources,
garnering support, management, leadership and the importance of having a strong
voice.
Several other events were
instrumental in shaping the next 10 years of my life. My academic file went up
for a university wide committee review, by what was called pre-tenure by CAP,
the Committee for Academic Personnel Promotions and Tenure. This vital
milestone predetermined if I would eventually qualify for tenure and stay at
the university. After the review, they warned that if I continued working
on a book I proposed, for which I had a contract from a top publishing company,
and if I stayed in my administrative role, I would definitely fail to attain tenure
- an important warning and a Iesson I listened to very carefully. It prompted
me to give up the book, resign from my administrative role and re-invest my
time in my women’s health research program. It was imperative and timely to put
in a request for sabbatical leave, for which I was approved. I chose to go to
Kuwait during my sabbatical, to continue with my research program by listening
to more women’s stories.
Within a year of returning from sabbatical,
with renewed energy for my research program, I was actively pursued and
recruited for another administrative role, this time for a deanship in Kuwait. Because
of our family goals to provide opportunities for global experiences for our 5
and 7-year-old sons, my husband and I accepted to take leaves of absence from
our employers, UCSF and Bechtel Corp., so I could accept this new leadership
position – yet another opportunity I did not seek nor prepare for. It turned
out to be an instrumental position for cultivating my global voice and gaining
more insights into global health and women’s issues. In that new role, I led multinational
faculty, developed curricula, dealt with multisector organizations, promoted
research agendas, listened to women’s stories of trials and tribulations and
resilience and transformation and traveled to some 10 countries in the Middle
East and Europe – all packed into a two year deanship appointment.
When I returned to UCSF, I was
adamant about declining every deanship and/or administrative role that came my
way, and opted to focus on teaching and research and on having a voice that
represented the faculty and the academic mission of our university. I did that
through leadership roles with the University of California’s strong Academic
Senate. I chaired system-wide academic personnel committees, listened to women faculty
and students and became one of the thunderous voices for promoting equity and
justice for women faculty and minorities. I testified in front of California
legislators about inequity in promotions and financial compensations for women
in the University of California system and about the limited resources available
to support the multiple demands on their energy and time. I absorbed new skills
concerning where and how to exercise my voice, and where and when to ask for
policy changes. I also learned a great deal about legislative processes that
drive change.
Another milestone that was serendipitous
and contributed to making my scholarly voice more impactful – I created and
taught a series of three new theory, philosophy and epistemology courses for Ph.D.
students. I was thoroughly invested in and enjoyed these full year courses of learning
and teaching. I was settling back in, doing what I love, research and teaching.
And one day, a vice president of a top publishing house for health professional
education walked into my office and asked me to put those courses in a book, as
he heard about my innovative theory/philosophy courses everywhere he went,
nationally and internationally. Reluctantly, I agreed and I wrote the textbook, which provided
approaches to viewing and studying theories and strategies for developing them by
using my unique analyses. The book reflected a very different voice with regard
to our discipline, about the theoretical foundation of nursing, and it provided
frameworks that considered how nurses make major differences in people’s lives.
I honored our discipline’s history in theory development through new approaches
to viewing nursing scholarship.
This book, written from a feminist,
post colonialist perspective, was used by almost every graduate program, nationally
and globally. It provided more visibility for my voice and for the hundreds of journal
articles I previously published. It made my ideas more accessible, and interestingly,
more accepted and relevant. It expanded my scholarly voice in nursing circles
globally and contributed to dialogues and deliberations about nurses as women
between international organizations (such as WHO, ICN and the UN).
Another important milestone was the
proactive role I played in the only organization, at the time, focused on
research and practice in global women’s health issues. I became president of this organization and we held conferences all
over the world, which brought clinicians, researchers, policy makers and the
public together to dialogue about global women’s health issues. This
organization allowed me to develop even more global relationships, investing in
multidisciplinary connections with scholars and clinicians and empowering them
to influence their governments to devote more attention to women’s health
issues, beyond reproductive health. This organization was another platform for
my voice.
With dedicated listening to women
and nurses’ experiences and global relationships forged through various
positions, I developed more leadership skills and increased my ability to take
risks by getting out of my comfort zone, allowing me to accept the challenges
in formal leadership positions, such as the deanship of The University of
Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing. However, one skill I still needed to develop once
accepting that position was fundraising for a private university. This was
another role/skill falling totally outside of my comfort zone. This deanship
position gave me the platform to not only master fundraising, but also to thoroughly
embrace and enjoy it.
After reviewing this narrative, I
would say the following more accurately describes my leadership trajectory. I
have been a lifelong learner and
listener and a reluctant adopter of
formal leadership roles, who has been privileged to take advantage of and
accept many serendipitous positions and opportunities.
I definitely lived a life outside of my
comfort zones - leaving my home and my family in Alexandria at the age of
20, becoming a citizen of a country I grew to love and immersing myself in a discipline
I am proud to be a member of. I hope I made some difference and that I will
continue to make an impact, however miniscule it is compared to the needs that
exist for insuring justice, equity and valuation for women and nurses.
