Austen Rainer on changing cultures, leading people and values

Austen Rainer is a Professor at Queen’s University Belfast in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His main focus area is team-based software innovation for societal, economic and environmental impact. Austen and I also co-facilitate an academic leadership development course. We talk about lots of different topics, from the motivation for his various moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland, and negotiating various cultural differences, to his experiences being an academic leader, what he has learnt, including about having difficult conversations, and the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon his COVID lockdown experiences, both in teaching his team-based module and how well that worked, and the personal challenges negotiating boundaries and staying well in working from home. “It can be easy to overlook the fact that people who come into a new job, it’s not just a new job, it’s a new country, a new culture, that there’s all sorts of challenges.”“How do I navigate the way that you should lead in this particular culture and the way that you led in a previous culture may not be the way that fits with the current culture.‘“There’s a whole range of really difficult but also interesting and rewarding challenges about how you relate to all these different people [academics, technical, professional staff as a leader]”“If you are going to take on these [leadership] roles there will be difficult decisions, there will be tensions, there’s competing interests, there’s politics. … So difficult conversations happen.”“The challenges don’t go away. Just because you handled something well in one situation it doesn’t …just naturally follow that you’ll handle it well in the next one because of the subtleties of personality and politics and the situation you are dealing with.” “Care can be interpreted sometimes as interfering.”Overview (times approximate - see full transcript at end):02:00 Motivation for moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland – exploring different cultures and being after a challenge.07:20 The subtle cultural differences such as national cultures, academic cultures, and how software engineering is regarded.11:35 The real diversity you can get within an academic school and a university, and the challenges of relocation. 13:25 Suggestions for things to help people with relocation and the ways that different cultural signals can even get in the way, making it uncertain as to how to navigate the challenges.16:25 The challenges coming into a leadership position as a new person and the challenge of how to figure out how to lead in this particular culture.17:30 The move into a role as head of department at Canterbury, building on other previous leadership roles at Hertfordshire, and discussing different kinds of leadership.20:30 Lessons from moving into leadership roles, big L and little l leadership roles - how varied and different academics can be, as well as various professional and technical roles etc. 24:50 The difficult conversations that come with leadership. And always learning since situations are different.30:00 Imposter syndrome, the masculine perspective, and the value of sense checking with other people.34:00 How else he has learnt along the way: by going on courses and the difference between general professional environments vs academia; 360 degree assessments in...

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