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 conjunction with a coach or a mentor.

39:00 The values and strengths he brings – fairness, equality, respect, care, inclusiveness, analytic in wanting to understand the root of the issues, depth of thinking and reflection.

45:00 The team-based software engineering module for final year students and learning how valuable the right technologies are for doing this online during COVID experiences.

50:15 The COVID experience – rewarding for him as an introvert and also the challenges of managing the boundaries when working from home, dealing with dependents, the importance of nature and exercise, and cooking more.

54:00 What drives him as an academic – multidisciplinary challenges and team-based innovation

55:30 Key learnings from the last leadership development course

58:09 End

Related Links

Austen’s links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/austenrainer/?originalSubdomain=uk

https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/austen-rainer

https://softwareinnovation.nz/austenrainer-chair2017/

Academic leadership development course – next course starting 11 March 2021 https://www.informatics-europe.org/services/academic-leadership.html

Atlassian ‘My user manual’ https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/my-user-manual

———Transcript———

Automated transcription via Temi.com – may well be inaccuracies!

Intro (00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

Geri (00:29):

This first conversation for 2021 is with Austin Rainer. Austin is a professor at Queens university Belfast in the school of electronics, electrical engineering, and computer science. And his main focus area is team-based software innovation, the societal economic and environmental impact Austin. And I have the pleasure and the privilege of co-facilitating an academic leadership development course, and Austin is just such a great person to work with. And I'm keen to introduce you to him here, so you can get to know him too. 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 the various cultural differences that you necessarily encounter. We also discuss his experiences being an academic leader, and what he's learned in including a discussion about the difficult conversations that you have to have. And through all this we also hear a very clear sense of the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon the COVID lockdown experiences and impacts on teaching software engineering as teams for students and how well that worked and the personal challenges, negotiating boundaries, and staying well in working from home. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Austin Rainer.

Geri (02:01):

So I'm really excited to introduce everyone today to Austin Rainer, who has been and continues to be a great collaborator and friend. And we've been working on the academic leadership development course together, and we have another one coming up with it starting in March. So if people wanted to sign up, we'll put a link at the, on the webpage so you can follow through. And I just thought it would be useful just to have a chat with you Austin, and introduce you to people a little bit more. So thank you for getting up so early in your morning.

Geri (02:43):

Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me today. I'm very much enjoying working with you. I just, you're a software engineer through and through. And in that you did your PhD in software and that's been your sort of focus and research area ever since. And I noticed actually that we got our PhDs in the same year in 1998. Yeah, I hadn't noticed that before, but what, what I'm really interested in is you, you were at Hartford CIF for a long time after your PhD at moving through various positions, and then you moved to New Zealand and now you're back in Belfast in Northern Ireland. So I'm just curious about what were some of those transitions about what was some of the things?

Austen (03:39):

So what I intended the motivation. Yeah. yeah, gosh, sort of large question in a way. I mean, sure. Like some of it's some of it's challenge that different roles as I progress through Hertfordshire and then over to New Zealand and then Northern Ireland are professional opportunities in the professional challenge and opportunities for growth that comes with that. But for me also, I mean, you know, Geri, you and I will know about this, we've talked about the whole work-life balance thing, but for, for lots of these decisions, sure. Some of the decisions were professional decisions in terms of career and kind of professional opportunity. But for me, for many of these decisions were also if you like a work-life balance decision in the sense of what's the implications for my wife and my children and my family overall. So it's a combination of things.

Geri (04:35):

Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Austen (04:40):

Yeah, sure. My, my pause is I may unpack in a different direction to what you'd like me to

Geri (04:47):

Anywhere anywhere you want to take it. There's no, no agenda here.

Austen (04:52):

Yeah. I mean, I New Zealand obviously was a big move. If you see what I mean, and people asked me before I went, you know, that's a kind of long way to go. And, and I was like, well, I'm after a challenge, you know? And it's like, well, you know, that's a big challenge to emigrate a long way. I mean, I, I realized as well, Geri you've, you've done your fair share of M immigration and immigration. So some of it goes back to my roots as well. My, my parents lived in Africa for 14 years. And so I've spent a lot of time when I was younger traveling and moving around. So some of it was around wanting to explore cultural differences both academically in terms of how a different department and university did things. And one of the things I found really interesting about Canterbury and New Zealand is the emphasis they place on engineering broadly within, within if you like society and industry.

Austen (05:47):

I think it may well be the case in Australia as well, that the sort of status of engineers and engineering is in some senses, much more highly regarded than maybe it is in the UK. This is a course or relative. But also the emphasis they put on software engineering and New Zealand as being you know, it's something that's professionally accredited. So if you graduate with an engineering degree in New Zealand, and once you have sufficient professional experience, then you will recognize this as a certified engineer. And I thought that was particularly interesting in contrast to the kind of perspective taken in the UK where software engineering much more sits within a sort of computer science kind of discipline and perspective. So, I mean, that, wasn't the only thing, but when you're kind of asking about unpacking it a bit, it was looking at this fact that there was a very different perspective and culture academically, and then also in terms of where software engineering sort of fit within things. And we were after a challenge and it was a kind of good time in terms of the age of the children and you know, let's go for it. So that's,

Geri (06:53):

And you couldn't have moved much farther good shake.

Austen (06:57):

Well, indeed. Aye, aye, aye, aye. Joke with people I went about as far as you could go and still be in a civilized sort of, I mean, Dunedin is a little bit further, but you know, we're talking about a few hundred kilometers, which isn't yeah. But it was a, it's a long way away and a long way to go.

Geri (07:13):

Mm. So other cultural differences that you noticed, you know, I don't know, in faculty culture or, you know, other, other aspects that were interesting or surprising. Yeah,

Austen (07:29):

Yeah, yeah. New Zealand is. Well, I mean, part of my pause is that it's w w what was very interesting is actually how subtly different cultures can be when you think on the surface, that they're very similar in that. I mean, one of the things we were thinking about New Zealand is, is a Western culture, if you like. So I mean, my you know, my parents spent a long time in Africa and my eldest brother has been in China and Hong Kong for a long time. And I use those as examples because on the face of it, you would think they would be very different cultures are very different languages and very different ways of doing things. And then what, what I found very interesting is sure New Zealand is a Western culture is a first-world country, et cetera. And then there are subtle differences in the, the kind of national culture, if you like.

Austen (08:18):

And then also you find, I think, differences in the way that a particular university or the university sector approaches things. I think yeah, I I'm, I, my, my pause is to think through some of the, I mean, as I mentioned already, the, the, the, the way they position engineering and software engineering, I found very interesting. We, where there are with where I am in here at Belfast Queens university, it's very interesting to compare the, the kind of cultures, the academic cultures which I think here is probably in a sense, more hierarchical. But part of the reason I pause is you know, you can talk about a sort of national culture and then a particular university, but then even within a university, you will find very different cultures, even within the same academic school, if the school is large enough.

Austen (09:12):

And, and part of my pause is, is taught to be one, goes into the detail, but I think it's very interesting to reflect on, on working in New Zealand and he even here working in Northern Ireland, and then I reflect back on working in Hertfordshire, which is the particular group of people that you might be working with within a department that can have, you know, positive or negative effects, but that might be quite a different experience to something else that's happening in the very same academic school, you know, because it is about the particular kind of people you're working with and the way they approach. Yeah. So really good question. How to summarize it.

Geri (09:54):

Yes. Yes. Cause you make a, you're reminding me that. Yeah. Have you, as you said, having moved around myself that sometimes you think that just because you're speaking extensively the same language, and of course they're even language differences in the way people speak English, there are lots of subtle cultural differences. And I know that sometimes when I was in Sussex, I would have to go, Oh, was I just being Australian? Because I realized I had said something in a particular yeah. And the thing about cultures being different.

Austen (10:24):

Yes. Sorry. I was just going to respond to your comment on language, which is I was just joking with the colleague on email who was in New Zealand. He was asking me to provide some information from when I was there, which is like, you know,...