G. Edward Vates, MD, PhD, FACS
University of Rochester Professor (Neurosurgery, Endocrinology & Otolaryngology)
Director, UR Medicine Pituitary Program
Director, Rochester Early Medical Scholars Program
Challenge: professional advancement and compensation renegotiation
Ed is a surgeon, an educator, and someone who gives his all to his patients. He is also my husband and the smartest person I’ve ever met.
Being the smartest person I know, it always catches me off-guard when Ed encounters situations that stump him or when he doubts himself. Eight or nine years ago, Ed was experiencing a sense of stagnation at work. When he discovered that his compensation was only about half what his partners were making, his feelings went from bad to worse.
I worked with Ed to identify where he was feeling undervalued (it was about more than just his paycheck), what the dynamics were at the university, we worked through the specifics of what he was asking for, what he needed to do going forward to maintain his pay equity, and we began crafting a letter. I will let Ed finish the story below but suffice it to say that our efforts made a difference.
Ed is a pretty perfect human being. Beyond his raw intelligence, he’s also kind, funny, thoughtful, and so incredibly good to me. To be able to help him in this way was a blessing for both of us. His trust in my instincts, strategy, and writing meant so much to me and the opportunity to be able to contribute to his professional happiness was an honor. This was a pivotal moment in his career and has had a lasting impact on his overall contentment in life which makes this particular project one of the most important and impactful things I’ve ever done.
Ed’s Testimonial
Jen the maker
No one likes feeling undervalued. Neurosurgeons typically have a “robust” sense of self-worth, so to feel like walking into the hospital every day was a swift kick in the gonads was not sustainable for me.
I loved my job: the patients who blessed me with their trust, the families who looked to me for guidance and wisdom on the journey they never wished for, the residents and students who learned from me and were my connection to the numinous nature of the young. What weighed down all this lightness was the sense that everything I was doing in patient care, research, education, and professional development was not valued.
Obviously, I was not starving; my concerns were very much problems of the “1%-ers”. But compensation is an easily quantified and knowable “hard number” and a measure of whether what I was doing was important to the hospital and department leadership. To know I was being compensated ~50% of comparable colleagues was not a fact I could live with. It was not about the money as an end in itself, but rather compensation as an indicator of the mission and vision and core values of my professional home.
That I can even delineate these concepts coherently now is a testament to Jen’s skill as a maker: Jen was able to take what existed in my heart as a “barbaric yawp” of discontent and distill it into a coherent and palpable essence. Knowing nothing about the practice of medicine, let alone the rarified (some might say self-obsessed) practice of academic medicine, Jen could see the universal concepts and the fundamental issues at hand. By making them easily understood communalities that were agnostic to the specifics at hand, she made my discontent easier to communicate to my intended audience. This also made it easier for me to then engage in the analysis that formed the factual foundation of my proposal to hospital and department leadership. To use a metalsmithing analogy: Jen took the ragged and scraggly ore of my dissatisfaction and refined it into a pure and beautiful and resilient metal that as easily grasped by anyone.
But the work did not end there. A bar of gold is beautiful in its own right, but it isn’t a work of art.
As I developed the arguments that I would make, Jen took these and molded them, sculpted them, beat them into submission. Her appreciation of form, symmetry, narrative arc, and her unparalleled grasp of the English language helped her to transform my arguments into an irrefutable piece of rhetorical art. She understood that, even in the mundane, the nitty-gritty, or the obtuse, beauty has a power that transcends. The forcefulness and impact of a beautifully written sentence, like a finely honed Laguiole switchblade with its trademark bumblebee insignia, cuts faster and cleaner than a plastic picnic knife.
When the time came and the efforts that Jen made were presented to hospital leadership, the response was swift and unambiguous: “You are right. This needs to be fixed. This is exactly what we have been trying to make happen across the enterprise. We will make it happen.”
I know I am biased…Jen is my love, my wife, my partner in the journey of my life going forward until I draw my last breath. But DAMN, SHE IS GOOD. Her insight, emotional intelligence, wit, thoughtfulness, deliberative process, inherent sense of what beauty is, and a kind heart give her superpowers beyond measure.
To this day, almost a decade since my “throwdown” with leadership, I keep a picture of Jen’s hands crafting a piece of fine jewelry in my office.
It sits at the point of pride in my bookshelf because it is from her work that all good things in my professional life emanate, from her skill and craft that everything I love to do is possible. Jen no longer makes jewelry. Instead, she uses her talents to help people achieve beauty and significance in their works and days. The Fates gave her a “bum paw” but like many heroes in Greek myth, she has taken this challenge from the cosmos and forged her own epic.
Should she take you as her client, know that she has seen and prized your inner fire and beauty, and through her skill and craft she will make you glitter and shine brighter and stronger than you could have ever imagined.