Asserting Agency to Create an Effective Relationship with Your Advisor

by Dr. Sonja K. Foss and Dr. Karen A. Foss

Completing your dissertation successfully is much easier if you have an effective interpersonal relationship with your advisor. Because advisors have the greater power in the advising situation, it would be nice if they took the lead in initiating communication that facilitates effective relationships. Ideally, advisors should engage in communication such as inviting interaction, offering assistance, creating a safe environment, adapting communication to your particular needs, and providing constructive feedback.

As we all know, however, advisors don't always engage in these kinds of communication. If that's the case, you aren't doomed to have an ineffective relationship with your advisor. There are some things you can do in terms of communication that will have a positive impact on the relationship you have with your advisor. They can help reduce the power differential between you, and your initiation of these kinds of communication can dramatically affect your advisor's perception of you. They can transform you from a groveling graduate student into a proactive, capable, committed, potential colleague for your advisor. Engaging in these kinds of communication also will help you make your advisor into the best possible advisor for you.

There are six communication skills that will help you create an effective relationship with your advisor: Ask, articulate needs, accept support, accept feedback, appreciate, and assess.

1. Ask

Asking has to do with asking your advisor to be your advisor if you have several faculty members from whom to choose.

Your first step is to do research on the faculty members who are available to serve as your advisor. Interview them, talk with other students who have them as advisors, and read books and articles they have written to discover who would be the best advisor for you.

Don't ask a faculty member to be your advisor too early. Interpersonal relationships typically go through five stages that take them from an initial encounter to a fully committed relationship - initiating, experimenting, intensifying, integrating, and bonding.

Don't ask someone to be your advisor (which puts you at the bonding stage) before you have the benefit of the other stages required to build a good relationship.

Before you ask, take advantage of any opportunities for exchange between you and your potential advisor - take a class from her, work on her
research team, attend a workshop she is presenting, ask her for advice on a paper or project, and attend social events the department sponsors, for example.

After several such interactions in different contexts, you are ready to ask the faculty member to be your advisor.

2. Articulate Needs

There are a number of areas where you should articulate your needs to your advisor, and its perfectly appropriate for you to do so. Tell your advisor that you would like assistance with these processes:

* Holding an extended conversation with your advisor to work out the plan for your dissertation

* Establishing ground rules for your advising relationship working out together how often you will meet, how quickly your advisor will provide feedback on chapters, how you and your advisor will keep track of decisions you make, and expectations your advisor has for your behavior

* Learning basic information about the dissertation process: Ask your advisor to provide you with answers to questions such as: Is there a proposal defense? What constitutes a proposal? How long should the proposal be? How long should the dissertation be? What are the deadlines you must meet? Ask your advisor to supply you with samples of good dissertations.

As you articulate your needs, choose ways of communicating verbally and nonverbally that suggest your self-confidence and self-esteem. Clearly, you don't want to go overboard so you aren't respectful of your advisor, but, at the same time, you want to communicate that you are valuable and have ideas to offer that are worthwhile. You also want to communicate directly and confidently in response to suggestions by your advisor that seem inappropriate, unfair, or unhelpful.

3. Accept Support

Be attentive to the suggestions of your advisor.

Give your advisor the best products you can whether in research support, papers you write for his classes, or dissertation chapters. Advisors find very rough drafts frustrating and irritating. Show your respect for your advisor's time by giving him polished products whenever possible.

Keep appointments and be on time.

Respect the ground rules you and your advisor have established for the relationship.

4. Accept Feedback

Don't prejudge your advisors feedback to be negative until you have more information. Disarm negative trigger words by reframing them through self-talk. Allow for the possibility that words have many different meanings and that maybe you haven't clearly understood what your advisor meant.

If the feedback is being given orally, respond with silence until you understand it. Silence allows your advisor to rephrase or clarify meaning. It also gives you time to diffuse your emotional triggers and to be in greater control of your response.

Disconnect your ego or self-esteem from the feedback. Your advisor is trying to help you be successful, and her feedback isn't a commentary on your worth.

Ask questions when you don't understand something, and ask for examples if the feedback is vague. Also ask for written feedback on chapters so that you can deal with it more effectively at a time when you aren't so emotionally invested.

5. Appreciate

The advising relationship is a reciprocal one. Just as you want to get needs met and have certain outcomes as a result of that relationship, so does your advisor. Advisors want to be appreciated. They want to feel that they aren't giving and giving with nothing coming to them in return.

One way to show your appreciation is to do your best to follow your advisors advice and guidelines.

Another way is to express your appreciation explicitly to your advisor periodically. This can be verbally, with a thank-you card in his mailbox, or with a flower from your garden for his desk, for example.

6. Assess

Regularly assess your relationship with your advisor. Two major signs that the relationship is not effective are that you aren't making progress on the dissertation and/or that you try to avoid communicating with or even seeing your advisor.

If you determine that you don't have an effective relationship with your advisor and that your relationship is likely to interfere with the completion of your dissertation, you have at least five strategies available to you:

* Engage in conflict resolution: Work with your advisor to resolve your conflicts by focusing on your goals and shared interests rather than on positions that each of you is defending. With your advisor, generate a variety of possibilities for resolving the conflict.

* Ask for help from a mediator: The director of the graduate program, the department chair, or an ombudsperson may be able to serve as a mediator and resolve a conflict between you and your advisor. Remember, though, that going outside of the advising relationship may cause your advisor to lose face and to become more defensive.

* Perform completion: Write the entire dissertation, making it as high quality as you possibly can and putting it in perfect form. Then submit it to your advisor. Sometimes, when an advisor sees your dissertation all done and knows that the conflicts plaguing your relationship can stop, she will happily approve it. Obviously, there's a big risk with this strategy (she may not approve it), but you should know
your advisor well enough to know if this is a risk you can take.

* Switch advisors: Your only real choice may be to switch advisors. Clearly, you should not make this decision lightly. Switching to another advisor may slow you down, and it may have political ramifications for you within your department. If you choose to switch, try to end the relationship with your advisor on a positive note and thank her for his assistance and mentoring. Before you switch advisors, of course, be sure you have another faculty member lined up who will serve as your new advisor.