The Human Doctor podcast hosts talk power of building intentional workplace friendships
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Key takeaways:
- To leverage connections and friendships in the workplace, be intentional, move in love and make ‘support’ a verb.
- Women need other women.
CHICAGO — Building sustainable friendships in medicine requires intention, showing up time after time, and becoming “a friend of someone’s mind,” according to two speakers at the Women in Medicine Summit.
“Becoming a friend of someone’s mind requires continued effort and intention,” Kimberly Manning, MD, FACP, FAAP, professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Emory School of Medicine, said during the summit. “One of our absolute ‘sheroes’ is the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, and this quote from the book Beloved embodies the power of a real sisterhood and friendship: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gathered me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ We are grateful for those individuals who gather us and we hope you will reflect on those who gather you.”
Source: Jennifer R. Southall
Manning and Ashley McMullen, MD, assistant professor in the department of medicine at University of California, San Francisco — both hosts of The Human Doctor podcast — said their sisterhood-friendship began as a result of a 30-minute meeting on a busy agenda.
“I could not imagine doing my job without the sustaining mentorship and support of many people, but especially women in the workplace,” McMullen said. “The power of female friendships, especially as an adult, is something that I don’t take for granted.”
McMullen recalled the time when she and Dr. Manning met in September 2019.
“I had been on faculty for maybe 2 weeks when I received an email from a woman that I would consider an amazing sponsor of mine at UCSF, Beth Harleman, MD. She mentioned that this incredible physician would be visiting from Emory and that I should meet her,” McMullen said. “I think that I was perhaps the only person in the country who at that time did not know who Dr. Kimberly Manning was.”
As a visiting professor, Manning had a packed agenda, but a 30-minute timeslot was squeezed in for the two to meet, McMullen said.
“I also had a lot going on that day, but I trusted this sponsor of mine who said I should meet this person,” McMullen said. “I am a bona fide introvert, and I have learned that when meeting new people and new mentors, that it is good to be prepared. So, I listened to Dr. Manning’s grand rounds presentation and looked at her 80-page CV beforehand to find some points of connection.”
The conversation started off as a general mentorship talk, but somewhere along the way, McMullen realized there was a deeper connection between the two.
Manning agreed.
“When I first met Ashley, I remember feeling that I wish I had met somebody when I had just come out of my chief residency, trying to sort out what I was going to do next,” Manning said. “When we had that first meeting and we connected, we were both interested in each other. I felt safe to share the things with her that I shared. It wasn’t just about me coming in and unloading — it was that she created a space through intention that allowed me to feel OK doing that.”
When their 30-minute talk ended, Manning said she knew she wanted to be intentional about the next step.
“I didn’t want to say, here’s my email and reach out any time,” she said. “I looked at my schedule and saw that I had more available time, so I suggested that we get coffee together. We took another 15 or 20 minutes [for coffee] and I truly believe that 20 minutes was where our relationship truly began. Our journey of sisterhood.”
‘See each other’
Manning said despite her seniority to Ashley, there was “a flattening of hierarchy” in terms of their relationship that allowed them to “see each other.”
“So much of what we do in relationships is to ‘see each other’ and especially in spaces where we might not always see others like us. Part of seeing each other has to do with all the things that are us — like our hair,” she said. “In our identity as Black women and people who have hair that has texture to it, our white heteronormative world often [portrays] the idea of what normal looks like and what beauty looks like. For many of us, it can be a real fight to find what is affirming to us.”
McMullen reflected on the time she made the decision to stop straightening her hair.
“I was chemically processing my hair from the young age of 11 or 12 years — that’s decades of putting chemicals in my hair every other month to make it straight,” she said. “I felt that was what was needed to be accepted within the institutional spaces that I moved through. It wasn’t until the end of my residency — going into my chief year — that it wasn’t so much that I was empowered, but that I just couldn’t do it anymore. My hair was shedding a lot — it was breaking and never grew past my shoulders. I was never pleased with it.”
McMullen decided to stop straightening her hair and went through a transition phase.
“I did ‘the big chop’ and chopped all of my hair off and landed with a teeny Afro. It was such a meaningful experience for me that I hadn’t anticipated. It was literally like falling in love with a part of myself that I hadn’t felt in a long time,” she said.
The journey with outward appearance is that of agency and ownership, according to Manning.
“During residency, I had long hair and right before coming to Emory, I cut it all off into a pixie cut. People looked at me differently. The attention that I got from people was completely different and I remember feeling like I had made a huge mistake,” she said. “As I now think about it, the things that we do with our outward appearance is really a matter of ‘who you are belongs to you.’ We should create spaces that allow people to bring their entire selves into medicine and into the professional space, so that we can use all of our cognitive and emotional energy on doing good work, instead of trying to be somebody else. Nobody can be a better version of you than you.”
‘Move in love’
Manning referenced a quote from LaShyra Nolen, the first Black woman to become president of the student body at Harvard Medical School.
“LaShyra, who goes by Lash, has this quote: ‘move in love.’ When I first heard it, it stopped me in my tracks. It got me thinking about what it means to move in love. [To me] it means interacting with people — even for a fleeting moment — in a way that says, ‘I want more of you and I see you,’” Manning said. “It’s also knowing that sometimes the people who you are trying to show love to, it sometimes is not enough to show them. Sometimes you have to speak the words.”
One of the things Manning said happened organically in her relationship with McMullen was being open enough to say what she means.
“On [The Human Doctor] podcast, it just happened that we began to say, ‘I love you’ and that is now a regular thing we do,” she said. “Tell others that you love them, are proud of them, are inspired by them and to keep going — especially when somebody looks like you and you haven’t been seeing yourself in workspaces. To hear those words sometimes means more than the words. Whatever those words of affirmation are that might work that might tell somebody more than just, ‘Hey, girl’ — use those words of affirmation because they set others up for a soft place to land. We all need a soft place to land sometimes.”
Women need women
To leverage workplace connections and friendships, Manning and McMullen offered the following tips:
- Be intentional: Kismet can’t become connection without intent;
- Move in love: Use your words;
- Make ‘support’ a verb: Show up when it’s time to show up;
- Be stoppable: If people don’t stop you, ask yourself why;
- Lift as you climb — no matter where you are on the ‘ladder.’ You can be junior faculty and suggest someone who is senior for an opportunity; and
- Continually deposit into others: Sometimes that can be a simple text letting someone know you are proud of them.
“It is important to be stoppable — we need to be intentional about making sure that we are people who can be stoppable and leverage those relationships,” Manning said. “You will not survive this work without intentional relationships, which are built with time. Repeatedly deposit into people and build a relationship with someone who is not in your immediate family, who could give you a call in the middle of the night and you show up for them.”
Women need other women — beware of the woman who says she does not need other women, Manning added.
“Sometimes we are going to fly on one wing, and really if there is anything special and beautiful about intentional connection, it is providing that other wing for each other,” she said.
For more information:
Kimberly Manning, MD, FACP, FAAP, can be reached on X (Twitter) @Gradydoctor.
Ashley McMullen, MD, can be reached on X (Twitter) @Ash_McMullenMD.
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