You Say Potato, I Hear Tomato: Communication Challenges in Research Administration
When I was 11 years old, we moved from a small town near Pisa, Italy to El Paso, Texas. My dad was in the US Army, and we had been in Europe for eight years at that point. We approached El Paso like being in another foreign country because most people we encountered spoke a language that we did not. One night we were having dinner in a Mexican restaurant that we had been to many times before, being served by our favorite waiter. That night, we happened to be facing a mural and my mom looked up and read the wording on the wall. However, we did not speak Spanish and pronounced the word as if it were in Italian. Our favorite waiter, who knew us a little at this point, flushed red with embarrassment and corrected my mom’s pronunciation. But he was too embarrassed to tell her what her Italian pronunciation meant in Spanish. We would have to ask someone else, who would tell us that it roughly translates to a slur.
How does this apply to research administration, you might be asking? Language and communication are not precise. We live and work across institutions and cultures. In this field we use the same word to describe very different things and sometimes we forget that different institutions have different processes and procedures that can impact our working relationships.
Many years ago, there was a disagreement between the Pass Through Entity (PTE) and my then organization regarding the continuation of a subaward. The PTE wanted to terminate it for underspending, and we didn’t understand where they were coming from because we had automatic carryforward and expected the unspent funds to roll forward into the next period.
We were using all the same words, but we didn’t understand each other. As it happened, I had previously worked in the university system of the PTE. After a few back and forth conversations something struck me. The PTE and our organization had different accounting methods, and I wondered if this was part of the cause of our disagreement. So I called my counterpart at the PTE and we talked.
I asked the question that I was pretty sure I knew the answer to, in order to confirm that they operated on an “actuals” accounting method. There are probably other names for this, but in this article, “actuals” means that a budget period runs from a fixed date to a fixed date and is closed on that date, and those dates are normally not aligned with the calendar month. They confirmed that I was correct.
I explained that we ran on an “accruals” method, which for this article means that the fiscal period does align with the calendar month, but is left open after the calendar month ends for corrections and associated charges to be posted into that fiscal month before it is closed. We discussed that we ran on accruals because of the timeline of receiving invoices for joint and interpersonal agreements.
In explaining our timeline and telling them that I could provide an estimate of what we would invoice and when we would be able to submit that invoice, and they had the information they needed to discuss this with their PI and leadership. While I wasn’t able to give them what they initially asked for, through translating the language and figuring out which cultural differences between our institutions were causing the block, we were able to work through it and execute the continuation.
These examples help remind me that sometimes when confusion strikes, we might need to make sure we’re really speaking the same language.
Authored by Heather Brown, Grants and Contracts Administrator
Duke Human Vaccine Institute
SRAI Catalyst Co-editor
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