Description
This course is for early career researchers and mentors who believe that modern scientific careers require management skills and want to be research leaders. This curriculum gives you skills to effectively implement funded projects, thereby enhancing your career success. Research leaders take on a number of new roles, rights, and responsibilities–as scientific leaders, financial administrators, managers, and mentors. In this course, we explain how to optimize the people, teams, projects, and finances for which you are responsible.
Despite your research training, you are probably facing an urgent training gap in leadership and management skills. Scientific careers falter for non-science reasons when researchers fail to execute a scope of work: struggle to track expenses and returns substantial unspent grant funds; or run out of funds by spending on the wrong people or mismanaging the right people. Consequently, projects close with inadequate progress on aims, thus compromising successful competition for future funding. This course will help avoid these traps.
Leadership and management are essential skills for researchers. Several early career researchers, senior scientists, and administrative leaders are eager to share their expertise and experiences with you.
What you will learn
Researcher Management and Leadership Training
Welcome to Researcher Management and Leadership Training
Leadership
Being an effective leader–of projects and people–means to understand yourself and how you communicate with others. In practical terms, this means taking steps to align the words you say with the things you do. As a leader you set a mission and vision for your work that reflects your personal values, and then show people how to contribute to your vision of a brighter future–leadership is about getting people to follow you! We will discuss leadership behaviors generally, and specifically scientific leadership. Leaders take on additional and specific roles when you lead specific people such as employees. In that case, you may take on management or mentoring functions. These are related to, but quite different in important ways, from leadership. We will introduce you to important management and mentoring skills in other modules. This module focuses on the rights and responsibilities you have as a research leader.
Finance and Administration
New research leaders need to know about financials, reporting, and administrative obligations. If you are the research leader of a sponsored project with grant funding, then you are an academic entrepreneur. You need business skills because financial support and academic leadership come with rules, scrutiny, and new challenges. This module will prepare you to seek local answers to key questions so that you’re not taken by surprise, and do not make “beginner’s mistakes” with your funds. Small missteps can be extremely consequential to you as a research leader. We will help you spend research funds appropriately, on time, and as effectively as possible. You will be made aware of key practices for compliance, and prepared to adapt to the unexpected. From a regulatory or funder perspective, our goal is to keep you in compliance, out of trouble, and in good standing as a principal or lead investigator. This module focuses on the rights and responsibilities you have as a research leader and administrator.
Management – Part 1: Starting a Research Team
Management refers to getting people to perform to agreed-upon standards. We will address important practices when managing people who work for you, whether they’re paid employees, or earning credit such as students. Management is one of the biggest traps for early-career researchers, from defining tasks to giving direction and correction to delivering performance reviews and professional development. Having one or more people work on your research team requires you to engage someone to work in order to advance your goals. Your goal is that they will be your extenders, and do for you what you don’t or won’t do for yourself. If you manage effectively then they will be accountable and responsible for their work. This course will address key actions you will take as you start your own lab or research group: how to decide the kind of person you need; take steps to hire someone; and how to manage individuals, your team, the project, and also manage yourself. We’ll get you started on a path to effective management, improving your team’s performance and your own productivity and scientific leadership. This module begins our program on the rights and responsibilities you have as a research leader and manager of people and teams.
