Teams, Research Leadership, Making Your Own Progress

This practical, action-oriented programme of three online workshops is presented by

Dr Adrian West, facilitated by Sophie Brown, Company of Mind.

Format

"Star Researcher": Team Missions to Help You Make Progress Now series will run on Zoom as follows:

Part 1: “Ingenuity”, Wed, 11 May 2022 Time: 10:00 - 12:30 hours (BST)

Part 2: “Perseverance”, Wed, 18 May 2022 Time:10:00 - 12:30 hours (BST)

Part 3: “Opportunity”, Wed, 25 May 2022 Time:10:00 - 12:30 hours (BST)

Please complete a short registration form here to register for this series!

Note: For continuity, to generate momentum, and because you'll work in teams with other colleagues over the period, participants should attend the full series, so registration is for all three parts, and not just individual sessions.

Please make a note of all three dates and aim to keep these blocked out in your diary.

Rationale

A research career, in academia and an industry, depends on more than excellent research - that's just the starting point. You need to make progress now on other fronts too: contacts, profile, credible experience, demonstrating skills, and more. But that can be hard when you're already busy.

The point

1. Urgent tasks and anxieties take up most of our time and energy.

2. Important longer term goals seem too abstract and too far-off for action today.

3. When the future arrives though, we know we could have done more today that we didn't get around to doing. And the people who succeed seem somehow to have managed to do that already.

What small things could you be doing today, well before that future arrives, to build your path? You may not know what to focus on, or how to make it happen, or who to engage with. Making progress on distant, uncertain goals is difficult - especially when it's only ourselves who are involved.

Where this comes from

Research Councils occasionally fund an extra year to commended PhD students to foster tomorrow’s Research Leaders (such as the EPSRC Doctoral Prize). Those people face a problem: how to transition to building a research profile as research leaders...when they are preoccupied with their current daily research project.

We developed this team programme for that prize research leadership series (where it runs over several months):

"... the role I’m applying for puts a lot of emphasis on ability to organise and lead groups and I feel as though the course you ran gave me an excellent opportunity to exercise these skills, particularly with working with a group over a prolonged period and keeping on top of organising meetings and such. Also, the opportunity that you gave me to chair the virtual conference/Q&A at the end of the course was one I really enjoyed and I’ve added this to my CV! " Doctoral Prize participant

"Star Researcher" is not associated with this doctoral prize, but is a condensed version of this programme that we developed, to boost your progress towards long term goals . It is three, half-day online events running over just two weeks (though teams could carry on afterwards if they wish). There's no time commitment other than the three half-day events - anything else you undertake is important to you anyway.

What you gain

We'll touch on leadership, progressing action and teams, opportunity creation, and handling risks within a framework to help lift your sights and take you further.

If you have attended any of our nine events this year (“Practical Thinking for Researchers” 1-3; “Working with Difficult People 1-3”; “Getting Organised for Research (and Life)” 1-3) then this is a practical action-oriented chance to put what you have learnt into practice too.

However the main focus is on progressing what matters to you, but within a team striving to make the most collective progress on their individual goals - like being the staff responsible for your own research group.

Previously on Star Researcher 2021

"Talk is cheap - we learnt the importance of keeping yourself accountable to someone else to make real progress. Having a scoring system helped us prioritise our goals and tasks, and dedicate time to work on those in a realistic and doable way"

"We realised we needed to generate and maintain team spirit as well as come up with simple solutions (like keeping good lists), to be more effective. It became obvious how proactive we needed to be from Day 1; It’s has been really inspiring."

From the longer Doctoral Prize programmes

“I'm really grateful. It was really valuable, especially right now as we can't easily meet with others. Working in teams was great in this format as it enabled us to talk and bounce ideas around with other researchers, which was motivating. It was not important that our research topics were not the focus of meetings - just having the opportunity and structure to meet helped us to discuss research and how things were going.” Daniel Niblett, EPSRC Prize Post-Doctoral Scholar, The University of Manchester, 2021

“I'd like to say thank you for the programme and the team task you've organised for us. It's a great way to make me commit to it and really try out things that I would have put off for later, to help me talk with other PhDs who are ahead of me in their study and career, and to offer me a view of what happens next after PhD and what opportunities are out there. It's been a great experience and I am very happy to have joined the programme.” Mengya Li, President’s Doctoral Scholar, The University of Manchester, Prize Post-Doctoral Programme, 2021.

The RDF Ref: These sessions offer opportunities to gain skills across:

RDF Domain B: Personal effectiveness: subdomains B1 Personal Qualities, B2 Self Management, B3 Professional and Career Development

RDF Domain C: Research Governance and Organisation: subdomains C1 Professional conduct, C2 Research Management, C3 Finance funding and resources

RDF Domain D: Engagement, influence and impact: subdomains D1 Working with others, D2 communication and dissemination, D3 Engagement and Impact

Registrations are closed

"Star Researcher": Team Missions to Help You Make Progress Now Series