🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

📣 Excited to share my latest video: “Key Considerations for Transitioning to Leadership Roles” 🎥🌟

Are you considering a leap from small team leader into more senior leadership positions in academia or research? This video is for you! I delve into essential aspects such as:

✅ Key considerations & strategies for a smooth transition
✅ Benefits of stepping into leadership roles
✅ Common hesitations & some reassurances

Leadership in academia and research is crucial for driving innovation and fostering a culture of growth. My video provides personal insights that will help you make informed decisions and empower you in making informed decisions about any possible journey into more senior leadership.

Please reshare if useful 🙏

🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Leadership Transitions
📌 (0:13) Leadership Transition Career Stages
📌 (0:35) Video Overview
📌 (0:53) Typical Scenarios
📌 (1:49) Typical Hesitations
📌 (1:56) I Haven’t Done Everything I Need to Do Yet
📌 (2:51) Leadership Experience is Valued for Researchers
📌 (3:18) Research Output Doesn’t Have to Collapse
📌 (3:41) Research Involvement Changes, Doesn’t Disappear
📌 (3:56) Some Time Intensive Research is Harder to Do
📌 (4:15) Letting Go and Opportunities for Your Team
📌 (4:41) Caveats: Totally Different Leadership Roles
📌 (5:17) Transitioning From Temporary Acting Roles
📌 (5:31) Acting in a Role Shortcuts Your Learning
📌 (5:45) Acting and Ongoing Can Be Perceived Differently
📌 (6:05) Leadership Skills Are Research Skills
📌 (6:27) Increased Access to Information & Decision Makers
📌 (7:03) Things to Consider When Taking a Role
📌 (7:08) Choosing Where to Stay in Technical Touch
📌 (7:36) Commit to Get the Full Experience
📌 (8:10) Requesting Extra Support
📌 (8:15) Resourcing for Junior Group Leadership
📌 (8:28) Administrative Support
📌 (8:36) Support for Transitioning After the Role
📌 (8:55) Final Notes – Not Overthinking
📌 (9:23) Experience That Informs Your Career Planning

Full Video Notes

One of the key, optional transitions in any academic or research-oriented career is when you switch from primarily doing the research yourself to leading a team that does research.
This can occur at a few different stages: when you transition from being a junior postdoc to a senior postdoc or junior faculty member supervising a bunch of graduate students or postdocs, and at a more senior level, when you transition from leading a typical personal research group to leading a larger research centre or institute.
In this video I want to talk about the second scenario, how it can come about, some of the key reasons to consider making the switch, address some of the typical concerns that people raise about making the switch, and talk about some measures you might consider should you proceed.
Picture the scenario: you’re a middle career academic, you’ve got a mature research group consisting of graduate students and a couple of postdocs, and an opportunity has arisen to lead or co-lead a much larger research centre or group that isn’t just comprised of your own direct reports.
How does this situation arise? There are lots of ways. Perhaps the centre or group you’re being approached to lead is a new initiative. Perhaps a previous leader has vacated the spot – for all sorts of reasons – and they need a new leader. Maybe you’ve identified in your career planning discussions that leadership is something you want to get more experience at, and your supervisor has identified the opportunity for you. You could have been acting in the role temporarily while a colleague was away. Or perhaps you’ve pro-actively applied for the position…
Let’s talk first about some of the typical hesitations that come up when these opportunities arise.
The first and most common hesitation is the perception that the individual involved hasn’t yet “done everything they need to do” as a traditional research group leader. The perception here is generally founded in the assumption that the leadership role will eat up substantial time and emotional energy, which otherwise would have gone towards the individual’s own research group. We can unpack this into a few different issues.
The first is the slippery slope of determining what exactly an individual means when they say they haven’t “fully made it” yet in research. This is a fuzzy, ill-defined set of goal posts. Sometimes it’s associated with specific outcomes – perhaps they haven’t yet landed a specific middle or senior career major grant scheme or fellowship, and they want to get that under their belt before they take on a leadership role.
What people often don’t consider here is that as your career progresses, you are assessed increasingly on your leadership and impact through leadership, rather than just your direct technical research contributions. Taking on a leadership role is often not in direct opposition to your ambitions here – and sometimes, it can actually help more with achieving your end goals than just doing technical research.
The second misconception is that your research group activities will fall off a cliff if you assume the leadership role. If you have healthy, reasonably well resourced research group, you should be able to structure it to be relatively self-sufficient, especially if there are senior postdocs or junior faculty associated with the group. Whilst taking on a substantive leadership role will definitely take time away from working with your group, you can still influence and co-lead a large personal research group whilst doing so, and many senior university leaders do this well. What does get sacrified is some of the “research indulgences” so to speak – your ability to take 2 weeks off to do code hacking or hands on research is reduced. Whether this is an acceptable deal for you will depend on your own principles and goals.
Sometime hesitation is driven by a fear of letting go and trusting your junior team leaders. They will, with support from you, learn how to do a good job co-leading your group. They will, as you have, of course make mistakes – but that is all part of the process. And you are doing your mentoring and career development job by providing them with more substantial leadership opportunities yourself.
Obviously there are some caveats here – if the proposed leadership role is worlds apart from what you’ve been doing as a leader of your own personal research group, than the previous advice won’t apply as strongly. If the leadership role is really different, then you want to consider whether it has sufficient interest and professional development potential for you, to justify the fact it will be a bit of a step change from what you’ve been doing. A common example would be a switch to a leadership role that has no direct or even indirect partial connection to the broad field of research that you’re in.
If you’ve been acting in a role – often referred to as an Acting Director or Interim Director role – and are now given the opportunity to take on the role, there are a few additional considerations. Firstly, if you’ve been acting in the role for a while, you’ve had to invest substantial time into learning how to do the role well – so a lot of the cost of taking on a new leadership role has already been paid, so to speak. Secondly, from a purely CV perspective, there is often a perceived difference between having acted in a role temporarily, and being permanent or ongoing in a role. If you’re already familiar and relatively comfortable with the role, why not consider making it a more formal ongoing affair?
Whilst a new leadership role will take up substantial time, most people are surprised by the synergy between developing and practising those leadership skills and continuing to lead or co-lead your own research group. Leadership necessitates the development and refinement of many skills that are also useful in your own research career.
Leadership roles give you a lot of “baked in” networking and access to information. Typically you’ll be added to regular meetings with executive at your organisation, on a range of topics relating to the role. Physically “being in the room” so to speak on a regular basis can be very informative, and open up a range of opportunities that would not have been visible or accessible. That is not to say you need to become a over-enthusiastic networker and coffee meeting arranger – but the default of regularly being in the room with senior decision makers can be very helpful.
If you do take the role, there are a few additional concepts to consider. One is that, due to the realities of your time commitments, you will of course not be able to practice day-to-day world class technical expertise in all the areas you previously did as a more hands on research leader. You should consider which area or areas you will endeavour to maintain some genuine deep technical familiarity and competence in, and which areas you will switch to having a more high level intuitive understanding of.
The second is simply that you should commit and follow through. If you find your day to day individual and personal research group commitments have not changed, then either the role you’ve taken on is relatively superficial, or you’re not devoting the required time to do a good job of it. You want to commit fully, so that you get a realistic idea of the leadership experience, which will inform your future career decisions. Otherwise you kick the can down the road of getting that realistic leadership experience.
Before taking the role, you may consider whether you should request any extra support. A common request would be a moderate amount of resourcing to help your group running – for example some funding support for senior postdocs to take on more of a group leadership / management role. If the role is sufficiently senior, you might consider requesting professional administrative assistance – like a personal or executive assistant. If it’s a fixed term role, you might also consider the transition period at the other end – perhaps you might request some extra workload consideration in the 12 months after the role ends to enable you to fully transition back to your previous role and get everything up to speed again.
Finally, it’s important to know that you can’t over plan things. Even with detailed descriptions for others, you will not have a visceral, informed sense of what is involved in the role until you do it for a while. Now that’s not suggesting you should jump at every opportunity – but if you’re someone who tends to overplan and overthink, at some stage you should just give it a go – assuming there are no unresolvable red flags. You may be pleasantly surprised – and even in the unlikely case you really dislike the particular leadership experience, you’ll be all the better informed for your future career planning.