Fostering the talents of our research leaders

By Dr Joanna Royle, Researcher Development Manager

Perhaps the best-known cultural touchpoint for ‘talents’ is the biblical parable about investing and growing. The largest unit of Roman currency, the value of a ‘talent’ was immense: by some comparisons constituting 20 years of a worker’s wage. ‘Talent Lab’ is the name for the University of Glasgow’s leading edge leadership development initiatives, through which investing in fostering our valuable ‘talents’: our brilliant communities of researchers.

Talent Lab is one way that the University is delivering the Research Strategy 2020-25 which states that “by working in teams, building on each other’s ideas, and making Glasgow the best place to develop a career, our research transforms lives and changes the world”.

In practical terms Talent Lab is the umbrella term for a range of initiatives that develop our current and future leaders, including through mentoring and communities, career development, and leadership development programmes. The focus is primarily on bringing together cohorts of researchers, carving out time for them to form collaborative and interdisciplinary connections, work creatively on big problems in their field and beyond, reflect on what they want from their own professional path, consider how they can best support the careers of others, and build their confidence towards their next steps: whether that is securing funding, working with new partners, fostering values-led teams, or branching out in new career directions.

Leadership programmes within Talent Lab

Talent Lab already houses our original flagship programmes such as Postgraduate Leaders and The Glasgow Crucible both of which have run for over a decade. It is also an experimental space for trialling new initiatives such as Flourish, and the Catalyst Mentoring Programme and for testing ideas as we work towards our long-term goal of building a comprehensive suite of career-stage calibrated research leadership programmes. These all share the ambition that researchers at all stages will:

• Gain awareness of the skills, attitudes and behaviours that are required for research leadership, in a contemporary research culture.
• Develop new network connections to foster the potential for future interdisciplinary ideas and collaboration opportunities.
• Evaluate the social, economic, and cultural implications of their research, and their actions as a research leader, and their impact on the world.
• Discover ways in which they can be more creative as a research leader.
• Join a strong network of research leaders.

Talent Lab leadership programmes are selective, encouraging potential participants to articulate how they will develop through the opportunity and creating space for their managers to show confidence in their research leaders, and to articulate how their participation and long-term development will be supported. Key to our beliefs that the talents of our researchers are not valued or grown through a deficit model, our delivery formats focus on carving out structured spaces for reflection, for learning from other’s stories, and for forging connections – seasoned with a little bit of useful expert input along the way!

Talent Lab is led by the Research Culture and Researcher Development Team in Research Services and designed to be parallel to and complementary to the University-wide leadership courses devised and delivered by the expert team in People and Organisational Development, which offer #TeamUofG colleagues’ structured opportunities to develop skills in management, strategic leadership, and organisational change, enhanced by the chance to learn from each other across job families.

Talent Lab for Research Leaders

In the last two years (in collaboration with People and Organisational Development in the first year) we have piloted two cohorts of the ‘Talent Lab for Research Leaders’ offering strategic leadership development for 24 experienced investigators on trajectory towards securing large-grant projects.  Now in the middle of the second iteration, Talent Lab for Research Leaders is led by our brilliant delivery partners 64 Million Artists, a company whose goal is to unlock everyone’s creativity. As well as six full days together as a cohort, participants receive six one-to-one sessions with a hand-picked coach aligned to their career goals, and three facilitated small-group Action Learning Sets.

There are also cross-institutional online spotlight sessions, linking UofG researchers with programme peers from other universities, to cover key content on developing and managing people, having difficult conversations, and wellbeing and resilience. These shorter sessions free up in-person days to focus on creating coaching spaces for participants to learn from each other, and to plan their ‘big idea’, pitched at a final celebratory ‘Ideas Summit’ to a wide audience of peers and Senior University Leaders.

Programme impact so far

Participants tell us through their applications and initial sessions that they are coming to Talent Lab for Research Leaders hoping to build their interdisciplinary networks, team up with inspirational allies advocates and collaborators and carve out time for reflection. They describe wanting to ‘connect the dots’, to articulate their ideas and ambitions and regain creative momentum. It is their ambition to gain clarity of direction and vision, and to “emerge as a better version of myself”. While we are in the middle of a comprehensive impact evaluation, we already have clear evidence that the programme is accomplishing all of these ambitions, accelerating confidence, idea development, and success at securing big-grant funding.

The stand-out elements of Talent Lab for Research Leaders for its first cohort were:

• The peer support: researchers valued building a cohort of like-minded colleagues at a similar career stage from across the University saying “we are the future!”
• The coaching: researchers described this as ‘life changing’ ‘exceptional’ and ‘transformative’
• Planning and thinking time: Having ringfenced time gave participants the opportunity to think about their research and “what matters to them” in their professional practice and career.
• A values-first environment: Participants appreciated getting to know their own values, and the values-led methods emphasising positive messages of ‘choice management’, ‘not being able to do it all’, and the “need to be courageous and authentic in scheduling, prioritising, and understanding what is bothering you”.
• The integration of the multiple programme components: “Talent Lab provided a range of tools for thinking about, refining, and planning a ‘big idea’ from my research. One-to-one coaching helped me to bring together a diverse range of previous projects and interests and refine it into a plan for two research grants, which have since been funded. The Action Learning Sets were a structured way to help one another address the challenges we all face. It was also helpful to meet a group of other ambitious researchers in a similar career phase in an encouraging and optimistic environment”.

What is next for Talent Lab for Research Leaders?

This has been a very successful pilot, and there is strong institutional support to continue the programme. While it is encouraging to read feedback like “I feel lucky to have been part of this amazing opportunity. It has positively changed me as a person, both professionally and personally. Thank you”, we are, of course, thinking carefully about ways to further tweak and enhance the format, liaising with other universities to see what they find most valuable in their parallel programmes.

In particular we will be reviewing the format of the Action Learning Sets, which we have not yet optimised. While stretching the programme over seven months is great for having thinking space, it is less successful for forming the meaningful personal bonds needed to have challenging conversations, so in 2024 we will run the programme over a more consolidated time frame. We will also be bringing all of the programme in person, as participants struggled to engage with online workshops.

We will also be drawing the programme more explicitly into other existing opportunities. Firstly, by facilitating a cross-cohort Alumni Community to enable long term relationships, and secondly by aligning recruitment timing for all Talent Lab leadership programmes to create a clear story of how researchers can progress through development over their UofG career.

We are even considering a re-name, to reduce confusion between the umbrella Talent Lab and the specific Talent Lab for Research Leaders programme… we are open to suggestions!