It takes a village: supporting researchers to weave narratives that shine

By Dr Elizabeth Adams, Independent Coach and Research Culture Consultant at Scafell Coaching.

In an earlier auditorium post, UofG Research Culture Manager Rachel Herries shared advice for Supevisors and Principal Investigators (PIs) supporting researchers navigating narrative CVs (NCVs). In this blog post, I explore the role of research professional staff as advisors and thinking partners, and explore the range of approaches they might employ. Research professional staff are key collaborators for researchers in a range of situations. Here, they bring a raft of skills, patience and human connection, supporting researchers to successfully turn their complex and twisty career paths into compelling narratives.

Why it pays to have someone else in your corner 

Writing funding applications is tough, and the emotional rollercoaster that goes with it is only intensified when you’re doing it alone. The number one piece of advice that I give to anyone writing a NCV is to write it with someone else. Appreciative dialogue can help you remember achievements you’d forgotten about, fully reflect on the impact of these, and find words that strike the right balance between clearly evidencing that you have all these amazing skills, and ‘bigging yourself up’ in a way that feels too vague or icky.

Research professional staff carry deep expertise on funders, call guidance and processes, and are less likely to be a subject matter expert on the research topic (and indeed on the NCV writer’s career). This gives them valuable objectivity. My impression is that they are rarely dispassionate observers of the bid-writing process. They believe in the researchers they’re working with, and are fighting their corner, bringing much, much more to NCV writing than just their process knowledge. What I see most commonly is that research professionals pull from a range of different behaviours and skillsets to  draw the most out of researchers and helping them stay motivated and confident throughout the process. 

There’s more than one way to be useful

I’ve chosen Heron’s six facilitation styles (Heron 2001) to explore how you may be supporting researchers writing their NCVs and suggest where you could lean more heavily into one or other of these styles. The key thing here, is to notice what approach you take, and think about how this might be impacting the individual, their confidence and the relationship between you. Through this you can make space to be intentional in choosing the way you interact.

Below I explain the six styles and explore how you might use them in the context of supporting a researcher to write a NCV. These might be familiar, and you might have a preferred or default mode or even a way that you think you ‘should’ behave in this context. These are offered in recognition that this might not always be the case.

Prescriptive: This means telling people how to write their NCV. One of the reasons UKRI weren’t, and still aren’t, keen to share example NCVs was because they didn’t want there to be a set view of ‘what a NCV’ (or, by extension, a ‘top researcher’) looks like. So we know this method can’t work. However, I do sometimes find it’s quite helpful to suggest an approach to writing it, just to get people started. For example, can a team put some bullet points into a shared document? Or perhaps, if someone finds the later boxes (wider impacts) in the NCV challenging, advising them (as the UofG Research Culture and Researcher Development team have discovered in their writing retreats) to start with these ones, coming round to the more familiar ‘contribution to knowledge’ at a later point.

Confronting: This is probably the style your CV writer already gets plenty of from reviewer 2! Used in a positive sense, it is about encouraging people to think more deeply, be more ambitious and challenge their own assumptions or thinking. In the context of NCVs, it’s often challenging enough for the individual to be having to sell their skills in this way, so make your ‘challenge’ style gentle. Perhaps asking them to take a different viewpoint: ‘what would a collaborator have said your strengths were in that project?’. Or just asking them to talk you through a particular section of their NCV while sharing as much evidence as they can.

Cathartic: Writing funding applications, and writing a narrative of your career history can be an emotional experience. Even without those emotions, there are probably huge numbers of thoughts tumbling through the person’s mind. Listening attentively while they get their thoughts out there means they can let off steam, and then think about which thoughts to prioritise and how to move forward. Your listening, and perhaps some summarising or checking of key points, can really support that process.

Catalytic: This is one I see most often with research professional staff. Asking questions can help people to think through the options and move towards action. It could be as simple as ‘let’s try and get this down on paper and we can edit later’ or even just a ‘what else is missing’ can prompt a new wave of thinking.

Supportive: Anyone struggling with confidence or imposter-type feelings needs someone who can help them to reflect on their strengths and the evidence around their achievements. I often ask people to talk to me about what they are most proud of from the past year (beyond ‘getting published in x journal’). We don’t spend enough time acknowledging what we’ve done and doing this with an appreciative listener can be really restorative. The funding application writing process is so long and given the odds more likely to end in rejection, many researchers appreciate those who have stood by them, believed in them and acted as a cheerleader at precisely the point when they needed it.

Over to you

I will leave you with some questions to ask yourself:

• Which of these approaches do I already use? 
• Do I have a a preferred approach I default to? 
• Do you tailor my approach to individuals? 
• Which of these would I dial up?
• What might be the impact if I did a bit less of some of them? 

Whatever approach you take, the questions you ask and the support you provide during the writing process is likely to have a positive impact beyond getting a NCV written. By creating space for the writers to piece together and feel proud of their achievements and career narrative, and identify how these will support them going forward.