By Dr Rhoda Stefanatos, Fellowships Development Manager
This blog post is part of an ongoing series exploring themes and practices relevant to our aspiring, developing and established Research Leaders.
In the eyeshadow palette of research leadership, resources and their stewardship are the base colour. For those who don’t love a cut crease, let me describe it instead, using the classic construction analogy, as the base on which your research and leadership are built. In this blog post, I want to explore how we can approach and navigate the resource leadership aspect of our good research practice.
What do we mean by resource leadership?
As Research Leaders, now and across our careers we may have varying levels of access to, and influence over, the resources at our disposal. This includes our time, funding, capacity and people we work with and lead. Funding is limited, competitive, comes with conditions and will have likely been carefully allocated, to very specific activity, years in advance. None of our resources are infinite, and how we use them is shaped by priorities in addition to our own. If we have the responsibility of leading others, our considerations include how we create an environment with possibilities for them to develop and contribute. Effective resource leadership allows us to make considered decisions within constraints, recognise where we have flexibility and where we can support individual and shared ambitions.
Where do we have decisions to make?
By constraints, I mean anything that limits, takes up or predetermines where we invest our resources. This landscape of inputs and pressures will look different for everyone, and the purpose of mapping or understanding these constraints is to know where we have flexibility. These may change over the academic year, across stages of projects and careers and will be influenced by factor beyond research. Institutional and funder priorities and expectations, workload demands, sudden commitments and personal responsibilities can all shape the resources we have available and how we can use them.
For example, the timing of an upcoming funding call, our teaching and supervision commitments or the conditions of a recent award are often fixed constraints. They can still be navigated through decisions on, where and when we focus our attention, which opportunities or ideas we choose to pursue and not, and how we manage expectations, our own and those of others. While we can’t increase our capacity or that of our team, at the drop of a hat, we can make decisions about how work is prioritised, organised and distributed, as well as any support that needs to be put in place.
This section could have easily been subtitled “where can I show up as a leader?”, thinking and planning ahead, and understanding what is on the horizon, are all leadership practices. Now we know where we have decisions to make, we can move onto how to make them.
How do we make decisions when we feel that everything matters?
In a landscape where we will likely always have more ideas, be offered more opportunities and receive more asks than we have resources, what shapes where we say yes and where we say no?
- Work the vision
When everything feels or is presented as important, urgent, valuable or essential, having a clear vision of the research programme, career, team and collaborations we want to develop supports us to align our present actions with our future ambitions, be they one year, five years or ten years away.
- Focus on the yes
Recognising that saying no or not now, makes and keeps room for the yeses to come, and supports us to make those decisions confidently. This is not to say that it won’t be difficult or create discomfort to say no, or not now, especially when we see value in an opportunity, just that by focusing on the important things that we are creating space, maintaining capacity and momentum for, it can be easier work to do.
- Show our working
Doing this decision-making work ‘out loud’, where appropriate, can also help us role model resource management and leadership for those around us. Being transparent about, for example – why we are prioritising one activity over another, why we have said no to a particular opportunity, or why we are choosing to invest in something new or where the value is longer term – helps to demystify research leadership, demonstrate that success is not about doing everything all at once and support our teams to develop their own critical approach.
How can we create possibility with others?
Resource leadership also offers the opportunity to consider whether there might be another way to achieve the same or a better outcome. I have written before about how the academic spaces that we are a part of set us up to assume that we need to do everything alone and that developing ourselves as confident collaborative leaders supports us to connect and combine resources towards shared research ambitions.
Collaboration is a one way we can create capacity and possibility through others. In the case of reciprocal and genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration, the fruits of our collective labour are often richer. We are not always in the position to establish new or scale existing collaborations or indeed begin an interdisciplinary adventure. What else is open to us?
Often overlooked valuable resources are the expertise of others, our existing relationships and the networks we are part of. How are and have you been making use of them? Are you growing them in the direction of your ambitions
Creating possibility can also mean stepping back and inviting others to step in. Where could an invite to review, supervise, present, contribute be offered as supported development opportunity for a researcher you supervise? Where could sharing ownership develop confidence and future capacity for others?
I hope to have convinced you that resource leadership is the practice of recognising the resources we have, understanding where we have choices to make, deciding what shapes those choices and working with others to do and gain more, together.
