Self-paced leadership resources

These resources offer tools and ideas to enhance self-awareness, crucial for effective leadership. Great leadership starts with a robust understanding of oneself, including personal values, motivations, and responses to various situations and stress. It also involves emotional intelligence and challenging personal assumptions and biases. By exploring your values and recognizing cognitive biases that influence perception, these tools help build the self-awareness necessary for impactful leadership and research efficacy.

Research leaders often face strong inner critic and imposter feelings, which can hinder progress. These resources aim to equip you with an understanding of why self-doubt occurs, its effects on behavior, and strategies to manage or mitigate the inner critic to boost performance. Additionally, understanding these aspects is crucial for leaders to effectively support team members who may experience similar feelings.

These resources help leaders manage their time and energy effectively, prioritise tasks, and focus on activities that align with their long-term goals. New research leaders often face increased demands, from teaching to committee work. Given limited time, these tools assist in making strategic choices that advance career objectives, supporting you to prioritise effectively and manage time to achieve strategic career advancements.

Institutions and funders are increasingly valuing evidence of leadership skills in research and career evaluations. Traditional metrics such as publications and grant funding are no longer sufficient; it is also expected that leaders demonstrate their ability to manage teams, contribute to the broader research community, and foster positive research environments. The university and funders are adapting their evaluation criteria to include these aspects of leadership.

• UoE promotions and grade profiles - at the University of Edinburgh, Human Resources has revised the grade profiles for academic roles, which will be used in recruitment and the upcoming promotion round. These updates encompass not only research outputs beyond journal publications but also involvement in enhancing research practices and culture. New sections on "External Engagement, Innovation and Impact," as well as "Leadership, Management, and Citizenship," highlight the importance of innovative contributions and effective leadership
• Innovation career pathway - the Innovation Career Pathway at the University provides structured support for researchers involved in innovative and entrepreneurial activities, from Early Career Researchers to Professors. These innovations are recognized in grade profiles affecting promotions and recruitment
• Narrative CVs - many UK and EU funders now require narrative CVs that include structured sections to illustrate the individual's leadership and contributions to research beyond direct outputs. These CVs help in showcasing the researcher’s ability to develop others and lead effectively within their own teams and in the broader research community
• Leadership development - engaging in leadership development through structured programs or personal reflections effectively demonstrates ongoing leadership skills. Understanding and articulating your leadership approach is crucial for evaluations. Various opportunities for leadership development are available across the institution, including coaching and consultations, to support your learning and development
• Teaching accreditation [link pending] - gaining accreditation for leadership in learning and teaching is becoming essential for academic career advancement and promotions. To demonstrate your effectiveness in these areas, consider enrolling in a program that helps you develop and secure the necessary accreditation for your experience.

See also "improving research cultures" for how to develop positive research cultures and include this in funding proposals.

These resources assist leaders in recruiting research team members by outlining strategies, procedures, and ways to attract a diverse pool of applicants. They provide guidance on making effective and inclusive recruitment decisions, ensuring the right team is in place for research success, and addressing induction processes for new hires.

These resources explore various leadership styles, emphasising the need for agility in adapting to team or individual needs, expectations, and circumstances. Leaders must have a versatile set of approaches, as strategies effective in past situations may not suit new ones. Effective leadership involves signaling changes in approach and being able to apply different styles, even if initially beyond comfort zones. These resources will introduce some situational leadership frameworks to help leaders choose appropriate strategies and facilitate structured feedback from their teams.

These resources explain how employing coaching and listening skills enhances leadership and promotes the success of others. Leaders don't have all the answers; effective listening and questioning allow leaders to understand team needs, helping individuals progress by finding solutions independently. The material explores using coaching methods to tackle various challenges, introduces active listening, outlines coaching techniques for conversations, and discusses creating a conducive 'thinking environment' for your team.

These resources help research leaders delegate tasks effectively while considering individual motivations. Leaders cannot handle all tasks alone and need efficient delegation to enhance productivity and develop others' leadership skills. Effective delegation requires understanding each team member's skills and motivations and supporting them appropriately. This approach aligns with situational leadership theory, which advocates adjusting leadership style based on individual needs and includes coaching strategies to motivate performance.

Providing feedback on performance or having important conversations, often involving difficult topics or constructive criticism, are challenging for many. Important conversations require meticulous planning to be effective. These resources offer a structured approach for planning these challenging conversations, outlining key elements needed and guidance on using non-violent communication to ensure these discussions are conducted sensitively and constructively.

These resources address principal investigators' concerns about facilitating career development for researchers, particularly through career conversations. They offer strategies to boost your researchers' confidence and tools to enhance their career awareness. The key takeaway is that you don’t need to be a career expert to engage in meaningful career conversations. Research in various disciplines shows that having career conversations positively impact engagement, motivation, productivity, and well-being of researchers.

Building and maintaining teams are essential aspects of delivering successful research projects. These resources provide an overview of two models for building and maintaining effective teams and consider practical ways that leaders can set teams up for success and build positive cultures.These models also help leaders to anticipate common challenges in teams and be prepared to deal with them effectively [please note the model for team dysfunction is covered in the next resources tab, and has been removed here to avoid duplication].

Addressing team dysfunction is challenging for many new leaders, who may shy away from discussing team dynamics and communication. However, focusing on the team is as crucial as focusing on project tasks for success. Building trust and managing healthy conflict are key to preventing dysfunction. These resources offer practical strategies for leaders and their teams to maintain trust and handle conflict positively, enhancing emotional intelligence and the ability to manage difficult team dynamics. 

These resources provide an overview of the Research Cultures agenda, detailing its significance in the UK, internationally, and specifically at the University of Edinburgh, including key actions from our Research Cultures Action Plan. Improving research cultures is increasingly vital for grant applications and the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF2029). Beyond this, enhancing research cultures is crucial for optimising the performance of staff and students, ensuring high-quality research outputs, and maintaining the attractiveness of research careers. These resources guide principal investigators in enhancing the research culture within their teams, contributing to improvements at the School or Institute level, and understanding the broader efforts of the University of Edinburgh to advance its research cultures.

Engagement with external stakeholders can enhance the societal impact of research and there is a growing expectation from funders that researchers will embed quality engagement into their projects. These resources explore the myriad of pathways to engaging with policymakers and publics navigated by University of Edinburgh researchers; the support, expertise and resources available within the institution; and case studies of impactful engagement practice. 

These resources introduce some tools for developing a pathway to impact to be integrated in research proposals. It will look at how you map the relevance of different interest groups to engage and monitor, and how you develop activities that are relevant to achieve the impact you want to see from the research. 

Research Data Management refers to good practice in planning, collecting, storing, using, sharing and preserving the data generated in any research project. Both research funders and publishers increasingly expect that data resulting from research projects should be made available for scrutiny and re-use, whenever legal and ethical requirements allow. The Research Data Service at the University of Edinburgh provides support for researchers to manage their data effectively, and make it as open as possible.

The Research Project Management (RPM) team, based in Edinburgh Research Office (ERO), is a pool of research project managers and administrators that are deployed across the university to support the management and delivery of externally funded research grants. The provision of this dedicated resource can be tailored to the requirements of the project in question, with the long-term, short-term, and project start-up support options and project professional providing full-time or fractional support. 

The professional support provided by the RPM team is predominantly aimed at projects that require dedicated project management due to their complexity, and the cost of this support will usually have been costed into the grant at the bid stage. The RPM team also offers guidance and advice to externally funded research project, and recruitment support to project teams and PIs.

Key resources

• Research Project Management team