Leadership is now one of the most searched qualities for almost any kind of job. In research teams, this is a commonly used word; “she is the team leader”, “we are searching for a team leader”, “there is a lack of leadership in the institution”, etc. But what is a “Research Leader”? Is it the same to be a Principal Investigator (PI) as a Research Leader? Is it coming implicit the title of PI with this set of skills? And, how was this PI trained as a leader? Who should train her? Is she really a leader or a manager? What is the distinction between a leader and a manager?
For the past two years, I have been struggling and evaluating all these questions, trying to have a clear understanding of what a leader in research is, and how to drive my teams to extraordinary accomplishment. Since a year ago, I’m entitled PI of two research studies, with two different teams, one as part of the Lown Program to improve cardiovascular health in low/middle-income countries, hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health, and other to assess and improve the cardiovascular health of an urban population in Central Europe, hosted by the International Clinical Research Center of the St Anne’s University Hospital Brno, Czechia. From this position, I lived the transition from learning to write papers and grant applications to take a top position in the team, but nobody told me how to transition effectively, at least not in a traditional way. This brief document describes what I learned about leadership in research facing these challenges, and I hope to contribute to close the gap of knowledge about leadership in research areas.
On the path to someone become a good researcher this person has to learn a lot of skills, how to search for information, how to interpret the state of the art evidence and discover good research questions, how to write a project proposal, a paper, a review, test hypothesis, how to analyze and interpret data, prepare budgets, but especially, how to persevere for every review of the co-authors and arbiters, persevere after every rejection for a paper or grant proposal. These are requirements that all researcher should fulfill, but research is never done alone, always there is a partner, mentor, student, professor, coordinator, administrator, chairman of the institution, and so on, a lot of people who is around the researcher, and affect directly or indirectly her work. This demands a lot of social skills to be a team player.
The natural consequence of this process is to accumulate a good number of publications that will increase the rankings in research, enough to, in one moment, to have success with a grant proposal and become the PI of a research team, the “Leader of Team”… or the “Boss of the Team”, or the “Manager of the Team”, what is the difference? If this person is good at writing papers and grants, what makes sure that she will be a good leader? Probably, this person received some lectures in her path to becoming a PI, and her mentor highlighted the need that, to become a successful researcher, she probably will need to be a good leader, but the part of this training is missing. Despite the large study of leadership, this has been limited to military, political, or entrepreneur sectors, remaining a huge gap in research labs.
Because of this, I’m going to conceptualize leadership in research teams, as part of the self-reflection of hours of study, a dozen of books about leadership in the last year, and the daily challenges that I confronted to become a PI.
What is a leader?
There are four components that a leader has:
- The Vision. The vision is the first step in the path of a leader. This person is able “to see” where she wants to go, what can be achieved, the target. Leaders embody the vision.
- The Passion. This vision drives a strong passion to this person to fill her with the amount of energy required to begin the journey, the actions, the steps on the path to reach the vision.
- Transmit the vision effectively. During the walk on the path to the vision will be persons that will ask “where are you going?” and the leader is able to explain to this person the vision. The leader does not need for mandatory to be a skilled orator, the vision is transmitted from the passion. Because passion is contagious.
- Transmitting the vision and the passion to others inspire them to follow her, to walk with her to the vision. At this moment is when the person becomes a leader when the followers appear because there is no leader without followers. Also, here appears the team.
These four components create a leader, a person with a vision that drives her passion and transmits it in a way that another person says, “I want to go there with you”. Now there is a leader, but not necessarily a good leader, there are required other three components to be good.
- Set the environment. A good leader is a person who understands that human behavior is mainly a response to the environment created, and because of this, a good leader always works to have a continued improvement in the environment to get the best of each one. Especially, the good leader sets the environment that provides psychological safety, a mental and emotional state where appears one of the most wanted jewelry in modern times, creativity. As part of this role, the good leader is responsible to integrate into the team the best people, bringing positive energy to the team, and removing the toxic people that poison the environment.
- To get the right culture. Together with the safe environment that provides a good leader, she also creates the right culture that allows the team members to be challenged to grow. A good culture is characterized by strong communication that allows constructive feedback in all directions, as consequence, the best ideas prevail. Other key components of the right culture are valuable relationships, optimist, and kindness.
- Empower the team members. The good leader provides the training and tools to the team members to flourish and allows them the take decisions leading by context, not by orders (if the leader always says what to do, the team member never will be empowered). The sum of these elements empowers the team members, transforming the follower into a leader, because now this person embraces the first four components described, sharing the vision with a passion to others that will decide to follow this new leader. This is the moment when a leader becomes a good leader because a good leader creates other leaders.
There are lot of qualities that can be adjudicated to a good leader, but most of them could be incorporated into the components described. The list of qualities certainly could be so extensive that ends describing to Super Man, but in reality, a good leader is simply a good human being that does, consciously or subconsciously, all these seven components.
Having a clear understanding of the components of a good leader, these can be identified and transmitted. If you think about it, a few persons that you know could fit into this description. In the question, leaders are born or made, the answer is both. There are people who are easy for them to have a vision and inspire others to follow them, I also know people for whom is really difficult to have an original vision, but can take the vision of a previous leader and transmit it with passion.
In the question of how could I be a good leader in research, you could do a self-evaluation of how many of these seven components do you apply in your research team, or even better, you can ask your team. It is obvious, that other people different from the PI can be the team leader, the person to follow, the person who set the environment. PI is not the same as “team leader”, a person can have the name of the position, but not the components, in consequence, it is not a leader, maybe a manager.
A Manager is a person who “manages” the people in a team, or lab, or institution. It is who does the management, setting the goals and designing the strategic plan of implementation to reach the goals. This requires establishing some metrics, milestones in the road to indicate if the team is moving in the right direction. The strategy for a manager to make the team move forward is not the inspiration, that is what a leader does, the manager establishes a rewards or punishment system. “We need to hit this goal at this time, if you get it, you will receive a bonus, if you don’t get it, I will hire the right person to do it, I will tell you what to do to have success”.
This system is extremely effective and established the basis of the modern era as we know it. But, why are we moving from management into leadership? Currently, among the qualities searched by employers is always leading in the top, but not management.
The reason is that subjects that understood the principles of leadership in deep have done things that looked impossible to achieve with a small team with minimal resources. Of course, these things were impossible to do with the management model, there was required another aspect extraordinary, and is leadership. This “formula” is spreading now in the technology business in a way that a small group of people became more rich and powerful than entire countries in a couple of decades, achieving incredible results.
Now, these principles need to be spread and incorporated into research teams. We need to start to talk of leadership with a real understanding of the word, and high-quality and regular training should be established across the path of research.
Management and leadership can overlap, the establishment of goals that drives to a vision that could inspire research team members is easy to do in science, because research is for the common well, making it easy to connect our goals, grants, and papers with the true reason of why we are doing it, why we love research. Any person who is able to see this, to have a clear vision of the potential outcome, can let drive her passion on it, and spread this emotion to other team members, inspiring them to move forward, to work harder, to achieve what looks impossible.
Finally, a common question in leadership is how to motivate a team member? The answer is to set the proper environment and culture where this person can flourish. All human being has something good to give, across the history, we have seen many stories of individuals with average or poor performance in some positions, and when changed to a different role this person achieves extraordinary things. If after setup an adequate environment and establish a vision that inspires different members of the team and one or few team members feel that they don’t have the passion (motivation) maybe is the moment for them to move to another place, another vision could drive them better.
I hope this article brings a better understanding of how we can fill the gap of leadership in research. My description is probably far from perfect, and like everything in research, needs to be supported by evidence, but this reflection is an honest consequence of the quest for the understanding of leadership, from sailing in the pages of books to walking in the daily challenges of the PI position.
Juan Pablo Gonzalez-Rivas
juan.gonzalez@fnusa.cz