A UK research council is launching an initiative to help mid-career and senior social scientists improve their leadership skills.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is to spend about £200,000 on a pilot research leaders network that will “provide participants with opportunities to develop or enhance their research leadership skills by nurturing informal networks, facilitating collaborative learning, encouraging inter-sectoral mobility and cultivating productive interactions”, according to a  published by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) this month.

Inviting bids for the 15-month project, the ESRC says the pilot will help the council to “understand how it can strategically invest in infrastructure that enhances social scientists’ leadership skills”.

“Our long-term intention is to develop a whole-career framework that drives ESRC’s approach to investing in leadership capability and enabling researchers to realise their leadership potential,” it adds.

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“We want to enable social scientists to take advantage of the opportunities that are emerging from a rapidly evolving funding landscape that requires researchers to build capability in new areas, including their ability to collaborate and engage across sectors and disciplines,” it says, stating that “such boundary spanning activities demand skills in designing, leading, delivering and working within large and complex team-based projects.”

The project follows work by Matthew Flinders, professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, who identified what he called a “vacuum” in thinking around research leadership, especially how leadership skills can be nurtured across the sector.

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Writing for the Higher Education Policy Institute last year, Professor Flinders claimed that researchers generally developed their skills through a highly inefficient combination of trial and error, luck and “structured serendipity”.

In practice, “mid-career and senior academics are commonly expected to assume research leadership responsibilities with very little or no formal training”, he wrote, stating that training is often focused on early career staff.

Contributions to research leadership roles were “often not formally recognised or rewarded in workload models of promotion and reward frameworks”, which “risks locking in systemic gendered inequalities and creating perverse and individualised incentives”, he added.

Professor Flinders, who reviewed research leadership for the ESRC in 2020, recommended a series of measures to improve leadership, including programmes similar to the two-year-long Future Leaders in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Research scheme that was launched by the Academy of Medical Sciences in February 2019.

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Other ideas include establishing a small number of national “celebrating research leadership” prizes, improving mobility between sectors and disciplines with a new “discipline-hopping” funding scheme and new “research re-entry fellowships” for those who have worked in industry.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com