FSE Postdoc Council

Starting & Managing Your Own Group

As you climb the academic (or industrial) ladder, a necessary step is (starting and) managing your own research group which requires many critical personal and professional skills. In this document, you can find information about basics of management and becoming a leader of your own research group. Noting that management and leadership are distinct things: while management is more about how to do things (practical), leadership is about what and why to do it. However, often you will need to take up both roles at the same time. We strongly suggest that you also consider taking management and leadership courses your institution provides as these skills require time and lots of training to be developed. Here are other resources and courses that might help you improve your leadership skills:

• https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/policy-and-strategy/leiderschap-bij-de-rug/leadership-at-the-university-of-groningen.pdf
• https://www.rug.nl/corporate-academy/interessegebieden/interesse-leiderschap-management-coaching
• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYHnlELC8Z9tDvv57xr0ePCkZ83cTAjJg
• https://www.linkedin.com/learning/paths/the-top-15-most-popular-courses-leadership-edition

Finally, at the end of the document, we also share several organizational tools and software to help you manage your group effectively.

1. Management Basics

To be a good manager you must manage:

• Yourself
• Expectations
• Feedback
• Conflicts
• Motivation
• Relationships
• Diversity and culture
• Time (yours and your team members’)
• Understand some management theory

To self-manage you must first know yourself to create better interactions with your group members. Self-awareness is one of the traits of a great group leader. Through this, you can:

• Recognize your own emotions
• Know your triggers and hot buttons
• Understand your personality, communication, conflict and work styles
• Accurately know your skills and developmental needs

This will allow you to better understand:

• your personality preferences
• how you approach conflict and your “hot buttons”
• the difference between supervisor, mentor, advocate, friend

Four Domains of Emotional Intelligence

Using Emotional Intelligence (EI) you can work towards a healthier and happier research group, and adapt your leadership approach depending on the situation and personality of your team. EI is divided into four domains (Figure 1). Self-awareness has already been touched upon; what the remaining domains entail is listed below.

Figure 1. Four domains of EI: Self-awareness, social awareness, self-management and relationship management.

Social Awareness:

• Accurately reading the emotions of others
• Having empathy for others
• Understanding your organization
• Having a service orientation

Self-Management:

• Controlling negative emotions
• Managing stress
• Having/conveying self-confidence
• Acting with integrity
• Dealing with setback (optimism)
• Being appropriately driven
• Being flexible and adaptable
• Controlling edges in personality, communication, conflict and work styles

Relationship-Management:

• Exerting influence and motivating others
• Promoting teamwork and collaboration
• Being an inspiring leader
• Developing others
• Developing active listening skills
• Promoting inclusion of diverse individuals
• Dealing effectively with conflict and difficult conversations

Relationship management is an essential trait not only in group management but also in establishing collaborations. For starters, you should: identify key players, potential mentors, and advocates and establish regular meetings with key players and supporters (regular will vary depending on the individual and the nature of the relationship). You can find some of these key players by attending meetings, seminars and social functions. This allows you to get a better image of what everyone around you does, and to start finding connections between your work and theirs.

Notes on managing

Even with the best intentions, we cannot be the “best” manager all of the time for all of our team. Keep in mind that you are also human and that you will also make mistakes. Apologies and effort go a long way, but only if you are honestly making the effort. Your team will be able to tell whether you are actually trying. We all have our weak spots; figure out what “gets your goat” & work on dealing with these issues more calmly View each “failure” as an opportunity to learn for the next time; find a “mentoring mentor” & talk it out.

2. Maximizing Mentoring Relationships

An important part of managing and leading a research group is to act as a mentor for your group members. While mentoring others, it is important to keep in mind the work-style difference between individuals. Although these differences might cause conflicts in a mentoring relationship, it is possible to work around them by developing certain strategies as outlined below.

Important Work-Style Differences

• Our communication style
• Our view of competition and how we compete
• Our approach to deadlines and how we view time
• How we like to be rewarded
• How much we value work friendships and relationships
• How we view uncertainty and change

Strategies to make it work

• Understand who/what they are (how they deal with conflict, etc)
• See the conflict from their perspective
• Approach in their preferred method
• Prepare agendas for every meeting
• Have solutions not just problems
• Follow up with an email after important discussions
• Find an advocate
• Find a friend to vent to
• Avoid taking it personally
• Take assertiveness training

Developing Networking Skills

One of the key aspects of mentoring is to help develop the networking skills of the mentee. You can do this by considering the following.

• Read: Networking for People Who Hate To Network 
• Know what you will say when asked “what do you work on?”
• Have a set of standard questions you might ask

• What do you work on?
• What are you planning to do next?
• What do you think about…..
• And more personal; sports, family, hobbies, vacation, plans for the future

• Practice in low-stress situations; get feedback if particularly anxious about this skill

3. The Business of Running a Group And Becoming a Leader

The Hersey-Blanchard Leadership Theory Model suggests that successful leaders adjust their styles depending on the situation. No one style is inherently better than all the others; they all have their time and place and should be used appropriately. This model characterizes leadership style in terms of the amount of direction and support that the leader provides to their followers. There are four leadership styles based on the relative emphasis on directive vs. supportive behaviors (Figure 2). The key issue in adjusting your leadership style is the maturity of the target.

Directive behaviors (task-focused) involve telling people what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and then closely monitoring behavior. This is commonly called micromanagement. While these behaviors are quite useful when interacting with younger students, they do require a very large commitment and effort from your side, so they should be used only when strictly necessary. Overdoing this creates students who rely on you for every decision and impedes independence.

Supportive behaviors (relationship-focused) involve listening to people, providing support for their efforts, and then facilitating their involvement in problem-solving and decision-making. While this allows for student growth, it also creates an environment more prone to errors. When implementing these behaviors, check regularly with your student for progress and trouble-shooting.

Figure 2. Supportive vs. Directive behaviors based on the Hersey-Blanchard Leadership Model.

Developing the Vision

Questions to answer to develop your vision:

• What are you trying to achieve?
• Why should people be interested in your work?
• What are your Short Term and Long Term Goals (1 year, 3 year, 5 year goals…)?
• Do you have an overview to share with people?

Communicate Your Vision

• Develop your website

• Develop your pitch for:

• Potential collaborators/partners
• Potential hires / team members
• Potential funders

• What are your talking points for each audience?

• What does each group care about?
• What interests each group?

Marketing Your Lab/Group

Develop a marketing strategy to increase visibility for the team:

• Present at conferences
• Give invited lectures at institutions (It is worth noting here that it is a challenge to get "invited" in the first place. It might take a few years until one gets noticed, especially when changing a country or community. However, one can foster invitations, by networking and telling colleagues that one is in the area and would love to give a seminar. Often just asking if you can present in a seminar is most effective.)
• Speak at other non‐conference venues – i.e. disease foundations, charity events
• Publish papers and write review articles
• Write other articles and blogs
• Join grant review committees or advisory boards
• Involve yourself with professional associations in your field
• Use social media accounts for your lab

Developing your Network

• Organize / co‐organize a panel at a conference (i.e. Keystone, Gordon conference)
• Organize / co‐organize an entire conference
• Involvement in a steering committee for an event/organization
• Invite inspiring leaders to speak at your University/Department

i.e. people who you would like to collaborate with

Developing Collaborations

• Initiating partnerships to enable further “impact”

• Internal to university
• External to university

• Some with people you already know
• Some with people you need to get to know

• Through connections
• Direct outreach

• Involvement in Consortia Projects

Manage Communication During Research

• Manage communication updates regarding timelines and deliverables

• Clearly set expectations and deliverables with partner
• Have difficult discussions if timelines will be missed, work is not going as planned, etc.
• Troubleshoot as needed to resolve issues
• Propose new research direction / approach (if needed)
• Ask for more funding (if needed)

• Keep discussions professional

Develop your Leadership Skill Development Plan

Making a table similar to the one below could help you prepare your leadership skill development plan.

Figure 3. An example of a Leadership Skill Development Plan

4. Organizational Tools and Strategies for Researchers^[1]

Specific software products, suggested use cases, and examples are shown across the life cycle from idea to publication. Strategies for managing the organization of, and access to, digital information and planning structures can greatly facilitate the efficiency and impact of an active scientific enterprise.

Basic Principles

Figure 4. The life cycle of research activity (adapted from Levin et al.1 ).

• Information should be easy to find and access, to enable the user to have to remember as little as possible—this keeps the mind free to generate new, creative ideas.
• Information should be both organized hierarchically (accessible by drill-down search through a rational structure) and searchable by keywords.
• Information should be reachable from anywhere worldwide (but secure and access-restricted). Preferable choose a software that includes a cell phone/tablet platform client.
• No information should ever be lost—the systems are such that additional information does not clog up or reduce the efficiency of use and backup strategies ensure disaster robustness; therefore, it is possible to save everything in a cloud.
• Software tools optimized for specific management tasks should be used; select those tools based on interoperability, features, and the ability to export into common formats (such as XML) in case it becomes expedient someday to switch to a newer product.
• One’s digital world should be organized into several interlocking categories, which utilize different tools: activity (to-dos, projects, research goals) and knowledge (static information).
• One’s activity should be hierarchically organized according to a temporal scale, ranging from immediate goals to career achievement objectives and core mission.
• Storage of planning data should allow the integration of plans with the information needed to implement them (using links to files and data in the various tools).
• There should be no stored paper—everything should be obtained and stored in a digital format (or immediately digitized).

Information Technology Infrastructure

• You should be familiar enough with computer technology.
• One key element is backups—redundant copies of your data.
• Another key element is accessibility of information. Everyone should be working on files (e.g., Microsoft Word documents) that are shared through a cloud-based system such as Dropbox or Box folder; whatever you are working on this month, the files should be inside a folder synchronized by one of these services.

Facilitating Creativity

This step consists of two components: identifying salient new information and arranging it in a way that facilitates novel ideas, associations, hypotheses, and strategic plans for making impact.

For the first step, an automated weekly PubCrawler search which allows Boolean searches of the literature is suggested. Good searches to save include ones focusing on specific keywords of interest, as well as names of specific people whose work one wants to follow.

Enhancing scientific thought, creative brainstorming, and strategic planning is facilitated by the creation of mind maps (Figure 5): visual representations of spatial structure of links between concepts, or the mapping of planned activity onto goals of different timescales. There are many available mind map software packages, including MindNode.

Figure 5. Examples of mind mapping charts.

Organizing Information and Knowledge

The input and output of the feedback process between brainstorming and literature mining is information. Static information not only consists of the facts, images, documents, and other material needed to support a train of thought but also includes anything needed to support the various projects and activities. It should be accessible in three ways, as it will be active during all phases of the work cycle.

1. Files should be arranged on your disk in a logical hierarchical structure appropriate to the work.
2. Everything should also be searchable and indexed.
3. Finally, some information should be stored as entries in a data management system, like Evernote or DevonThink, which have convenient client applications that make the data accessible from any device.

Notes in these systems should include useful lists and how-to’s, including, for example:

• Names and addresses of experts for specific topics
• Emergency protocols for laboratory or animal habitats
• Common recipes/methods
• Lists and outlines of papers/grants on the docket
• Information on students, computers, courses, etc.
• Laboratory policies
• Materials and advice for students, new group members, etc.
• Lists of editors, and preferred media contacts
• Lists of Materials Transfer Agreements (MTAs), contract texts, info on IP
• Favorite questions for prospective laboratory members

Data Management

All researchers work with data: from interviews and sound recordings, to archive documents and DNA traces. Research data management is the process of collecting, processing, protecting, storing, and sharing this research data.

Funders, your university and faculty/institute ask all researchers to design for research data management by writing a Research Data Management Plan in the initial stages of every research project. You should always bear the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles in mind. You should also realize that good data management is not only important in terms of complying with the strict guidelines, but can also affect the impact that your research makes.

For the individual researcher, data management is about keeping track of research data and the way it is manipulated during its life cycle. Data management also helps to get an overview on where the data exists in what stage, where it will go next, and under which conditions it can be accessed. Accordingly, the data lifecycle deserves attention, documentation and planning (Figure 6).

Figure 6.  Research Data Life Cycle. Source: https://www.rug.nl/digital-competence-centre/research-data/

From collection and processing to archiving and reuse, research data usually exists in different versions, copies, phases and stages and is kept temporarily or permanently in different environments or media. There are several ways of data storage and in most cases more than one solution is used for storing the research data. For instance online drivers such as Google Drive or Onedrive allow data versioning, restoring, collaboration and data sharing while mobile USB storage devices (e.g. sticks, hard drives) are used to transfer or (temporarily) store data. For the long-term storage of small and big data sets almost all institutions have their own reliable system networks.

For more information about research data management, please visit https://www.rug.nl/research/research-support-portal/during/research-data-management/?lang=en.

E-mail: A Distinct Kind of Information

Because the influx of email is ever-increasing, it is important to (1) establish a good infrastructure for its management and (2) establish policies for responding to emails and using them to facilitate research.

It is recommended to have a triage system in which, at specific times of day (so that it does not interfere with other work), the Inbox is checked and each email is (1) forwarded to someone better suited to handle it, (2) responded quickly for urgent things that need a simple answer, or (3) started as a draft email for those that require a thoughtful reply. Once a day or a couple of times per week, when circumstances permit focused thought, the sraft folder should be revisited and those emails answered.

A ‘‘0 Inbox’’ policy whereby at the end of a day, the Inbox is basically empty, with everything either delegated, answered, or set to answer later is suggested.

It is also suggested to create subfolders in the main account (keeping them on the mail server, not local to a computer, so that they can be searched and accessed from anywhere) as follows:

• Collaborators (emails stating what they are going to do or updating on recent status)
• Grants in play (emails from funding agencies confirming receipt)
• Papers in play (emails from journals confirming receipt)
• Waiting for information (emails from people for whom you are waiting for information)
• Waiting for miscellaneous (emails from people who you expect to do something)
• Waiting for reagents (emails from people confirming that they will be sending you a physical object)

Organizing Tasks and Planning

A very useful strategy involves breaking down everything according to the timescales of decision-making, such as in the Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy (Figure 7) (Allen, 2015).

Figure 7. Scales of Activity Planning based on Getting Things Done philosophy

A formal diagram helps clarify the conceptual vision and identify gaps and opportunities. Once a correct level of activity has been identified, it is time to plan specific activities. There are good open source tools for this purpose, including FocalBoard, Todoist, Workflowy or Quire. These tools enable hierarchical storage of tasks and subtasks and their scheduling.

The best way to manage time relative to activity (and to manage the people responsible for each activity) is to construct Gantt charts, which can be used to plan out project timelines and help keep grant and contract deliverables on time.

In addition to the comprehensive work plan in the above-mentioned tools or others, it is helpful to use a Calendar (which synchronizes to a server, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar).