I had the privilege of attending a leadership conference a few weeks ago now designed for early career researchers such as myself. The topic was about what it means to be a future leader in my area of research. If I’m honest, I went into this event thinking that I already had some sort of idea of what leadership is about, having had various minor leadership positions in my current position. Turns out, that I have comply misunderstood what it means to be a future leader.
In this blog post, I cover just a few things which I found particular helpful / interesting which helped improve my understanding of what is means to be a leader in academia. Here are my thoughts.
Leadership isn’t so much about managing people, it’s more about knowing how to ask the right questions
Often when we think of leadership and what it means to being a leader, we’re often quick to think of a heretical structure where the leader sits above a group of people and mangers them from a top-down relationship. While there is some truth in this, leadership is more about asking the right questions to solver a particular problem. For example, for large scale operations, it might be worth asking “why does this organisation or system exist?“.
I was thinking about how this applies to my area of research on the train home by asking what it is I want to get out of my research. For example, my current interest is in how people use social media and how this can lead to the presence of disruptive behaviour. Rather than asking “What are platforms X, Y and Z doing wrong?” I asked myself the opposite. “What are platforms A, B and C doing right and how can we learn from them?“. In doing so, I’m addressing the same problem but taking a different approach to it. This suddenly opens up so many more possibilities and provides a version (or an agenda) for future research in my team.
Admit what you don’t know and learn from others
If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom
Adam Grant
As well as asking the right questions, it is important for any good leader to admit what they don’t know and to be prepared to learn from others. Leadership involves listening to others and gathering ideas. For this reason, leadership is very much relational and forming (and maintaining) good relationships with others is essential. For any team to function well as a collective – showing humility plays a huge role in this.
The best leaders are adaptive
In my area of work (research), anything could happen. Plans can change. Requirements can change. We get unexpected results. For this reason, it is important that those in leadership positions are agile. While it’s not possible to predict the future with 100% accuracy, it is the responsibility of any good leader to be prepared to change course when things don’t go according to plan due to unforeseen events.
Final Thoughts
To finalise my thoughts, leadership can be defined by a number of different qualities which go beyond what was mentioned in this post. Ultimately, the role of being a leader involves being open and curious, creating and maintaining a healthy work environment for others, and always seeking to push for innovation and success.