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