Themes for management development
In a broad organisational understanding, strategy is about what is most important to spend time on. In knowledge-intensive organisations in general and at universities in particular, the organisation’s strategy is developed through the practice of specialists, e.g. in research projects. Research strategies thus often describe specific ongoing projects. The ongoing projects are strategically important.
When resources are scarce, it is the manager’s job to highlight some things as being more important than others. A prerequisite for doing this in an acceptable way is attentive, professionally qualified management: Strategic academic management. The manager’s tasks will be – with one foot in the research group and one foot in the organisation – to define direction, set goals, prioritise and profile the group so that the group’s resources are used in the best possible way.
Professionals often possess a high degree of intrinsic motivation to solve a task. A large number of the structures and decision-making processes that exist in a politically controlled organisation can feel like ‘external’ obligations and come into conflict with ‘internal’ task motivation. The manager’s task is to mediate and translate the external organisational obligations in collaboration with the researcher, where the researcher makes the obligations his/her own – and not as a result of manipulation. We work with methods for how the manager can do this in practice, e.g. in connection with writing joint applications, recruiting new people for the group, formulating research strategy and the developing of teaching.
A managerial capacity generally consists of ‘frameworks’ and ‘relationships’. The framework is relatively fixed and concerns, for example, finances, teaching obligations, references, access to administrative support, access to meetings, etc. Relationships are about the things that can be done – within the framework – because the leader has a knowledge, a reputation, a network, social skills and impact. In a complex organisation such as a university, it is crucial for heads of research to be able to handle frameworks in the form of financial and resource conditions – these are often difficult to change – and to be able to work with their relational orientation both within and outside the organisation, e.g. by leading upwards towards one’s own leader and outwards towards partners.
Good leadership requires good followership. Therefore, it is important to develop the group and develop direction in interaction with the group. In particular, three factors must be balanced: The maturity or development phase of the group, the group’s common goals and the group’s mutual relations. It is on the basis of an assessment of the group’s maturity that the common goals should be determined, and this should be based on a consideration of what should be common goals and what should be individual goals. In the dialogue surrounding this, good interrelationships are needed. Strong emotions and disagreements can arise, but this is not about avoiding conflict or forcing an artificial consensus. The head of research must facilitate the conflicts in such a way that decisions are binding.
As a head of research, there are some important and sometimes difficult conversations that need to be had in the research group. Conflicts can arise over research interests, resource allocation, teaching commitment and interpersonal conflicts both internally within the group and across research groups. These conflicts often require much more leadership and control than academic leaders want. We will work on how you as a head of research can appropriately approach conflict management processes, and how you can approach the difficult conversations.