As a researcher, you have many skills and competencies that can benefit your organization and advance your career. But how can you demonstrate your research leadership to senior management and gain their recognition and support? Here are some tips to help you showcase your value and impact as a research leader.
One of the first steps to show your research leadership is to align your research with the strategic goals and priorities of your organization. This means understanding the vision, mission, and objectives of your senior management and how your research can contribute to them. You can do this by conducting a SWOT analysis, identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your research area and how they relate to the organizational context. You can also communicate your research vision and plan to your senior management, highlighting the benefits, outcomes, and indicators of success.
1. Provide Recommendations: Start by understanding the mission itself, then tailor your research questions to directly address these aspects. Go beyond mere reporting. Formulate clear, actionable, and implementable recommendations 2. Synthesize Information for Different Audiences: Research findings often need to be communicated to diverse audiences. Tailor your message to specific audience, for a CEO, highlight the big picture. For a CFO, emphasize how your research can impact the bottom line. 3. Showcase Tangible Value: Research should translate into tangible benefits for the company. Measure the impact of your recommendations and communicate these results. Highlight how your research helped save time, money, or resources.
Alignment is a critical step and it starts with identifying the source/strategic documents; policies, laws, goals, and visions. Next is to determine that the proposed research will add value to the overarching strategic goals.
Another way to show your research leadership is to build and manage a diverse and collaborative research team. This means recruiting, developing, and retaining talented researchers with different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. You can do this by creating a positive and inclusive research culture, providing feedback and mentoring, and facilitating knowledge sharing and learning. You can also foster collaboration and innovation within and across your research team, as well as with other stakeholders, such as customers, partners, and funders.
Building a diverse and collaborative research team is critical, but also challenging. It requires intention, effort, and commitment to foster inclusion. Some best practices I've found effective: 1. Remove bias from hiring processes. Standardize interviews, use blind resume review and diverse panels. 2. Customize onboarding and support. Understand individual backgrounds, strengths, and needs. 3. Promote psychological safety. Encourage speaking up, embracing failures, and providing feedback. Meaningful diversity takes continual learning, courageous conversations, and dismantling systemic barriers. But the benefits - innovative breakthroughs, richer insights, and higher impact - make it well worth the effort.
Building and managing a diverse and collaborative research team starts with having a plan that identifies the research landscape in contemplation of what is to be achieved.
A third way to show your research leadership is to deliver high-quality and impactful research outputs. This means producing and disseminating research outputs that are relevant, rigorous, and reliable. You can do this by following the best practices and standards of your research field, applying appropriate methods and tools, and ensuring the validity and reliability of your data and findings. You can also enhance the impact and visibility of your research outputs, by publishing in reputable journals, presenting at conferences, and engaging with the media and the public.
One of the biggest challenges for researchers is translating their work for non-specialist audiences. Even if your results are significant, the message can get lost if the delivery is esoteric. This means that it's imperative to frame your research in compelling ways, and a great way to do this is through storytelling. Make sure to invest enough effort in this part of the process so that the research itself can shine.
I’ve heard it said that your work speaks for itself or your research in this case. That is not actually true in the general sense. The largest part of research leadership is quality, consistency, ensuring validity, and reliability. The last step, and perhaps most valuable, is translating the message/narrative into a relevant context for output to your audience. Without this storytelling skill, that translates the meaning of the research into a context that is understood by your audience your listeners will not appreciate its value.
Sometimes "If you build it, they will come." Is an approach if the end-user isn't quite ready. I try to anticipate what research is needed at a future point in the project and begin preparing well before executive management needs it. They tend to be surprised that I already have it when they ask. Ready when you are.
Delivering impactful research starts with a plan that is supportive of the research objective(s). Next in the organizational delivery architecture - this includes but is not limited to policies, procedures, and processes that will either hinder or support the delivery. Human capacity is critical, the expertise and the rubrics of delivery must put human rights at the center of it all. Lastly, ownership and genuine participation of beneficiaries are key.
A fourth way to show your research leadership is to implement and monitor research ethics and integrity. This means ensuring that your research complies with the ethical principles and guidelines of your organization and your research field. You can do this by obtaining informed consent, protecting confidentiality and privacy, avoiding plagiarism and misconduct, and acknowledging sources and contributions. You can also monitor and evaluate the ethical and social implications of your research, by conducting risk assessments, seeking feedback, and reporting any issues or concerns.
Monitoring techniques on ethics and integrity should be also shared with third-party investigators in view to strengthen the ultimate result(s).
A fifth way to show your research leadership is to demonstrate continuous improvement and learning. This means seeking and applying feedback, learning from successes and failures, and updating your skills and knowledge. You can do this by participating in peer reviews, evaluations, and audits, collecting and analyzing data on your research performance and impact, and identifying areas for improvement and action plans. You can also pursue professional development opportunities, such as training, courses, workshops, and networking events.
?? Take initiative in your growth as a researcher. ?? In research and development of technology, when a new tool comes into the picture, it can be good to tinker with it as far as pragmatic to learn about its properties. Characterize the limitations and opportunities. Then leverage these properties to bring the best out of the system. You may find opportunities others were unaware of and have insights to share. ?? This can be applied to organizations, as well. As a student, I extensively explored websites of the universities I attended to find opportunities. I was sometimes the only student at events. Still learned, connected, and improved. ?? Be a supportive colleague. Encourage others to take initiative in their growth too.
A sixth way to show your research leadership is to advocate for research excellence and value. This means promoting the importance and relevance of your research to your organization and the society. You can do this by developing and delivering effective and persuasive research pitches, proposals, and reports, highlighting the achievements, challenges, and lessons learned of your research. You can also influence and inform decision-making and policy-making, by providing evidence-based recommendations and solutions, and engaging with relevant stakeholders and audiences.
Bring out evidence of how research has contributed to policy and programme changes, and how human testimonies have either condemned or justified it.
Advocating for the excellence and value of research is a core leadership responsibility. As researchers, we must proactively communicate the importance of our work to decision-makers and the public. Some techniques I've found effective: 1. Tailor messaging to each audience. Showcase societal benefits to the public and competitive advantages to leadership. 2. Leverage storytelling to make research compelling. Lead with real-world impact vs. technical details. 3. Arm leadership with data-driven recommendations. Synthesize complex findings into clear guidance. Make space for open inquiry and truth-seeking. As leaders, we must steadfastly promote the inherent value of discovery and human progress through research.
Highlight Tangible Outcomes: Quantify research achievements and translate into real-world impacts; lives saved, costs reduced, products enabled when communicating to senior leaders and policy makers. Put advances in context of the patient journey to build narratives around how discoveries underpin pivotal innovations. Emphasize Rigor and Reproducibility: Promote best practices in transparent reporting, open data, and protocol sharing to uphold confidence in results. Spearhead internal initiatives to adopt guidelines and training around data usage, guarding against biases and misuse. Overcome Evidence Gaps: Publish insightful reviews contextualizing degrees of uncertainty around controversial issues to encourage next best steps.
Helping others in your organization is always a good thing. Even if your actions are not intended to attract the attention of upper management, word will eventually spread. Thus, you don't need to thing in terms of who will or won′t notice, do stuff for the good of your place of work.