Managing myself and working with my team: a skills upgrade for Junior Staff

The goal of this workshop is to address junior researchers’ changing needs as increasingly expert researchers with growing responsibilities and pressures. Participants will gain a renewed perspective of some key transferrable competencies for the postdoctoral research stage and beyond. The over-riding principle of this training is awareness-raising: to develop a conceptual framework to understand and deal with some of the most common challenges that scientists face, and to acquire a set of practical tools and methods that are immediately applicable in the participants’ working environment.

Dates: 15th, 17th and 18th March 2021 (from 10.00 to 13.30 each day).
Three half-day online sessions, 10.5 hours (Zoom)

Target group: Postdocs and Junior PIs.

Training content

The content of the workshop will deal with the following topics:

• Review of core communication skills: Communication is the keystone of everything we do as researchers, whether it’s transmitting our science or managing our colleagues. Interpersonal communication will be a recurring thread throughout the workshop, and in this essential module, participants will explore a model for interpersonal communication (including hidden communication), how to say no, and how to give and receive feedback.
• Time and task management: How do you prioritise your tasks so you get the important things done first? How do you plan your day so you work effectively? Participants will learn intuitive tools to help them be more efficient. They will also learn how to set realistic medium-term goals, and review digital helpers to manage their work and collaborate better.
• Motivation: Science can give us many reasons to feel demotivated, with significant consequences for our work and career progression. Participants will work with a simple framework for recognising the causes of demotivation, both in themselves and in staff members they supervise, and for addressing these causes in order to get back on track.
• Delegation: As researchers gain experience and contribute to and lead ever-larger projects, they become increasingly responsible for directing and managing the work of other team members. In this module, participants will learn an intuitive model for how to effectively delegate tasks to colleagues, and to provide meaningful follow-up on their progress.
• Communicating with superiors: In this module, we reverse the role perspective of the Delegation module, and explore how we can understand the needs, pressures, interests, and objectives of our superiors, so we can adapt to them for mutual benefit, and help superiors to better manage and direct us. For postdocs, this is also a tool they can teach to junior researchers they supervise.