Innovative, productive, and happy teams stem from good leadership. True, in my opinion, of all sectors, including academic research.

However, most researchers would agree that their training, career pathway, and reward structures in academia often don’t equip them with the skills they need to lead. Especially true when they are expected to lead diverse teams effectively in an increasingly complex, interdisciplinary and collaborative environment.

The question of how we support our research leaders of both today and tomorrow is one that is very much in the minds of our team, and we’re not alone.

Wellcome recently convened researchers, funders, research developers and host institutions to discuss the findings of a report they commissioned on the training currently available to mid-career researchers. The report – yet to be released – confirms what we and others in sector find: the continuing need to offer tailored leadership training for researchers starting their own research team. All at the meeting agreed that good leadership is important for great science and that we need to continue to provide evidence that this is the case to ensure training in this area is prioritised.

So, the question now becomes when and how leadership training should be delivered so it is most useful to researchers.

Why timing matters

Outside of my day job, I am a keen footballer and coach. When I first decided to transition from player to coach, I was handed a pile of cones, a bag of footballs and introduced to a group of keen 4–7-year-olds. It was terrifying.

I’d been to hundreds of football training sessions, but none where I was expected to lead. I knew vaguely where to place some cones, but beyond that I was well and truly out of my depth. Handing the lab keys to a new group leader and expecting them to lead a team effectively when they have little experience of leadership seems even more wild – but it isn’t uncommon in academia.

Conversations with postdocs about their next steps often focus on their feelings of lack of preparedness to lead. But how do you learn to lead a team before you have a team? There are some excellent postdoc training programmes that focus on how to proactively prepare for leadership (see info box) but access to these is limited. We need to consider how we can embed leadership training and importantly, leadership experience, through the PhD and postdoc stages more widely, and think about what the most useful aspects of leadership to focus on are for these groups.

Empowering researchers at these career stages to take ownership of their development by seeking out opportunities to lead in their current role (leadership, after all, is a mindset, not a job role) is an important aspect of preparing for their next steps.

As important as equipping early career researchers to step into their first group leader or principle investigator role, is preparing those taking the step into more senior leadership positions. While the people skills needed to lead inclusively at all levels are similar, and the foundations of these can be built early, as your role evolves so do the skills you need. Researchers moving into more senior leadership positions must embrace broader horizons and develop the skills needed to think more strategically. The provision of experiential learning and training in this area is lacking in academia.

In thinking about how we can change this, an important consideration is ensuring that researchers from diverse backgrounds have access to the training they need to develop the skills and confidence to step into senior leadership roles, where women and those from ethnic minority backgrounds remain under-represented. To support a thriving, inclusive research environment we need to improve the diversity among our leaders – providing the right training at the right time is key to achieving this goal.

What should it look like?

Not only does the timing of leadership training have to be right, but as with all learning, the format of what’s delivered determines its effectiveness.

Feedback from researchers at all career stages shows that while online training is convenient and accessible, when it comes to leadership, in person learning is much more impactful. The challenge of making face to face, tailored leadership programmes broadly accessible is significant, which is why thinking about ways to embed experiential learning in researcher’s current roles rather than focusing on isolated training courses is important.

At the very top of the list when it comes to what researchers need to develop as leaders is mentorship and coaching, the provision and awareness of which is becoming more widespread in academia, but there’s still some way to go to make it common place. A team-based approach to developing leaders is also a hot topic – funders are not just thinking about the training needs of the fellows they fund, but how they can provide for the needs of their team as a whole. Part of this is ensuring lab leaders are equipped to develop leadership skills in the researchers they supervise.

As our team continue to develop approaches to the when and how of leadership training for researchers, two things I have come to realise after 20 years as a football coach will be central to our thinking: learning to be a leader is never complete, and giving the players the opportunity to position the cones is key to developing the coaches of tomorrow.