By Gemma Jiang.
Are you transitioning from a subject matter expert to a team leader? What is key to leadership? What challenges are you likely to confront? What questions will you need to address?
Defining leadership
Leadership is about influencing change among a collective of people, not about titles or top-down decision-making.
Influencing change
Change is an enduring and accelerating force, from the actions of ancient mythological heroes to the demands of our rapidly evolving VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. Effective leadership bridges deep personal transformation and profound organizational change, guiding individuals and institutions through transitions and innovations.
Influencing a collective
In team science, this means leading both small project teams and a larger, interconnected “team of teams” united by a shared mission. A common challenge for science leaders is transforming an institute from a collection of projects into a synergistic whole. The complexities of leading a “team of teams” are greater than those of leading a single project team, but the principles of influencing change apply similarly.
One of my most admired leadership mentors taught that the biggest obstacle to innovation is the distance between two people. Imagine the potential if two people could think as one without losing their individual differences. What if a team, or even multiple teams, could achieve this unity? These leadership questions underscore the importance of collective intelligence and synergy, where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Without effective leadership, the lowest-common-denominator outcomes of groupthink can drag the whole to operate at an intelligence level well below that of the individuals involved.
The dual nature of leadership influence is essential: it encompasses influencing change, often operationalized as “taskwork,” and influencing a collective, often operationalized as “teamwork.” These two aspects are mutually reinforcing—better taskwork leads to better teamwork, and vice versa. Without effective leadership, teams can overemphasize taskwork, leading to deficiencies in teamwork that undermine overall performance.
Specific challenges
There are three specific challenges for team science leadership as described below.
Lack of formal training in leadership
A common refrain among scientists is, “We never learned how to work with people in graduate school.” Scientists face two successive developmental challenges in working with people: moving from individual performance to teamwork and from teamwork to team leadership. While these skills and competencies can be acquired, they should not be taken for granted.
Analysis paralysis
Excessive analysis can stall progress. One frequent complaint is, “Meeting after meeting, we talk about things, but no decision is ever made. I would like to see some action, some progress.” Balancing analysis with decisive action is essential in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world and can be especially challenging for scientists who are trained to be analytical.
Split between the knower and the known
Modern science often overlooks the importance of self-awareness. As Frank and colleagues (2024, p.10) articulate, “We have created the most powerful and successful form of objective knowledge of all time, but we lack a comparable understanding of ourselves as knowers.” Scharmer (2009, p.33) suggests that “turning the beam of observation inward” is crucial. While science has developed tools to look far and deep, it is now time to turn the beam of observation towards the knowers and understand the complexities within.
Key questions for team science leaders
From my experience working as a leadership practitioner in the field of team science, the following key leadership questions confront most science leaders of large science collaboratives.
Operational level questions
- Navigating towards a shared vision: How can we journey towards a shared vision while remaining grounded in current constraints and affordances?
- Facilitating distributed sense making, decision making, and action taking: How can we effectively facilitate these processes, given the high diversity of team membership and geographical dispersion?
- Designing organizational role relations: How can we empower both administrative support staff and scientists, especially considering the legacy power differentials in traditional academic hierarchies?
- Leading change: How do we lead change through the various developmental stages of science collaboratives, while also responding to changes in the broader policy, funding, and societal landscape?
Cultural and mindset level questions
- Developing a collaborative culture: How can we create a unique collaborative culture that respects team members’ different disciplinary and organizational practices? Additionally, how can we navigate the tension between emerging cross-disciplinary identities and traditional disciplinary-based identities?
- Shifting from expert mentality to openness: How can we move scientists beyond the mentality of being experts to truly addressing complex societal challenges? Furthermore, how can we foster mindsets of curiosity and openness instead of defensiveness and a rigid “I am right” stance?
- Identifying and supporting boundary spanners: How can we identify boundary spanners and enable them to maximize their impact on integration? This is crucial because many boundary spanners are not positional leaders and often lack the proper support to exert their influence.
Conclusion
The National Research Council’s (2015, p.9) recommendations on enhancing the effectiveness of team science echo the importance of leadership development: “Leadership researchers, universities, and leaders of team science projects should partner to translate and extend the leadership literature to create and evaluate science leadership development opportunities for team science leaders and funding agency program officers.” In this i2Insights contribution I have suggested some key issues that must be addressed in team science leadership development.
What do you think? Are there additional considerations for defining leadership? Have you noted different leadership challenges? Are there other key questions that need to be addressed?
References:
Frank, A., Gleiser, M. and Thompson, E. (2024). The blind spot: Why science cannot ignore human experience. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
National Research Council. (2015). Enhancing the effectiveness of team science, Cooke, N. J. and Hilton, M. L. (Eds.), The National Academies Press: Washington DC, United States of America. (Online) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.17226/19007
Scharmer, O. C. (2009). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. Berrett-Koehler Publishers: San Francisco, California, United States of America.
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Gemma Jiang PhD is senior team scientist at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS) of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. She applies complexity leadership theory, social network analysis, and a suite of facilitation and coaching methods to enable cross-disciplinary science teams to converge upon solutions for challenges of societal importance.
Funding acknowledgement: This work is supported by the National Science Foundation Award #2118240 HDR Institute: Imageomics: A New Frontier of Biological Information Powered by Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning.
Dear Gemma, Thanks for this post. I particular liked your point about “Facilitating distributed sense making, decision making, and action taking” and your question: “How can we effectively facilitate these processes, given the high diversity of team membership and geographical dispersion”? I am thinking that there are various approaches for harnessing people’s collective wisdom in what could be called team work (which rests on distributed sense-making). For example, there is the approach detailed on the following site (also part of Gabriele Bammer’s Insights initiative in engaging people in conversation): https://i2insights.org/2024/07/09/structured-dialogical-design/
The approach as explained there (called Structured Democratic Dialogue ) offers a methodology (and theoretical justification) for engaging stakeholders in developing insights collaboratively towards imagined new futures, for the inclusive wellbeing of people as well as our planet. Perhaps readers should consider your post in relation to that post. There is an interesting discussion there sparked by Yiannis Laouris’s original post, with people offering commentary and Yiannis responding. I think readers will benefit from your two posts taken together (and the various discussions that have been sparked by the posts). All good wishes, Norma
Dear Norma,
Thank you for this insightful connection—linking our two posts is a fantastic idea, as the topics are indeed deeply related. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the Structured Democratic Dialogue methodology and the rich comments surrounding it. It truly does offer a powerful approach to facilitating distributed sense-making, as you so thoughtfully highlighted. I’m eager to add the Structured Democratic Dialogue method to my own toolbox, as I can see it being highly effective in supporting diverse, geographically dispersed teams. Thank you so much for sharing!
All the best,
Gemma
Some time ago we wrote here about leadership and management in participatory modelling. Managers need to consider people too but leadership is different. A simple description of the key difference is that leadership is about creating a vision, setting the direction and producing change, whereas management is about achieving efficient organization of projects and processes. Leadership is about inspiration and motivating people, whereas management is about implementing visions and executing plans. Managers do things right, while leaders do the right things.
If this of interest to you, please more at: https://i2insights.org/2021/02/02/leadership-in-participatory-modelling/
Dear Raimo,
Thank you for sharing your writing—I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I resonate with your perspective on the interrelated nature of leadership and management and agree that emphasizing both is especially valuable in cross-disciplinary science teams.
What are your thoughts on the specific issues I raised in my post? I’d love to hear how you think they intersect with the themes of leadership and management you’ve outlined.
Warm regards,
Gemma
Dear Gemma, First I have to say that the research area of Team Science is new to me. Your description of team leadership and the needs to improve it resonates closely to what we have called Systems Intelligence (SI). It refers to our ability to work successfully in complex settings involving both systems (such as as teams) and people. See: http://systemsintelligence.aalto.fi/
We have found that organizational performance correlates strongly with SI. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/tlo-04-2021-0045/full/html
If a team wants to learn the motivation has to come from each individuals. Direct influencing seldom works. Indirect influencing by creating growth opportunities is something which people do not resist.
This can be achieved e.g. by engaging people by gamification. Our Topaasia game for improving SI in teams has been very positively received. https://topaasia.com/en/topaasia-the-systems-intelligence-interview-with-esa-saarinen-raimo-hamalainen/
Perhaps the ideas in SI could be of interest to Team Science researchers too.
BR
Raimo
Dear Raimo,
I’m very familiar with Senge’s work on learning organizations and have come across the term “Systems Intelligence” before, but I thoroughly enjoyed your 2021 paper and the scale you and your co-author developed. I can certainly see myself utilizing this scale in future work, particularly in the realm of evaluation. Thank you for sharing!
The relevance of Systems Intelligence to Team Science researchers is clear, and I look forward to exploring opportunities to connect these concepts further.
Warm regards,
Gemma
These are important points. How might team coaching relate to these challenges? I was pleased to see recent research that reveals evidence of a positive relationship between research team coaching and proposal success/awards: https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964241240721
Dear Erick,
Thank you for your comment and for sharing this valuable resource—I enjoyed reading it and am very pleased with the findings. I agree that team coaching is a powerful expression of team leadership. I recently earned a certification in the 6 Team Conditions coaching method, which I’m eager to apply with the science teams I work with. Interestingly, one of the six conditions essential for team success is indeed team coaching, reinforcing just how impactful it can be.
I’d be happy to explore this topic further with you!
Warm regards,
Gemma
Hi Gemma – thank you for this great post on an increasingly important topic. As CEO of a health research funding agency in Canada, and a person in a world that is beset by troubles, I’m aware of the great need for team science…and of the forces that oppose it! Many academic incentives and funding programs and more encourage hyper-competition through recognizing individuals and their achievements even as we talk about the importance of working in teams. And as you note, researchers are not taught valuable leadership skills – and they are also not taught how, or at least enabled, to work in teams. I’m heartened by the increasing recognition of this disconnect by people in leadership positions in related sectors (who are well-placed to act) and by work underway in to align incentives and grant practices and more (e.g., the Transforming Evidence Funders Network hosted by Pew). Thank you for your important work in this area.
Hi Bev,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response! I echo your observations about the conflicting incentives in academia that often favor individual achievements over team-based efforts, despite our shared emphasis on collaboration. Your point about the lack of training in leadership and team skills for researchers resonates deeply with me as well—this gap is a major challenge for advancing team science.
It’s encouraging to see leaders like you, especially from health research funding agencies, championing change. This adds to my commitment to further this work, and I’m so grateful to find kindred spirits.
Warmly,
Gemma
Nice to see this, Gemma! Augmenting the idea of moving from subject matter expert to team leader is getting promoted from engineering subject matter expert to an engineering manager of engineering subject matter experts. Completed a systematic literature review of empirical studies for the National Research Council yielding a variety of attributes needed by the engineering manager: individual affective attributes (6 identified), individual cognitive attributes (4 identified), and social affective attributes (3 identified). See Figure K-1, page 197.
Wolfberg, A. (2024). The transition from engineer to manager: The roles of cognitive and affective qualities at the individual and social levels. In NASA at a crossroads: Maintaining workforce, infrastructure, and technology preeminence in the coming decades (pp. 181-204). National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/27519
Thank you for sharing this resource!