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.