Author-tag: Jenny Grabmeier

Navigating the spectrum of leadership styles

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier and Joan Lurie.

authors_gemma-jiang_jenny-grabmeier_joan-lurie
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
3. Joan Lurie (biography)

When you are in a leadership role, are you able to shift your leadership style to accommodate the needs of your team and project? When consensus is hard to reach, are you able to step in with a directive approach? Are you able to hold back from being directive when creativity and participation are needed?

A Spectrum of Leadership Styles

Lewin, Lippitt and White in their foundational 1939 study on group dynamics suggested three leadership styles. In the context of cross-disciplinary science, we do not see these as separate styles or the only three styles, but as reference points along a continuum. At one end of their spectrum lies directive leadership, and at the other, delegative leadership, and somewhere in the middle, participative leadership.

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Boundary spanning: A leadership perspective

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier, Diane Boghrat and Susan Simkins.

authors_jiang,_grabmeier_boghrat_simkins
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
3. Diane Boghrat (biography)
4. Susan Simkins (biography)

What does boundary spanning in cross-disciplinary science teams entail, and how does it relate to leadership?

At its core, boundary spanning is about bridging differences. These differences usually fall into two categories:

  1. Interdisciplinary differences, which involve varying perspectives across different disciplines, such as vocabulary, methods, epistemologies, and cultures.
  2. Transdisciplinary differences, which involve perspectives from science, society, policy, and practice that transcend institutional and sectoral boundaries.

The expertise required to bridge these differences is often referred to as “integration expertise” (Hoffman et al., 2024) or as one of us (Simkins) refers to it “interdisciplinary translation.” For simplicity, we’ll refer to all these forms of expertise as “boundary spanning,” and those who play these roles as “boundary spanners.”

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How to organize an “all-hands” meeting

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

authors_emma-jiang_diane-boghrat_jenny-grabmeier
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Diane Boghrat (biography)
3. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)

What is an “all-hands” meeting? What’s required to assemble an effective planning team? What should the planning team consider in setting parameters for the meeting?

What is an “all-hands” meeting?

Here we consider all-hands meetings in the context of our experience with a large cross-disciplinary institute, where members are geographically distributed. An annual all-hands meeting is an effective mechanism many such organizations employ to bring all members together in person.

An all-hands meeting differs from a science conference in two main ways. First, its participants are identified members within the boundary of the organization. It is usually not open to a wider audience. Second, its topic areas extend beyond the research projects supported by the organization. Such topics can include strategic planning among leadership, community building among early career researchers, professional and interpersonal capacity building topics, and development of team science competency.

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An effective way to organize research coordination meetings

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

authors_emma-jiang_diane-boghrat_jenny-grabmeier
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Diane Boghrat (biography)
3. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)

How can large cross-disciplinary science institutes consisting of multiple teams working on multiple research projects overcome significant challenges to research coordination? Key aspects are:

  1. Visibility: how to keep different project teams informed of each other’s progress?
  2. Learning: how to support cross-project learning?
  3. Accountability: how to keep project teams accountable for their goals and deliverables?

Tackling these challenges requires a combination of asynchronous communications such as Slack, newsletters and emails, as well as synchronous communications such as research coordination meetings.

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