The Research Leader Collective
The Research Leader Collective is a monthly online gathering of Research Fellows, new Principal Investigators and Lecturers who are daring enough to want to have conversations about their research leadership journey.
They aim to become research leaders of the future, and are committed to designing supportive research environments and a thriving research culture.
Themed monthly gatherings
Support through peers and facilitated discussions
Sessions where we bust challenges
Individual coaching sessions
Collective accountability
You know how to do the science but building your team and motivating others remains full of mysteries.
You have worked incredibly hard to make it to where you are now. This new step in your career, of establishing a research group, is both exciting and filled with complexities.
You want to make this transition work for you, so you can continue to enjoy your research, build a thriving research team, and remain sane.
Join The Research Leader Collective
A cross- institutional programme that dares you to transform your approach to being a research leader for a thriving research culture.
There are many challenges to becoming a research leader…
Overload in your transition journey
Shifting from working as a Postdoc to establishing yourself as a successful Research Fellow, Principal Investigator or Lecturer is something you did not expect to be so difficult.
Isolation and vulnerability
In starting your new(ish) role as a research leader, you are suddenly unsure where to turn for help and you worry about discussing challenges with departmental colleagues.
Enhancing Leadership Skills
Exploring the kind of research leader you want to become is hard to do on your own, and inhabiting the research environment on your own terms may seem risky.
How does The Research Leader Collective work?
What is the timeframe?
Dates for sessions
Once per month
on Wednesday afternoons (1-3pm)
17th November
15th December
19th January
23rd February
16th March
20th April
18th May
15th June
This community is built over an 8-month period:
We meet once a month for 2h in a virtual gathering to discuss specific topics relevant to your role and challenges as a research leader.
You will receive curated resources to help you reflect on the topics discussed.
We facilitate peer group discussions to help you work through challenges.
We create a collective accountability through peer support.
You can also choose to benefit from one-to-one coaching alongside the programme
“The Research Leader Collective is a transformational experience for new research leaders. It is not an easy quick fix. It is built slowly over time through connecting and building relationships and trust. It acknowledges the pressures on your time. It dares you to build a thriving research environment for your team and others”
The Research Leader Collective will bring you…
Togetherness
Bringing together like-minded research fellows, principal investigators and new lecturers from different institutions who want to share experiences and learn from each other about how to become excellent research leaders.
Institutional awareness
Learning to navigate the politics of institutions & departments or funders is an asset for your research leadership journey. Sharing with peers the issues that you are facing will provide alternative perspectives to solve challenges.
Leadership perspectives
Easing your journey into research leadership by providing tools and frameworks to reflect & experiment with your leadership approach. Helping you keep joy with your research through this transition.
Courage to thrive as a research leader
Becoming a research leader who excels in leading a research team and is supportive of researchers with diverse expectations, ambitions and capabilities is not a small feat. The Research Leader Collective will challenge you to become the best research leader you can be.
Self-awareness through reflection
You may want to do a good job as a supervisor, line manager and team leader, but sometimes it is hard to know how to go about things. The Research Leader Collective will support you in reflecting on your approaches and will bring new insights to shift your thinking.
Change agent for research culture
Managing the craziness of your own workload, whilst trying to rethink how you can improve the research culture through your own actions may feel overwhelming. Our conversations will be part of becoming a brilliant contributor towards a positive research culture.
Why Do We Need The Research Leader Collective?
“Members of the Research Leader Collective are daring enough to want to make the research environment a better place”
We need to fight the isolation experienced by new research leaders
There are multiple ways of being a great research leader and the motivation is to help research leaders find their own path.
The Research Leader Collective brings resilience through connecting socially in a network of peers.
Offering such support within single institutions can be challenging to put in place; this cross- institutional approach makes it easier for research organisations to offer sustainable support to their early career research leaders.
Addressing the lack of formal management training
Thinking about leadership in a different way
Offering a supportive space to reflect
Leadership learning as a long-term process
Seeing the success of your team members as your own success
Thriving as a research leader even within a context of workplace stress, high levels of competition and job insecurity
Acknowledging your uncertainty about how to be a good research leader
Who Is The Research Leader Collective For?
Research fellows
New Principal Investigators
New Lecturers
Research leaders who have great ambitions to deliver transformative research for the world.
Research leaders who are keen to engage and learn from peers and are prepared to build a community reshaping research culture together.
Research leaders who don’t assume that they know it all when it comes to people management or claim they are the perfect supervisor or line manager.
Research leaders who are open to the concept of vulnerability in leadership.
Research leaders who have the intellectual humility to admit that being a research leader is hard and the motivation to become awesome supervisor/line manager.
Cost to access the programme
Access programme without individual coaching support
Discovery call with participant
8 monthly sessions between November and June
Topic input during monthly session
Peer support in group discussions
Curated resources for each monthly topic
£480 per participant
Access full programme with one-to-one coaching included
Discovery call with participant
8 monthly sessions between November and June
3 one-to-one coaching sessions with session reports and follow-up prompts
Topic input during monthly session
Peer support in group discussions
Curated resources for each monthly topic
£1,200 per participant
“I love creating spaces for conversations. So much remains unsaid in professional environments. I hold the space for research leaders to reflect deeply about how they can best function within the intense pressures and the competition of the research environment. I want research leaders to open to supporting each others in ways they may not have dared before.”
The programme will be led by Dr Sandrine Soubes, the founder of Tesselle Development
Sandrine previously worked as a research scientist in the USA (at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland) and the UK (The University of Sheffield). As a biologist, she has worked on the bacterial cell cycle, the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, cell differentiation and early patterning in the developing brain.
Since leaving the laboratory, she has worked as a developer of professional development programmes, trainer, facilitator and coach, first at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology, then for the Faculty of Science at the University of Sheffield and now as an independent consultant at Tesselle Development.
With 17 years as a researcher developer, she has instigated many engaging programmes that support the leadership of researchers. She was a founding member and instrumental contributor of the Think Ahead team, which won the 2014 Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding support for early career researchers.
Sandrine facilitates key conversations & reflections for individuals. She supports participants take active steps in navigating the complexities of the research environment.
As a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Sandrine has professional values dedicated to respecting the diversity of learners; she thrives on tailoring programmes that benefit diverse research communities.
Sandrine is committed to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion values throughout her professional engagements.
What is the added value of getting one-to-one coaching in the Research Leader Collective?
Offering individual coaching support to programme participants may seem a bit of a luxury, but we believe it has an incredible potential to help individuals go even further in their reflections and actions than what they are able to achieve during group sessions.
The use of coaching in Higher Education is not fully embedded in practices and is probably perceived as something that only the elite- the most senior leaders in the institution can access.
We would like to propose that this is exactly why making coaching available more broadly to new research leaders should become the norm if institutions are committed to changing research culture.
Coaching philosophy of Dr Sandrine Soubes
My coaching values are anchored in respect and integrity.
I seek to empower individuals to regain independence and autonomy from set views and identify new, more effective and rewarding patterns for actions and interactions.
I am an expressive, enthusiastic and dynamic coach, who wants to “rock your boat”
I give individuals a sense of openness to all options and possibilities.
As a foreign national having worked all my career abroad, I understand what it feels like to adapt to working and living in a different country; this certainly helps me as a coach working with researchers having international careers.
Experience of participants for online live programmes
I think the monthly meetings worked great and I liked the tasks in between that helped me prioritising self-reflection and taking "me time". I also think the many break-out groups were helpful and made the programme engaging, even online. I loved the use of different media, grounding exercises and collaborative tools, like the Jamboards. The structure of the programme was very clear and the different aspects we were focusing on each month built upon each other and worked really well for me.
Sandrine did a great job in running this programme online. She had a really good presence on Zoom and managed the group discussions online very well. She also experimented with many other platforms to best support our engagement with the programme and one another.
I think one of the most powerful things I learnt through the programme was assertiveness. I know it's something I struggled with (I'm a "nice person" who hates any kind of conflict) and the workshops together with conversations in accountability groups provided a great foundation for my assertiveness.
Sandrine sent out really helpful emails between workshops that helped me in keeping engaged with the programme and reflect on my development.
Sandrine did an excellent job in planning and delivering the programme. She has so many insights to share and I always felt like she really heard what people were saying, engaged with them and had good advice. I also felt like I could trust Sandrine and she was able to create an environment and sense of community between participants in an online environment where I also felt like I could trust others in discussing quite personal things.
The programme was excellently structured, with each workshop clearly focusing on one or more themes that were also immensely relevant to my professional and personal development. If I could have requested themes to be discussed in the programme, it would have been exactly the programme that Sandrine set up.
What do people say about working with
Dr Sandrine Soubes as a facilitator and coach?
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Sandrine is an excellent listener and because of this she really pulls all the thoughts you have and make them into actions or activities to challenge or address the thought.
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The sessions were extremely useful and helpful. The time intervals between sessions allowed for reflection and implementation of goals.
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Sandrine showed empathy, asked the right questions, showed support, listened and wanted to understand the problem in order to deal with it effectively.
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I hadn’t previously been able to see how to break out of certain cycles – thoughts and actions – but Sandrine was quite clear that there were ways to do this.
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Sandrine was a good listener and pointed out the strengths and weaknesses in what I described was my experience.
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Sandrine identified and broke down some imaginary obstacles. These originated partly in my lack of knowledge of the UK higher education landscape, but also of my own methods.