People should stop using “operations” to mean “not-research”. I’m guilty of this myself, but it clumps together many different skills and traits, probably leading to people undervaluing them.
Could you say more about the different skills and traits relevant to research project management?
Could you say more about the different skills and traits relevant to research project management?
Understanding the research: Probably the most important factor is that you’re able to understand the research. This entails knowing how it connects to adjacent questions / fields, having well thought-out models about the importance of the research. Ideally, the research manager is someone who could contribute, at least to some extent, to the research they’re helping manage. This often requires a decent amount of context on the research, often having spent a significant amount of time reading the relevant research and talking to the relevant people.
Common sense & wide expertise: One way in which you can help as a research manager is often to suggest how the research relates to work by others, and so having decently wide intellectual interests is useful. You also want to have a decent amount of common sense to help make decisions about things like where something should be published and what ways a research project could go wrong.
Relevant epistemic virtues: Just like a researcher, it seems important to have incorporated epistemic virtues like calibration, humility, and other truth-seeking behaviours. As a research manager, you might be the main person that needs to communicate these virtues to new potential researchers.
People skills: Seems very important. Being able to do things like helping people become better researchers by getting to know what motivates them, what tends to block them, etc. Also being able to deal with potential conflicts and sensitive situations that can arise in research collaborations.
Inclination: I think there’s a certain kind of inclination that’s helpful to do research management. You’re excited about dabbling in a lot of different questions, more so than really digging your head down and figuring out one question in depth. You’re perhaps better at providing ideas, structure, conceptual framing, feedback, than doing the nitty-gritty of producing all the research yourself. You also probably need to be fine with being more of a background figure, and let the researchers shine.
Thanks for doing this!
Could you say more about the different skills and traits relevant to research project management?
Thanks, Jia!
Understanding the research: Probably the most important factor is that you’re able to understand the research. This entails knowing how it connects to adjacent questions / fields, having well thought-out models about the importance of the research. Ideally, the research manager is someone who could contribute, at least to some extent, to the research they’re helping manage. This often requires a decent amount of context on the research, often having spent a significant amount of time reading the relevant research and talking to the relevant people.
Common sense & wide expertise: One way in which you can help as a research manager is often to suggest how the research relates to work by others, and so having decently wide intellectual interests is useful. You also want to have a decent amount of common sense to help make decisions about things like where something should be published and what ways a research project could go wrong.
Relevant epistemic virtues: Just like a researcher, it seems important to have incorporated epistemic virtues like calibration, humility, and other truth-seeking behaviours. As a research manager, you might be the main person that needs to communicate these virtues to new potential researchers.
People skills: Seems very important. Being able to do things like helping people become better researchers by getting to know what motivates them, what tends to block them, etc. Also being able to deal with potential conflicts and sensitive situations that can arise in research collaborations.
Inclination: I think there’s a certain kind of inclination that’s helpful to do research management. You’re excited about dabbling in a lot of different questions, more so than really digging your head down and figuring out one question in depth. You’re perhaps better at providing ideas, structure, conceptual framing, feedback, than doing the nitty-gritty of producing all the research yourself. You also probably need to be fine with being more of a background figure, and let the researchers shine.
Probably there are a bunch more useful traits I haven’t pointed to