Research Management Mastery

Building strong systems to nurture self-organized, highly motivated & productive research teams

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Do you find yourself

Stressed and strained by maintaining a productive and well-funded research program?
In need of encouraging high levels of team performance, yet worried about finding the right balance: You do not want to run a sweat shop that hampers your team's motivation but need a certain amount of output to ensure the team's success.
Wondering if you should provide more guidance and structure to ensure progress or if that is considered "micromanaging"?
Frustrated that you have to remind your team members about standards, lab SOPs, and deadlines?
In need of better tools to stay on top of projects?
Wanting to get your message and expectations across clearly without deflating your team members?
Spending lots of time and energy making things work for the team, wishing everyone pulled in the same direction?
Curious how businesses and corporations manage creative & highly productive teams?

The top concern of research team leaders contributing to stress, strain, and a lack of career fulfillment is the time and energy required to
maintain their research programs.

...often leaving them struggling to find a way to work that does not crush their own and their team's motivation while still ensuring productivity and funding.

You likely already tried:

Imposing structure and setting deadlines for team members, which may work but creates a lot of work for you to follow-up on and enforce.
Breaking things down into smaller steps also requiring you to take extra time and may result in team members coming to you for things they could have figured out independently.
Talking through problems only to encounter more and more.
Giving pep talks and encouraging your team, which works for a time...
Working more to compensate and figured out that this strategy is not sustainable or compatible with your desires and values.
Lab management, leadership, mentoring books, Slack or Twitter, or courses, all providing insights, theories, opinions, information & tools but no integrated strategy to create sustainable systems and long-term change.

The bottomline is that researchers are not trained as managers.

Few research team leaders or lab managers have learned management approaches for creating systems and work processes supporting highly creative, independent yet collaborative work on complex problems.
Few research team leaders or lab managers have the ability to step out of potentially harmful leadership behaviors, acquired passively from key figures in their lives and careers, without substantial effort and guidance during implementation. This causes stress for all parties involved and can result in lack of motivation of the team leader and team members and even burnout, creating a vicious cycle.
Even the most organized research team leaders or lab managers may find it difficult to implement work processes and systems to achieve the desired outcomes simply because they do not have the management knowledge.
Because of this natural lack of skill (this isn't part of the research training even if you are a lab manager) time, energy, and resources are used suboptimally, requiring the team leader/ lab manager to compensate by spending time on training/ retraining, recreating resources, reorganizing, following up, and writing more grants to bring in funds.
Because this is frustrating, team leaders or lab managers may fall into harmful leadership behaviors that interfere with their teams' motivation and engagement at work. These behaviors are usually acquired passively from key figures in their lives and careers and are hard to walk away from without guidance.

Apply for training

The 6-month Research Management Mastery program is a hands-on management training designed for research team leaders, lab managers, and future PIs.

We will lead you through 7 distinct aspects of management providing you with tools and processes to build strong skills and systems to take your research program to the next level. In the process, you will create a visual research team manifesto. This will be a playbook for new and current team members. This guide will ensure continuity and consistency over long periods of time, even if key members of the team leave. It will be flexible and adaptable, enabling your team's creativity, autonomy, accountability, and independence.

Step 1. Process Management

Understand how your daily work flows and why processes break down. Set standards for processes, e.g. lab documentation, and learn how to create accountability so that you don’t have to constantly remind your team.
Step 2. Problem Solving

Learn various methods for tackling problems of different magnitudes and train your team to distinguish clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic contexts, so that you are not spending your time solving problems that your team can handle or are out of the loop when you should be involved.
Step 3. Meeting Management

Structure your team communication so that creativity is increased, the information flow is not disrupted, team members are in the know about what matters, and you all achieve your outcomes without fruitless discussions that cost a lot of time and lead nowhere.
Step 4. Team Management

Get a handle on skill development and take the awkwardness and pain out of providing feedback to your team. You will map out a skill matrix to get an unbiased and fair view of competencies and different levels of skill of your team. You will learn how to encourage growth without discouraging your team.
Step 5. Project Management

Learn about different ways to manage projects and how to teach your team, so that members can manage their own projects efficiently without your constant oversight.
Step 6. Team Performance

Learn how to set engaging targets for your team and how to measure success even if progress is slow and part of it is learning. Get an introduction to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), a process that Stefanie has used quite effectively with her research team. Learn how to speak about good as well as improvable performance without ruffling feathers and encountering drama.
Step 7. Continuous Improvement of Research Operations

Create an environment where your team members are keen to improve daily research operations, so that you are not the only person who spends time & energy making things work.

Stefanie, Alex and Robert have accomplished mission impossible for me. The Research Management Mastery Training helped me become crystal-clear about what needed to change and how to implement change to run my lab without feeling stressed all the time or stressing my team. During this half-year implementation course I incorporated strong management foundations with my team and embraced a bigger vision for my work and leadership..

Elisa Zanier, MD, Head Department of Neuroscience
Laboratory of Acute Brain Injury and Therapeutic Strategies,
Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research IRCCS
Milan, Italy

The Research Management Mastery course helped me develop strategies to better manage our lab and provided me with the tools to implement many of the organizational processes I have needed to do! The course reinforced the importance of the team-work approach we currently use in the lab. The RMM course gave me the tools and time to formalize our common lab processes to improve organization and function of the lab group, allowing us to grow from 4 members to currently 12!

Adele Addington, Lab Manager- Siobhan M. Craige Lab Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise at Virginia Tech

About Research Management Mastery

Currently available university lab management workshops or books on the topic, while a good starting point, rarely provide long-term support and concrete advice for practical implementation while you are creating new systems, working with your team, and encountering challenges.

Facilitating meaningful changes and engraining new behaviors of both the leader and the team takes months if not years, because they occur at several levels:

Learning new knowledge,
Understanding how you currently operate, what works and what doesn’t,
Implementing new approaches, and
Engraining new patterns and approaches, so that they are your go-to strategies even during stressful situations.

There will inevitably be challenges during this time of growth because growth can be uncomfortable and requires an initial investment of energy and time. Building management structures is critical for resource preservation. Yet, these activities are often the first to be dropped when many responsibilities are competing for time on your schedule.

A sounding board, feedback, accountability structures, and coaching are key to success while you test and roll out new leadership & management approaches. Doing this work within a supportive group is simply also much more fun.

Without a structure in place to implement changes step-by-step and support to adjust the approaches to your specific needs, it is likely that you and your team will fall back into old patterns.

The Research Management Mastery Program addresses these challenges by training you in leadership and management skills geared toward increasing autonomy, competence, and a sense of community of team members. Our focus is on providing you with long-term multifaceted support while you learn about and implement leadership and management approaches tailored to research teams.

DOWNLOAD Program Description

Training Structure

The training runs for 6 months, from April 2022 to September 2022 to allow you to build new management structures and behaviors and provide you with support during the transition period

Recorded video training sessions cover the core training and management principles (10 modules). Here, we pull on the most appropriate team management approaches & frameworks suited for small and medium-sized research teams.
Implementation with your team. Rather than relying on case studies alone that may or may not apply to your individual situation, you will implement with your team as we go and get feedback from us. Leadership & management is best learned by doing it.
TLIR Research Management Mastery group coaching sessions discuss the course content and develop strategies for implementation with your team. This is your safe forum to bounce around ideas and address any challenges that you may encounter. Group calls will take place mostly on Wednesdays at 10am Eastern Time and sometimes switch to Mondays or Fridays to accommodate Holidays or trainer schedules.
Videos with examples for training implementation that cover how we implemented the tools that you’ll learn with our research and corporate teams. We will share what works or what doesn’t and how you can create a great experience for yourself and your team.
Templates for work processes, skill development matrix, the living research team manifesto etc. that will make it easier and quicker for you to build smooth systems. We spent months creating these tools and adapting them to the work of research teams. We’re excited to share this resource with you.

Apply for training

Program Application and Tuition

Participation in the course is by application only. If you are interested in joining, apply below by filling out a quick questionnaire. If we believe that the program is a fit for your needs, we will invite you to schedule a 30-minute phone conversation with Stefanie during which we will talk about your needs, questions, concerns, and commitment to participate. If we feel that you fit well into the small group that we are bringing together, we will invite you to join the program.

The regular tuition for the 6-month Research Management Mastery program is $5797. You may qualify for a scholarship reducing the tuition to $4797.

Bonuses:

Assessment of where your lab is right now to create a custom strategy for your lab management ($500 value)
1:1 session during the program to keep you on track – $300 value
Virtual 60 min teamwork session on a topic of your choice (skills matrix, total time effectiveness) – $500 value
Final formatting of your completed virtual lab manual done by a professional – $1,000 value

Ten seats remain for the January 2023 cohort.

APPLY NOW

Initially, I was worried about both spending the time and money on my leadership development, but the biweekly calls coupled with the content and workbook activities have proved priceless.

The workbooks allow you to think through the techniques and ideas on paper in a way that is specific to your own experiences. I also like the idea that my goals and perception of my work will change over time, so having these resources available to re-examine and interrogate again and again will be valuable for my future growth.

I had been looking for something that would give me specific strategies with examples and then walk me through the personal work that I needed to do to become a better leader and top performer, and TLIR has more than served this purpose.

In addition, the biweekly calls which connect me to this community of like-minded achievers have been essential to demonstrate some of the techniques described in the modules and workbooks. For instance, in real-time, Stefanie walked one of our TLIR colleagues through the process of handling a tough conversation she needed to have a with a postdoc; we were all able to witness how some of the strategies could play out in real-time. It was fantastic!

Siobhan Craige, Assistant Professor Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise at Virginia Tech

I wasted years trying to teach myself leadership skills while doing all the other academic duties (research, grants, papers, service, etc) because I thought everyone else had all this figured out. I thought, “I don't need to spend money on this stuff"... which resulted in a huge waste of time.

I got more out of the year I worked with Stefanie on building my team than I did in 5 years learning random stuff on my own (and often that random stuff didn't work for me).

For the first time since I started graduate school, I truly love my job. I love what I do.

Tanya Garcia, Associate Professor of Biostatistics,

UNC Chapel Hill

Meet the Trainers

Stefanie Robel

Stefanie grew up in Berlin, Germany and completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in Munich before she permanently relocated to the US.

She became a personal development and leadership nerd during her postdoctoral training, initially to increase her competitiveness and later because she realized that she could use these strategies and tools to create a happier, balanced life AND increase her levels of success.

She started her independent research program in 2016, built a thriving research team, and brought in more than $6M in funding during her first two years on the tenure track. She meanwhile earned tenure and moved institutions to take her research and institutional leadership to the next level.

Stefanie started Team Leadership In Research in 2019 leveraging her life coaching skills and the experience she had gained as head coach in another business. Team Leadership In Research systematizes leadership knowledge and management approaches specifically for research teams to help team leaders achieve success and fulfillment*.

Her big mission is to change the academic culture from negativity and chronic stress to one where people express their unique brilliance AND live a fun, joyful, happy life by bringing leadership training along with positivity to her community.

Robert Rossbach

Robert grew up in Berlin, Germany. He completed a master’s degree in mathematics in Berlin and Barcelona before he became a Human Resources professional while at PWC, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. During this career stage he got insights to the structure of multi-national blue-chip corporations, as well as small and medium sized companies. During this time, he gained understanding of why some companies are more successful than others. Spoiler alert: It has to do with leadership and management strategies

Based on this expertise, he became an executive at RWE, the biggest energy supply corporation in Germany. There he became a project lead of “New Way of working”, a full company transformation program further diving into different organizational set-ups and learning how a holistic approach to leadership, operational excellence and End2End-process management drives performance, success, and satisfaction of employees.

To back his practical experiences up with theoretical insight, Robert has become a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt, an Agile coach, a certified Professional Scrum master and Scrum Product owner as well as a PRINCE2- project manager.

Robert believes that excellence in leadership and self-organizing teams are two different words for the same thing. The concept of servant leadership in Scrum, i.e., a great leader’s role is to support team members to perform at their best. Robert teaches leaders how to do exactly that.

Alex Schober

Alexandra Schober (aka Alex) was born and raised in upstate New York where she completed her PhD in neuropharmacology. During her PhD, she became the lab manager and discovered a passion for management and workflow efficiencies.

In 2018, she moved to Montreal, Canada to do her postdoctoral fellowship and shortly after became lab manager once again. As someone who is invested in personal growth and leadership, she spent her free time building these skills through seminars, trainings, and books.

Through these trainings, her passion grew into a desire to bring about change to academia from within by training current and future researchers to become better managers and leaders. Her long-term goal is to help scientists everywhere to gain the skills necessary to foster supportive and positive work environments in their labs, thus allowing great science to happen.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are a few answers to our most common questions. If we don't cover yours, just reach out to stefanie@stefanierobel.com

Q: I'm very busy and worried about the time commitment. Will this program overcommit me even more?

A: If time is an ever-present struggle, it may be time to take a deeper look and ask yourself: Do my systems optimize my time? Or do they contribute to my struggles? If you are ready to not just treat the symptoms (e.g. say no to all things that would nurture and support you while saying yes to many external requests) but the real problem, we can support you in this. We will take a deep look at your time-eating activities and help you optimize. We also have experience of addressing the mindset challenges often at the root of feeling behind. It's not a quick fix, magic bullet type challenge. But one that can be addressed. That said, we encourage you to only apply if you are ready to commit at least 2-3h/ week to the program. We can only help if you show up.

Q: What funds can I use to pay for the program?

A: Most of our clients use institutional funds (start-up or departmental funds, training grants) to pay for the program. Occasionally, clients decide to invest in themselves using their personal funds. Payment plans are an option.
Q: I saw that there are other Team Leadership In Research trainings. Is there a specific order in which to do the programs?

A: There are a total of three programs currently. In chronological order of creation: 1. The "original" Team Leadership In Research Inner Circle program (TLIR1), 2. Mentoring Roadmaps (TLIR2), and 3. Research Management Mastery (TLIR3). All programs are standalone, although it is recommended to take Team Leadership In Research Inner Circle or Research Management Mastery before Mentoring Roadmaps. TLIR1 is a program dedicated to helping you dial into who you are as a leader, what you value, what your vision is. It also provides training in a variety of leadership skills and helps you develop your leadership point of view. A new TLIR1 cohort may start later this summer. TLIR3 or Research Management Mastery is the program you are looking at right now. It is focused on helping you become a badass manager and build lab and people management systems for your team. Mentoring Roadmaps or TLIR2 is a 75-hour coaching training for research team leaders that focuses on mentoring skills and one-on-one interactions with team members. It is next planned for fall 2022. Participants learn two frameworks and several coaching tools to mentor team members and address challenges. Because coaching others requires great self-awareness and self-regulation, this training is easier to digest after you gained clarity about who you are and where you're going as a leader and manager. Based on our program schedule, we suggest the following order: TLIR3 (April-September 2022) --> TLIR2 (fall 2022 to spring 2023) --> TLIR1 (2023).
Q: Will there be a later course start?

A: While we plan to run the program again, perhaps in fall, we cannot guarantee that there is another round in 2022.
Q: I already have a lab manual. Will this program add anything?

A: It depends on your lab manual and whether it does what you were hoping for. If it is up to date and outlines your major work processes, details team roles and responsibilities, maps out a path for team development, sets standards and makes expectations explicit, helps you retain critical skills, resources, and knowledge even when key personnel leave, and enables your team members to self-manage, you may be good. If your team performs to your expectations and above, if they are motivated and if you are fulfilled, happy and satisfied with your work load, work products, leadership & management skill level and overall career trajectory, you probably won't need this program.

Q: How is this program different from others out there?

A: Your university may provide workshops or even a leadership or lab management course. Alex, Stefanie, and some of our clients have taken a few of those. While those programs certainly don't hurt, they often do not provide support over a sufficient period of time to help you shift how you lead and manage. You simply do not get enough practice and feedback. Importantly, you need to look at the quality of information that you receive. Are these programs providing guidance based on experience, anecdotal evidence, and opinions? While this is certainly a better starting point than figuring it out without any input, the advice received in this way may not be the most adequate approach to getting your desired result. It may not be in alignment with your values or your authentic leadership style. We build our programs based on as much evidence for effectiveness as possible. We also draw from a wide variety of leadership and management frameworks to make sure you get systems in place that represent your authentic leadership and get you the results that you are after.
Q: I would like to send my lab manager to take the training. Is that possible?

A: You are welcome to suggest this training to your lab manager. They will need to fill out an application form and we will talk to them about their goals and aspirations for the program. If they are a fit for the group, they will receive an invitation to join. The group is currently composed of a couple of lab managers (new and seasoned) and research team leaders at all career stages (pre-tenure, tenured, chief operations manager).
Q: Is there a discount if I join together with my lab manager?

A: We will apply a 15% discount to the program tuition (can be combined with early-bird discount). Please apply for the program and mention in the online form that you would like to join together with your lab manager.
Q: Is there a discount for future research team leaders?

A: There are limited trainee spots available at a discounted tuition for each cohort. Please submit an application and inquire about availability.
Q: Is there a bundle price for all three programs?

A: There is, just submit an application and let us know that you are interested in bundling two or three programs.
Q: I can ask any question on New/ Midcareer PI Slack or Twitter. Is this program going to give me any additional value?

A: New PI Slack, Midcareer PI Slack, Twitter and similar are certainly great resources to have access to for 1) getting questions answered, 2) getting examples and templates for all kinds of SOPs and 3) a sense of community. As with any responsible use of information retrieved from social media, ask yourself what the accuracy and strength of evidence for the suggested approach is. Aside from this, some people find the constant chatter on Twitter or Slack distracting or overwhelming or have a hard time figuring out which one of the suggested approaches to go with. On some of these channels, the messaging can feel negative and discouraging. Research Management Mastery is a small group program with not more than 15 participants focused on implementation of management strategies that are tailored to your needs. This is facilitated by trainers with in-depth knowledge of management tools and strategies. One lovely side effect of being part of a small group of people with aligned interests over the period of 6 months is that you will form a tightknit and supportive mastermind. It is not often during our busy adult lives that we get the opportunity to meet and build friendships with people outside of our immediate work environment. The Team Leadership In Research programs provide this opportunity.