So, during this presentation, what I'd like to do is I'd like to start off by defining what academic leadership is, talk a little bit about the moral obligation that we as scientists have to lead, essentially, or to take on leadership roles, which comes with the need for developing our skill set.

So that doesn't only pertain to the ability to lead and manage and supervise, but also the knowledge that you need to be able to do so, or the skills that you need to be able to do so. And subsequently, I'll talk a little bit about the institutional context in which our careers unfold,

and what implications that has for developing this kind of a skill set. So what is academic leadership? Well, first off, we can wonder whether leadership is a quality of the person or the position. So we look at universities, and we see professors, and we typically think of them as the leaders.

But in my mind, I think anyone who conducts research, even from the master's programs, where students conduct research towards their master's thesis, anyone can take on leadership qualities.

So I think the onus is on us all as researchers to lead wherever we are in the career ladder. So when I look at academic leaders, I think it's not so much related to the position that people are placed in,

but to the particular qualities that they have in interacting with their environment. And I think leadership in academia also requires a very unique and very heterogeneous skill set, something that I'll return to in a few moments.

So when I was thinking about how to define leadership, I think it has to do with positive impact. So I conduct most of my research on people. So I ask people to fill in questionnaires and things like that. Now, clearly, that comes with responsibilities towards treating those people well, thinking about how our research participants may be adversely affected by participating in research.

We also have an obligation to have a positive impact on our students that we train in the courses that we teach. And maybe a bit less conventional, I think of leadership as also pertaining to the impact that we have on our direct colleagues,

on the way we are managed. And indeed, as a scientist, clearly, we're interested in having a positive impact on theory, practice, and perhaps even society.

So when we look at this kind of very tentative definition, it's clear that leadership or academic leadership is a very multifaceted construct and that it's not easy. So when I think of the positive impact I've had on research participants or society,

it's like, wow, maybe not so much. And clearly, it's very challenging to make a difference towards all these different stakeholders of our careers. However, I do think there is a moral obligation here.

So I think most of science is driven by this moral obligation to do good, essentially, or to improve the world as we see it around us. And in a way, research and science is very much a belief system. And I think as scientists, we have a kind of a missionary role to spread the word,

and especially in these days of misinformation and fake news. Science is coming into a very precarious position. So as scientists, we have a job to do there. We have a job to spread the word and to show the difference

that science can make to improving our lives. And if that's not convincing or a convincing case for the moral obligation that we have, there is a moral obligation also in the way many of our positions are funded. So my job is funded with public money,

and I think many of the positions in the medical program are also funded with public money. So there is an obligation there that the public is investing in science and we need to return on that. So there is a huge number of skills that come with academic leadership.

I would say that this is the research and development framework that was put up by the Vite organization. And essentially, what's interesting there is that leadership is only a small part of,

it's only one of a huge number of skills that academics are thought to have. And I think, or when I think of academic leadership, we actually need to be skilled in each one of these domains to be good leaders. Okay, so we cannot lead without, we cannot supervise,

for instance, PhD candidates without having a knowledge of research methods or the disciplinary topics that they're dealing with. We cannot lead without regarding the precarious position that many of our colleagues are in. So we need to consider issues like mental health, preventing burnout.

We need to have critical thinking skills. We need to have an ability to teach. We need to have an ability to deal with intellectual property rights. So the academic leadership construct is hugely multifaceted. And I would say that academic leadership depends on expertise in each one of these domains.

So when I reflect on this research and development framework, I'm clearly not going to take you through each one of those skills that are listed therein. I think true leadership can only result from expertise across a very heterogeneous skill set.

And the demands that are being placed on researchers are perpetually increasing. It's like an expanding universe where due to developments such as globalization, internationalization, data science and need for interdisciplinarity and so forth,

increasingly we see new demands being placed upon us. So when you think of developing expertise across this full range of competencies, it's essentially a perpetual exercise and we're never fully done. Also, I think, at least within my institution, I see that due to a lack of funding,

sometimes we're taking on roles or activities that don't even belong to our own job role. And an interesting example being people in our department being asked to take out the trash because the people who used to do that sort of negotiated that they would not need to do that anymore.

And I think oftentimes as researchers, great demands are being placed on our adaptability, if you will. So when I joined the university or when I first got into a PhD program, I was interested in conducting research and I did that for a while.

And then I was hired as an assistant professor and then they said, well, why don't you teach? And then the people who do research and teaching, well, they get into managerial positions. So perpetually there's this cycle of changing demands being placed on people.

And the onus is on us then to continually develop ourselves against all these different goals. So it's almost like a Sisyphus task where we're perpetually pushing not one stone,

but maybe 50 stones up a hill and it's a perpetual part of our existence as academics, I would say. Now, we should also realize that academic careers are increasingly boundary. So many institutions don't have the same number of positions at the top of the hierarchy

as they do at the bottom. So that implies that many people will be increasingly mobile from university to university, but perhaps also through crossing the divide into the corporate world.

Now, I think that's a good thing. So I think that this idea of the boundaryless career is nice in the sense that we get to go places. We get to ensure that there is a healthy exchange of ideas and that people actually collaborate with people from different disciplines

or different nationalities and so forth. However, there's also a bit of a darker side to this. So we see these up or out tenure tracks that essentially imply that if you don't perform up to a certain nearly impossible criteria, you're going to be sacked.

Also, we see serial post-docs, so people who take on several post-doc positions in a role and essentially find themselves dead-ended in their career because academia is somehow not interested in supporting them.

And I think many institutions, for some reason or another, are essentially competing for publication canons. So for those people who manage to publish huge numbers of papers, and clearly that's associated with the prestige of the institutions that we work for,

but it also implies, or there's this underlying notion that researchers are replaceable and expendable essentially. And rather than making or investing in research and development, I think many institutions just switch people around to ensure that they get most out of their workforce.

So we can, in light of this idea of the boundary-less career and people switching from employer to employer, it also has implications for what employers must do.

There's this idea that's known as the employability paradox, where you can wonder why an organization should invest in its employees when those employees as a result will be more marketable to other organizations. Are we ourselves then responsible for this perpetual development

against all these different competences and skills that I was pointing to earlier? How would we go about doing that? Well, I think that's a very difficult question, and I would urge that there is a role for professional organizations such as the Marie Quilla Alumni Association to get together

and to think about how it can facilitate people's professional development across their lifetime. What's also interesting about this research development framework is that when you look at it, only one of the 12 subdomains identified therein

has anything to do with a discipline, with a particular knowledge of a particular area. And as academics or as a researcher, the way I think about conducting my research and going about my work, I always have the idea that I must be read up on the literature

and that I must expend a significant effort to know that I'm on top of whatever is happening within my discipline. So when we look at the fact that there are 11 skills that are kind of transversal

that can be even taught to diverse groups of academics, I think there's a huge untapped potential there for economies of scale. And I think at the same time that it's not the universities who are going to invest in this. So we need to develop sort of meta-organizations that look for synergies

and developing courses for particular skills and doing that very well. So Gabor and I were involved in managing the Edworks project, which is a project that was concluded last year.

And as a result of that project, so when we got into that, we looked at the proposal once it was granted and we looked back at everything that we had promised. And there were these summer schools and we're like, wow, what are we going to do in these summer schools?

How are we going to facilitate the development of our researchers? And we actually put a lot of thought into it, but we had nothing to go on, nothing to base ourselves on. And essentially we developed these summer schools from scratch

and put a lot of effort into finding courses and trainers that would be able to train our researchers. And then we also sort of realized nearing the end of the project that all this effort that we had put into this would go wasted essentially at the end of the project.

So we put some more thought into it and recently launched kind of a spin-off organization known as SciLink. And what we intend to do with this organization is to basically serve as a hub for training or transversal skills training of researchers.

And it's a nonprofit organization, so essentially what we want to do is we want to find top-notch trainers from across the world to train courses to researchers who might be interested in participating.

So I've talked a little bit about the boundary-less career and here's quite a lengthy definition of employability. What struck me about this definition is the part where it essentially says that employability is an interaction.

It's an interaction between person and the environment. So it's not only people who are responsible for their employability and it's born out in even greater detail here where it's stated that the crux of the capability concept lies in the combination of various meanings of can,

which refer to being able to, having opportunities, and being facilitated and allowed. So I think it's very much, even though many universities might not be picking up on this, I think there is a responsibility there to facilitate the employability of their employees.

And this employability paradox I've already talked about to some extent. When I reflect upon my career so far, it's felt oftentimes very much like I'm swimming up a river. And the demands that are being placed on individual researchers,

and I don't think this is just true of my own institution, but the demands don't come with the support that is needed to excel. So what I was telling you earlier about coming out of my PhD and landing a job as an assistant professor, essentially my university said, okay, well, here are your courses. Good luck.

And there was no content. I had never stood in front of a crowd to teach lectures and things like that. And essentially I had to develop all these skills on my own. And similar when we landed the Edeworks project, clearly we were super happy,

but we'd never, or Gabor, it's not really true of Gabor, but I'd never had a lot of project management experience. So there were a whole bunch of skills there that I needed to acquire. And I think there is a role for institutions to play that.

Now in academia I think there is a whole bunch of kind of perverse paradoxes or assumptions. So one is that teaching input results in research output. That publication criteria and up or out tenure tracks yield quality research. I would actually urge, I don't know how it's in your field,

but in my field we basically end every publication saying there is a need for longitudinal research. And when you think of that need, that doesn't sit very well with publication criteria, where researchers are being asked to publish on a yearly basis.

So who's going to engage in a longitudinal research project when you know that by the end of the year you need an A publication? There is no upper limit to research output. And I think this is an important one. And I myself was guilty of this in supervising our PhD.

Basically I was telling them, the more publications the better. So go for it. One A publication, great. Two A publications, even better. And there is this sort of assumption that a dynamic can go on forever.

And we see highly successful people around us with 20 or 30 publications a year. And you start to wonder, well, how do these people manage this? And I would say that it's not possible. It's not possible to do that and live a healthy life.

So I think we need to think very carefully about how this incentivization works. And maybe institutions should say, well, there's going to be a cap on the number of publications that we're going to ask you to put out.

In the Netherlands, we also had a case of a very highly successful and prolific publisher. His name is Dieter Extapel. And as it turned out, he was forging all his data. So I think this whole system creates wrong incentives. And at times, we may need to think about how we can slow people down

and how we can give people the time and the resources that they need to develop the skill set to do good research and to demonstrate academic leadership. And I've already talked about it. But there's this assumption that people who can do research well can teach well

and that people who can teach well and do research well make very good managers, which I don't think often holds. Interestingly, in my field, which is the field of work and organizational psychology, people are now organizing themselves and becoming more activist, if you will.

So I was at a conference called The Future of Work and Organizational Psychology early this year. And what I saw there, I found to be quite shocking. So we sat in a session like this, and people were reflecting on their careers and on their career progress.

People were crying in the room. And a good percentage of people there had experienced a burnout, were under extreme pressure in their jobs, were about to lose their jobs because they weren't making the criteria. And as a result of that meeting, we're now writing this manifesto

where we want to signal clearly to ourselves but also to the institutions that we work for that there are limits to the demands that can be placed on us and that also we have responsibilities. So we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves, of our mental health. We have responsibilities of the people we supervise, of how we work,

of how the publication system is organized. And I think these are very important developments because in my mind only good can come out of this. So some personal lessons that I learned in the EdiWorks project is,

first off, that interdisciplinary research is very hard. In English there's a nice proverb that goes something like, to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And all too many people go through their careers using one type of method

and applying that in their research. Now clearly there's a lot to be gained from this idea of interdisciplinarity. And for me personally it entailed getting into data science. Well, I was trained in methods that are a pretty far cry from this new field.

And in my conversations with researchers, it's almost like a Babylonian confusion of words. So we were really speaking different languages to one another. And that too then, it requires time and resources

to nourish and facilitate this interdisciplinary research. What I also found a great challenge in sort of taking on this management role is to balance ESR autonomy with support.

And so initially we were thinking, well, maybe having hired these ESRs, we should give them time to take ownership of their topic and to come up with some ideas that they'd be interested in researching. But in hindsight, I think this kind of sink or swim approach

may not have been ideal, and maybe some of these researchers should have received greater support. It's all too easy once we make it through this very difficult selection system that academia has in store for us to forget how hard it was to be a PhD candidate or a master's student.

And I think there are some lessons, or personal lessons, at least for me to be gleaned from that. Also, I think the focus should be on development. So in running these types of projects, it's not about publications.

It should be about developing a skill set and ensuring employability on the part of ESRs. And that means that these people should not only come out of these projects with disciplinary expertise, but also with some of those skills that I was talking about earlier.

So we should take a holistic approach to developing our ESRs. Also, one thing I really liked about running the Otherworks project is that we were drowning in resources, essentially.

And it was fantastic to have all this money available to do all the stuff that we did in the project. But at the same time, I'm thinking that that should not be a luxury. We should be put in a position where we can thrive.

And I think all too much the work we do is very competitive and oftentimes those opportunities and resources are not provided by the context that we work in. So that was what I had in store for you today.

I don't know if you have any questions or comments.