I'll undoubtedly evolve this list further, but right now, I'm thinking that the three key areas where a research manager needs to focus are:
- Strategy: Everything starts from the strategy. Without a clear and impactful purpose, your team's efforts will be wasted. A great manager does not build a strategy alone. It is very unlikely that they a priori have all of the information they need to create a great strategy. They need others help. It is unlikely that the team and stakeholders will enthusiastically work towards the strategy unless they feel ownership for it. Managers need others buy-in. Great managers define a clear and transparent process for creating a strategy, follow the process to gather information and ideas from the team and key stakeholders, and then use their judgement to refine this input into a strategy that will give purpose and direction to everyone on work that matters.
- Workflow and Process: Even great people will fail at executing their work if the workflow that steers incoming work and coordinates work with others is bad. Cal Newport highlights this really well in A World Without Email. The productivity gains (and general human happiness) that come from developing and refining effective workflows can be huge. Hint, a great proxy metric for effective workflow is time spent coordinating work (rather than executing it). Without great workflow, the only way to advance research productivity is by pushing people to work more (e.g. longer hours, more email). As with great strategies, great workflows are developed with the team so the workflow includes necessary information and gets buy-in. Additional hint: anytime you feel like telling one of your directs "do better", stop and reflect. Good questions are "what is really going on here" and "how might I be responsible for this situation". Your power as a manager to create bad workflows is immense. It can be very easy to misunderstand this and blame others.
- Hiring: Hiring sets the baseline capabilities of the team. Starting with a great baseline is of course great, but as a manger be aware that a key reason that people underperform compared to what you expect is that you have not created effective workflows or strategies that matter/have buy-in.
Make sure to dedicate significant time to regularly reflecting on these three tasks. These are creative, knowledge work tasks. They need focus to do effectively.