Research leadership vacuum harming UK science, professor warns

The UK’s “amateurish approach” to research leadership, which relies on “trial, error, osmosis and luck”, is threatening to hold back scientific progress, says a report that calls for more training and support for senior researchers.

In a new publication for the Higher Education Policy Institute, Matthew Flinders, professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, says there is currently a “vacuum” in thinking around research leadership, especially how leadership skills can be nurtured across the sector.

At present, researchers generally develop their skills through a highly inefficient combination of trial and error, luck and “structured serendipity”, explains Professor Flinders, a former Economic and Social Research Council board member who reviewed the issue of research leadership for the council in 2020.