Self-leadership: The game of higher education & how best to play it
Dr Steve Joy Through self-leadership, early career academics can take control of their careers, be proactive and set their own goals Leadership is something of a buzzword these days, a concept which has seeped into academia from the corporate world and seems to come in an unending array of flavours: academic, research, thought, moral, business, strategic, and so on. It's the sort of thing people highlight in their job documents; it crops up as an interview question. But what might leadership mean to early career academics, many of whom don't lead the projects they work on, let alone teams or departments? What might it mean if, like many of the researchers we work with, you struggle with the feeling that the higher education system is a game, the rules of which are difficult to navigate and set by others? These questions come from our on-going work with researchers at the University of Cambridge, where we are using the idea of self-leadership as a means of helping them...