Tailored Approach to the Leadership and Management for Research and other Innovative Projects

There is a large disconnect between the long and detailed project leadership and management guidance that works well for other sectors, and what is needed for innovative research and evaluation projects.

Paraphrasing Tommy Lasorda, the effective leadership of research and other innovative projects is like ‘holding a dove – you need to hold it tightly enough that it doesn’t fly away, but not so tightly that you crush it.’ This means that guidance developed for other sectors needs to be tailored in order to be helpful and enabling vs. constraining and burdensome.

It was this gap in practical guidance for that prompted P. Alison Paprica to create training and other services focused on light-touch research project management and leadership including:

• • Courses, workshops, webinars, and one-on-one coaching for Principal Investigators and other research team members at the University of Toronto
• • Workshops on research project management and related topics (e.g., governance, leadership, effective meetings) for Canadian federally funded initiatives (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC)
• • Customized training for the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria, the Canadian Evaluation Society, the International Population Data Linkage Network, Cornell University, and others