“Leadership in academia requires particular skills.”

Workstream 3 is about the support for professors. What specific topics are dealt with in the working group?
Edoardo Mazza: We are essentially concentrating on three topics: the first is about supporting professors in their leadership role. Secondly, we are looking at the different phases of the professor lifecycle. We are developing tools to improve the processes of hiring, promotion and retirement, for example. Topics such as faculty workload or ensuring equal treatment across the faculty are also part of this second theme, as well as the evaluation of professors. The third subject is preventing and dealing with conflict situations. For this topic, we are only acting as a sounding board, and we provide feedback on the development of new procedures and support services by the VPPL Office.

So the focus is primarily on the challenges and needs of professors. How is the working group composed? Is it made up exclusively of faculty members?
Paola Picotti: No, we are a mixed group. In addition to professors, representatives of the central administrative units and the scientific staff, and also students participate. Specialists from the areas of personnel development, faculty services, faculty affairs and conflict management are also part of our group. Of course, it is important that we as professors can report from our own experience where there is potential for optimisation. We know what is going well, what is not going so well, and which approaches our colleagues might find particularly useful. But the perspective of other bodies is just as important. It is essential to hear the opinions of people who support professors in their work, but who are also affected by the behaviour of professors. The interaction within this diverse group is very productive. We learn a lot from each other and benefit from the different perspectives. All members show a high level of commitment and motivation.

The topics of Workstream 3 are closely linked to the area of the Vice President for Personnel Development and Leadership and the Office for Faculty Affairs. How do your findings from the rETHink workstream flow into this?
Edoardo Mazza: The transition between Workstream 3 and the organisation is fluid: we focus on our topics in working groups. Each working group also includes 1-2 specialists from the VPPL area or the Office for Faculty Affairs. In this way, knowledge flows in both directions. VP Julia Dannath is part of our core team, so she can contribute her expertise directly, but also learns about the specificities of our community from our discussions. For certain topics, President Joel Mesot has also been involved in our discussions and has given feedback on our ideas. The interface with other rETHink workstreams is also very important. In particular, we had several productive exchanges with colleagues from Workstream 2. For some topics, we could already present concrete results to different sounding groups and ultimately to the Executive Board. The next step is to hand the proposed solutions over to the organisation, where they will be further elaborated in order to prepare their concrete implementation. Particularly in the case of difficult topics, several iterations will be needed, and we will remain available as a sounding board in WS3.

The topic of "professors as leaders" has already been handed over to Personnel and Organisational Development. What potential solutions are being pursued here?
Edoardo Mazza: We received numerous ideas from many interviews with colleagues. From these, we have tried to identify specific offers that can be useful in the various phases of professional life and are also compatible with faculty’s tight timetable. For instance, specific topics like selection, supervision and promotion of young academics will be addressed as part of the program “Leadership4faculty”. Active participation and contributions to leadership events have increased in the last year, showing that the topic is considered important by professors. We also reached the conclusion that in order to support professors in their leadership role it is important to promote the direct exchange of experience among professors, for example through peer-to-peer lunches across departments or virtual forums. In addition, we proposed new procedures to consider leadership skills when hiring new professors and promoting assistant professors. Mentoring of assistant professors also came up again and again. We have made concrete proposals for a concept on how these young colleagues, who are growing into a new role, can be better supported, promoted and evaluated.

And what about the issue of workload?
Paola Picotti: The results of the last employee’s survey for the group of professors and interviews conducted within rETHink made it clear that workload is an increasingly problematic issue for faculty. Many professors are willing to volunteer their time for servicing ETH Zurich and the wider community (e.g. commissions or working groups). However, it is critical that faculty members are not overloaded with this type of tasks and retain enough capacity for research, teaching, supervision of their groups and intellectual exploration. In addition, in several departments service tasks seem to be unevenly distributed amongst professors.

What do you propose here?
Paola Picotti: We have made the recommendation that, firstly, there must be more transparency about what additional service tasks there are, how time-intensive they are and who takes on such tasks. This information should be part of the AAA (Annual Academic Achievements), but it should also be extracted and made available to department chairs. Second, we propose that professors who have taken on particularly time-intensive or demanding tasks be able to take a break from service to plan their future research direction, refresh teaching and focus on group supervision. In parallel, we have also made suggestions on how to support professors in their delegation and time management. Of course it is also very important that our institution as a whole is aware of the issue of "capacity" of professors, and that this is taken into account when evaluating the introduction of new tasks (e.g. new committees).   

Both on the topic of leadership and on the topic of workload, Workstream 3 proposes that the range of courses for professors be expanded. Is it realistic that professors will make use of this, despite their high workload?
Edoardo Mazza: Yes, this problem is always present in our discussions. In principle, it is a question of return on investment: if the courses ultimately help us in our main tasks in teaching and research, then these offers will also be used. In our analysis phase, we gathered various opinions from all over ETH on where there are deficiencies and where there is need for more support. In addition, we made sure that a modular and flexible structure of the offer allows colleagues to engage, even with a particularly tight time budget. We are therefore confident that such offers will meet with approval.

There are already numerous leadership courses or time management courses on the market, for example those from industry. Why do these courses need to be developed for ETH professors specifically?
Paola Picotti: It is important to understand that the academic world and the business world work differently. Leading a research group in an academic environment requires different skills than leading a team in industry. We spent a considerable amount of time in WS3 defining such differences before we approached the design of tools to support professors. We concluded that the content of leadership development tools must specifically address the challenges for professors.

Can you give examples of where a professorial position differs from a similar management role in industry?
Paola Picotti: As professors we are not just managers of our team members, we are primarily advisors and mentors, which makes our role different from a management role in industry. Our trainees need to learn how to design research and this requires a high degree of ownership. Furthermore, the work we supervise is often individualistic by nature, e.g. research projects that are carried out by a doctoral student in the context of a doctoral thesis. Nevertheless, this work must be done within a team where mutual support is required. This poses specific challenges. The constant change in research teams is also a characteristic of the academic environment. Doctoral students and post-docs only ever stay in the group for a limited time. Professors are confronted with the need to retain knowledge within the team despite this constant change. These are just some examples from a longer list of peculiarities we analysed.

Another difference from the business world is that ETH has a strong "bottom-up" and democratic structure. How will professors who are not part of Workstream 3 have the opportunity to comment on the ideas?
Edoardo Mazza: Participation is a core value at ETH. As we said, we already listened to many voices outside the workstream during the development of the proposed solutions. Also, for the concrete implementation of these proposals it is very important to get feedback from our community. For some topics, we will solicit feedback from specific groups, such as the DVK, KdL, AVETH or HV. In the end, certain deliverables will also require a proper ”Vernehmlassung”.  

The work of Workstream 3 will continue next year. What is the roadmap?
Paola Picotti: Two large thematic blocks are currently in focus: the first is conflict management. We are currently giving feedback on a programme developed by the VPPL Office focused on prevention and intervention, including training modules of different depth and format, for professors and for all ETH employees. Next year the VPPL Office will address grievance procedures, including early detection of critical situations, and we will help by acting as a sounding board on these sensitive topics.   

And what is the second block?
Edoardo Mazza: The second thematic block is the evaluation of professors. The ETH Rat has requested to develop a concept for the evaluation of professors, in line with the corresponding article of the professors' ordinance. So, we received the mandate from the Executive Board to work on an expansion of the evaluation. Our goal is that any evaluation should be as efficient as possible, and useful for all parties involved. Based on our analysis, there is already a substantial amount of information available on the performance of professors in terms of research and teaching, and some also on technology transfer. What we are discussing in greater depth is the question of how to give useful feedback to professors on their leadership. We are of course very much aware of the relevance and delicacy of this topic. We will therefore involve various ETH committees and take into account the opinions of all interested parties.