Supervision and Leadership during the doctorate
To avoid frustration during the doctorate, clarify mutual expectations of the collaboration at an early stage and be aware of existing areas of tension.
The supervision of doctoral students is central to a successful doctorate. Many studies therefore deal with what optimal supervision of doctoral students looks like. One consistent theme across these texts is the importance of adapting supervisory approaches to the unique characteristics and needs of individual students.
Whether students are conventional PhD candidates, mid-career professionals, or part-time students in a university hospital setting, the texts underscore the necessity of tailoring guidance and support to facilitate their academic and professional growth.
Furthermore, the role of supervision is seen as multifaceted, encompassing not only academic guidance but also mentorship, support for psychological well-being, and elements of leadership. Effective supervisors are portrayed as those who foster creativity, encourage networking and publishing, provide timely feedback, and adapt to students' work styles.
You should therefore take sufficient time at the beginning of a doctorate to clarify mutual expectations of the collaboration with your new candidate. On this page you will find helpful tips on the application of social and leadership competencies in the context of doctoral supervision, as well as material to help you implement them.
Enabling people
- Ensuring that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and comprehensible to all
- Listening to the individual needs and drivers of doctoral students
- Giving employees opportunities to try new paths, take on new challenges and learn from set-backs
- Sharing networks to forward doctoral student's careers and create opportunities
- Recognizing potential for growth in doctoral students instead of weaknesses
"Good practice" examples
- external page call_made Toolbox for Professors: Enable doctoral students to select research direction (restricted access)
- external page call_made Toolbox for Professors: Smart delegation-based organisational concept (restricted access)
- external page call_made Toolbox for Professors: Delegation and trust (restricted access)
Driving innovation
- Inspiring with vision and purpose
- Fostering creativity, exploration and diverse perspectives
- Rewarding and encouraging measured risk taking to advance innovation
- Breaking larger goals into smaller steps, monitoring progress and ensuring completion
"Good practice" examples
external page call_made Toolbox for Professors: Academic scope and ability to innovateNurturing well-being
- Actively asking about doctoral student`s well-being – Displaying authentic interest
- Creating psychological safety (a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes)
- Helping doctoral students find the right work-life balance to ensure that they can achieve their best
Building bridges
- Taking responsibility for the quality of relationships with doctoral students
- Negotiating solutions in a constructive manner
- Recognising and assessing different types of conflicts
- Intervening in conflicts when necessary
- Ensuring the fundamental appreciation of doctoral students, regardless of their performance
"Good practice" examples
As the supervisor of doctoral theses, you have the complex task of fulfilling various roles. You are simultaneously an instructor, examiner, supervisor, mentor and sometimes also a collaborator for postdoctoral research. Fulfilling and balancing these different roles can be challenging.
The global academic system and the multiple roles as supervisor of doctoral theses bring with them areas of tension that cannot always be resolved.
It often helps to be aware of this in order to find a balanced approach.
Before starting a doctorate, doctoral students often only worked on smaller research projects as part of their Bachelor's and Master's degree programmes. Until now, this has been done under the close collaboration and guidance of other researchers.
In the course of the doctorate, they should develop into independent researchers. This development is very individual and each doctoral student has different prerequisites.
Support doctoral students in this development and encourage them to express ideas openly and discuss them constructively. At the beginning of the doctorate, candidates often need a little more support and guidance than later in the doctorate.
As the leader of a research group, you have a major scientific question or problem that you are trying to answer or solve. This big picture often spans several generations of researchers in your research group. To do this, they divide the big picture into individual sub-problems, which are often worked on by different group members, but which all make an essential contribution to answering the larger problem.
It can be challenging for doctoral students to maintain an overview at the beginning or during the course of their doctorate. This can lead to doctoral students getting lost in the details and failing to make any major progress in the project. Or doctoral students do not find access to their individual project. Help your doctoral students to formulate clear questions and at the same time encourage dialogue within the research group so as not to lose sight of the overarching goal.
Free, result-open research is essential for innovative developments and findings. However, various framework conditions can make this difficult.
Third-party funding is often awarded with a specific time frame and a doctorate at ETH Zurich usually takes about 4 years.
Realistic and clear goals are therefore particularly important for doctoral students in order to successfully complete their doctoral thesis. However, doctoral students themselves are often not experienced enough at the beginning to formulate these goals themselves. Support your doctoral students in learning how to do this without avoiding free and result-open research.
A common central question, the big picture, connects the researchers in a group. At the same time, most of them aim to publish their research results. This pressure to publish can lead to competition within a research group.
A certain amount of competition can be motivating, but too much competition can lead to conflicts between colleagues and the common goal can be forgotten.
Different expertise is often required from employees in order to comprehensively address a common issue. Clear agreements on responsibilities, deadlines and authorship are recommended here to ensure smooth collaboration.
Hierarchies often remain flat in the academic landscape. In some cases, this is very helpful for academic discourse at eye level. Researchers at different stages of development (doctoral students, postdocs and senior scientists) engage in open and critical dialogue with each other and with their supervisors.
However, the responsibilities of individual functional levels are sometimes blurred. This can lead to uncertainty and conflict among employees.
A flat hierarchy and clear decisions are therefore not necessarily mutually exclusive. Draw clear boundaries for yourself and communicate them transparently. In this way, scientific dialogue remains lively, open and critical and at the same time you, as the superior, have the responsibility for decision-making.
As the supervisor of doctoral theses, your doctoral students are dependent on you in many ways. On the one hand, you are a pioneer in the research topic and, at the same time, you evaluate the doctoral thesis at the end of the doctorate. You are a superior who must make clear decisions in the interests of the research group and at the same time a mentor who responds to the individual needs of the employees. Due to the flat hierarchies, you can even meet on a friendly level. However, be aware of how eager doctoral students may be to please you and consider whether they would really feel free enough to disagree with certain requests.
But you are also dependent on your doctoral students to a certain extent. A successful collaboration will bring you closer to solving your big question. Successful and productive collaboration often continues beyond the doctorate, when doctoral students have become independent researchers who lead their own research groups.
Personal development and lifelong learning are important for all of us. For doctoral students, this is additionally influenced by the question of how their career path will continue after the doctorate. During their doctorate, doctoral students should think about where they want their doctorate to take them. Intuitively, an academic career is the obvious choice, but positions are limited and not all doctoral students aim for a professorship.
As the supervisor of doctoral theses, you are usually best placed to give advice and tips on how a career in academia works. You may be unsure how to support doctoral students who have other goals.
However, an exact goal or a specific career is not the decisive factor. Talk openly with your doctoral students about which competencies they can further strengthen or develop. Give them space to develop these. When deciding which researchers work on which projects, it can also be helpful to know whether doctoral students want to continue on an academic path or whether they would rather leave research work behind.
Toolbox for Professors
- external page call_made Trust-based doctoral supervision
- external page call_made Leadership in general and teambuilding
- external page call_made Leadership and culture
- external page call_made Leadership principles
- external page call_made Supervision of doctoral student and PostDocs
- external page call_made Lab manifasto
- external page call_made Lee, A. (2008). How are doctoral students supervised? Concepts of doctoral research supervision. Studies in Higher education, 33(3), 267-281.
- external page call_made Di Benedetto, C. A., Lindgreen, A., & Ringberg, T. (2021). 22. Guiding PhD students. Handbook of Teaching and Learning at Business Schools: A Practice-based Approach, 313.
- external page call_made Vähämäki, M., Saru, E., & Palmunen, L. M. (2021). Doctoral supervision as an academic practice and leader–member relationship: A critical approach to relationship dynamics. The International Journal of Management Education, 19(3), 100510.
- external page call_made Sodhi, M. S., & Tang, C. S. (2014). Guiding the next generation of doctoral students in operations management. International Journal of Production Economics, 150, 28-36.
- external page call_made Yang, B., Bao, S., & Xu, J. (2022). Supervisory styles and graduate student innovation performance: The mediating role of psychological capital and the moderating role of harmonious academic passion. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1034216.
- external page call_made Bäckryd, E. (2022). Doctoral supervision as leadership: a practice-based proposal with special reference to the university hospital setting. Linköping University Electronic Press.