This is a good question. I agree that “managing up” is a very important skill in general! It’s one of the primary focuses of our research manager training.
However, I want to acknowledge whether to focus on this with scholars seems to be a question of tradeoffs regarding MATS’s priorities: to what extent are we prioritizing scholars upskilling in deep technical/research understanding available at MATS, versus them upskilling in generalizable soft skills (that they could theoretically learn elsewhere)? If we were to theoretically prioritize solely the former... (read more)
This is a good question. I agree that “managing up” is a very important skill in general! It’s one of the primary focuses of our research manager training.
However, I want to acknowledge whether to focus on this with scholars seems to be a question of tradeoffs regarding MATS’s priorities: to what extent are we prioritizing scholars upskilling in deep technical/research understanding available at MATS, versus them upskilling in generalizable soft skills (that they could theoretically learn elsewhere)? If we were to theoretically prioritize solely the former... (read more)