(S6E3) Harnessing the Power of Collaboration: Writing Persuasive Team-Based Narrative CVs

Intro:

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Emma Spary:

Hi, it's Emma, and as a quick introduction, I lead the researcher development and culture team at the University of Leeds. My podcast episodes focus on areas of research leadership and research culture. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Elizabeth Adams from Scafell Coaching. And we're going to be tackling the team based narrative CVS, or resume for research. If these are brand new to you or there's something that you're currently trying to write, then hopefully we will have the hints and tips on how to approach them. If you're writing an individual narrative CV, perhaps for a fellowship application, then we have a separate podcast episode that covers this. So, welcome, Elizabeth.

Emma Spary:

Let's start off with the proper introduction and also why you're interested in narrative CVS.

Elizabeth Adams:

Hi, Emma. I'm Elizabeth and I work for my own business, Scafell Coaching, and I deliver workshops and research or development support to institutions across the UK and internationally. And a lot of that's about helping people to grow in their careers, but also to apply for funding. And one of the things that people have been asking me about recently a lot, is narrative CVS, as they're seeing these as a new and potentially quite difficult, challenging thing to grapple with as they're trying to talk about themselves in a different way to what they're used to. And most recently, team narrative CVS have come in as a new way of doing this for grant applications. And I think it just deserves a bit of thinking about what are we expecting from people here? How do people actually go about writing one? If I thought it was hard to write an individual one, it's going to be really hard to write a team one where there's just so many voices in the room and so many people and you're trying to be fair and how do you go about it?

Emma Spary:

So you're absolutely right. We hear all the time that these are really challenging for individuals. But then you've got the whole next level up and you've got the team based ones. A limited amount of space, often the same amount of space. But now you've got a lot more expertise to get in, and you obviously need to demonstrate a good balance across the team. Before we dive into some of the trickier questions around these types of CVS, I've got my view on them and I know that they're tricky to write, but I have to ask, what's your view on the team narrative approach?

Elizabeth Adams:

What I'd really love is if they encourage people to talk at an earlier stage about what they really aspire to with the team. Like how, by bringing this group of people together, are we going to be a team that's truly greater than the sum of our parts? And how are we going to do that work to make sure that it's a good and positive experience and environment for the early career researchers, for the PhD students coming through within that environment, and that you're going to leave behind a legacy of something for the sector and for your discipline. So I think if it promotes those kinds of conversations at the outset and then as a tool to help people really review whether you're going to be able to deliver that as part of the project, then I think it's a real positive. And I think the challenge will be that people writing grant applications rarely have that time because it's such a risk. You're trying to write several grant applications and you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. And if you had all of these meetings for every possible collaboration, it would be really time consuming and people don't have that time.

Emma Spary:

So if they're striving for one particular thing, what do you think that should be with this document?

Elizabeth Adams:

I think to demonstrate that the environment within the project is going to be the right one to deliver a really good project, to project, manage it well, to lead it well, to make sure that it engages with the public or communities or whatever. It has to do that you've got all the right strengths and experience to do that, but actually also it's going to be a good environment for the early career people who are associated with that project.

Emma Spary:

Brilliant. Thank you. So I am pretty certain we could do an entire podcast series on the challenges associated with team based narrative CVS, but today we're trying to pick out some of the practical steps that individuals and teams can use to try and create these documents. So I'm going to ask some specifics about the challenges that we've seen and also please feel free to bring in any additional ones that you've seen so we know that we can't put everybody in every box. As you said, we've often got really small amounts of space here and you may be having teams of upwards of seven or eight people. One of the ones I did recently was eleven and that was really challenging because what you're trying to do is distill people into a couple of sentences. So we advocate putting people where they're strongest and that's really tricky when you've got a whole bunch of experienced people. So how do we even begin to agree on what or who goes where?

Elizabeth Adams:

It's a really difficult one. I think getting each individual to do some thinking beforehand and writing some notes as if they were making their own individual CV probably is helpful. And then also thinking about what type of contribution would this individual be making to the grant. So if they are actually only like 0.1% of the grant and they're just there as a strategic input, then you want to be demonstrating their ability and capacity to be strategic. So what other situations have they done this strategic level activity at? Have they been leading on a research center or sort of really pushing forward a new discipline or being creative or really talking about what research looks like in your discipline? How are they doing those things? That's what you talk about. You don't talk about their history of teaching or how many PhD students they've supervised, necessarily. If actually the person doing the supervision of the PhD students is someone else, then I think you need to talk about their experience and capacity to manage teams and to develop the careers of others. So just think about who's doing the different types of things in the project and how are you demonstrating that you've got the right people? And obviously there might be people who are supervising PhD students for the first time in that situation.

Elizabeth Adams:

You might want to think about how will you demonstrate that they will be surrounded by mentors who have that level experience and can support them to learn and do that?

Emma Spary:

Well, one of the other things that we've been encouraging them to do is to get all of that information up front so everybody almost giving their examples, but then selecting one person to write the narrative CV on behalf of everyone so that it's got that one flow. Is that something you would recommend?

Elizabeth Adams:

Absolutely. I think even for an individual, the flow can become quite clunky when you start editing things down and you really need someone else to read it and see if actually they understand how one thing's building on the other. When it comes to a team, you just want someone else to read it and say, does this demonstrate that the team will be able to deliver the project in terms of the technical expertise, in terms of their ability? To project, manage things in terms of their ability to work together across disciplines or across stakeholders. And with the different partners, does it show that they've got the right partners to do all the sort of knowledge exchange and research impact work that they might have talked about in the bids? And those are the kinds of questions you need to be asking at the review stage. But one person writing that is going to make a much more coherent narrative than everyone else sort of sticking their bits in. You can just imagine like people putting things in in sort of different tendencies and all sorts. Yeah, just one person.

Emma Spary:

And apologies if you are the person that's drawn that short straw. So the next thing I want to talk about is the whole benefit of this type of CV. So it's designed to create that level playing field between researchers that may be just starting out in their careers and also those who are more established. So how do we make sure that as part of these team narratives, those with less experience don't inadvertently become less visible because their biggest achievements may still be overshadowed by some of those more established researchers.

Elizabeth Adams:

Think it's a hard one. Would it matter to you ultimately if your name isn't mentioned 20 times in a narrative CV, if it still allows you to get a grant and work on it in a way that is meaningful for you and for your career going forward, then I think that might be the more important thing. Really, it's just a tool for you to have a conversation about what contributions are you going to make to the grant, what do you need from each other, what are you going to lead on, what experience do you have already? And then just being comfortable that different people will have different levels of experience. And you might be talking about the big strategic projects that one person's led, but actually for the early career person, it's about demonstrating that they also have project management experience, albeit at a much lesser scale. But if they're going to be doing the day to day project management, their experience is actually much more important to the actual CV than someone else who won't be doing any project management saying that they once did something amazing.

Emma Spary:

What about some of the researchers who may be earlier in their career wondering about how they include things potentially like career breaks or actually more for our established researchers as well, how they include things like career breaks or perhaps they've changed direction within their research trajectory? How do you tackle those challenges within these documents?

Elizabeth Adams:

So there is a box that's there intentionally for things like career breaks and additional information. There's usually quite strict guidance in the call itself about what can and can't be put in there. So just read the guidance and see if there's anything that's applicable in there. Don't try to use it as a way to slot in anything extra. In terms of things like the story of individuals careers, it's about thinking, is this relevant to the bid that we're making? And if it was an individual CV, it would absolutely be relevant to sort of tell the story of how they've flexed their career and built on one thing and the next and maybe taken advantage of certain opportunities. Usually people want to know what you've done and what the outcome of that has been and everyone accepts that people have challenges in their working lives, in their careers and their personal lives that will impact on their abilities to be doing research all of the time. And I think that's probably the strength of the narrative series. It allows you to sort of talk about what you have been able to do, rather than just sort of mentioning the gaps or the lack of things.

Elizabeth Adams:

I think focus on the positives of how you've picked up after a particular situation rather than focusing on any of the sort of the negative things that have happened in your career, unless, of course, there's things that you've learned from them. And if you've had to pivot because of whatever reason, and that might be that because the funding just wasn't there and you've had to move directions, we recognize that not everything is this wonderfully planned out career where everything happened the way that you wanted it to, but just how did you build on the opportunities you had?

Emma Spary:

Great, thank you. So one of the recent examples that I've been asked to review had box number three. So the ones where you make those contributions to your research area, your search field. And I said we had, I think, nine people involved on this bid and it just became a long list of bullet points of all of the committees that people sat on. And we are advocating for them to be really concise, but actually tell us what they do with these committees. Telling us that you're on five or six different committees doesn't actually tell us about what you do, or crucially, how the committee or the end user actually benefits. Any advice on how you can have those discussions? Because it can get quite difficult if.

Elizabeth Adams:

I think trying to do it in a way where almost using having those discussions as a way of testing out how you work as a team in difficult situations can you actually put in place a sort of structure where everyone gets to contribute in a way that maybe everyone just think for a minute and write down your thoughts on a postit and then read out what you've written and sort of share and have that sort of equitable time for people across the meeting to explain why their particular committee or contribution, what it was and why that's relevant to the bid itself. And then that might allow for a bit of a better discussion rather than maybe a roundtable discussion where people are talking on top of each other. So just model the kind of behaviors that you want to see when you're actually talking about your research as well.

Emma Spary:

Brilliant. Thank you. Now, we know ourselves, we've been focusing here a lot about the researchers that are often included in the applications, but for example, UKRI are starting to promote the inclusion of technical staff and professional services on funding applications. So do you think it will be a case that these roles will be included within these narratives, and is that actually a double edged sword?

Elizabeth Adams:

So, absolutely, I think they'll be included and I think that it would just seem strange not to include if the technicians are actually doing really core pieces of the work, then I think you need to include who's going to be doing these really crucial bits of the work. Maybe having a look at things like the credit taxonomy, for example, if that's relevant to your discipline, might give you some of the words for talking about the types of contributions that different roles, different specialists might be making, including professional services. I'm interested about the double edged sword. Is that something people are worried about, that they feel like they're almost being assessed, or that if they're not included, they're not valuable to the project?

Emma Spary:

It's more around. If you look at the structure of the template at the moment, it is very written for research based activity. So how would somebody potentially from professional services be able to equate their experience? And does it potentially look like a weaker application because they haven't got all of this research experience? I think what we're tackling here is, are people going to be left off an application because they don't look as though they are filling evidence across one or more of these areas?

Elizabeth Adams:

And yeah, we probably can't know that yet because so few people will have found out if anyone has yet whether or not their team Narrative CV has been reviewed favorably. I think there's a lot of things like that to really potential areas for funders to reflect on post panels. How are people understanding the contributions of professional services staff, for example, or technicians? And I think that's just part of a wider conversation for the sector. So if that enables us to have some of those conversations, because it'll be exactly the same conversations that come down to things like should other types of staff be included in the ref and actually, who would assess what they're contributing and what does that look like and what do we value in what professional services staff do?

Emma Spary:

I think it's probably fair to say there's some work for people and colleagues like myself and my team to be able to support our professional service colleagues, to be able to complete these resumes, these Narrative CVS in the same aid, but we support the researchers, so I'm all for that one. One question we get asked quite a lot is what happens if the team changes if one person leaves or somebody else joins the team once the application's gone in? Does this then look like a risk for the funder?

Elizabeth Adams:

I guess that's the same for any research grant application that's a Narrative CV or any other kind of CV. And I think you just put in place things to manage that with the funder and just make sure you talk to them. Funders are generally like real people. There are real people that work there and find out what their guidance is. And it will absolutely depend on where are they moving to, are they staying within academia, are they staying within research, are they retiring, are they leaving for ill health? What are the reasons and what other could someone else step in and take on that role? So yeah, it will be a risk if a core part of a project is leaving, but how can you mitigate that? And I suppose if you've had a conversation about what is that person really bringing to the project, then that might make it easier to think about, what do we need? Where else could we get these skills?

Emma Spary:

Great, thank you. And again, we are almost up to time, so I'm going to give you an opportunity to cover anything else that you want to tackle on Narrative team based CVS. Any advice that you've got for people who are just starting out with these or wondering where on earth they came from in the first place. So over to you.

Elizabeth Adams:

Tie it out. Understand that it's going to be a messy process, that probably no two CVS are going to look the same and don't stress about that being different. If you do have feedback on how this works for you, for your disciplines, for your types of projects, please do give that feedback back to the funders so that they can really inform how they're thinking about these things in future and the kinds of guidance that they give to reviewers.

Emma Spary:

I'm just going to sneak one last question in. Sorry, it's just popped into my head. We get asked a lot if people can view other people's narrative CVS, what's your view on this?

Elizabeth Adams:

Well, funders don't typically share them because they don't want there to be a set format, because obviously everyone's CV is quite unique and different and your story is different. And if we're really honest about valuing different people's experiences and stories, then there shouldn't just be one size fits all. That said, I'm sure if you know colleagues who have written one, they might be willing to share them and give you a look, but don't sort of take that as the be all and end all. At the end of the day, if it makes sense and it represents your team in a way that demonstrates that you have the capabilities to deliver the project, then that's a win.

Emma Spary:

And at this point, I'll just do a big plug for the resources that we're creating within the Researcher Development Culture team at Leeds. We have got some guides and useful words that you can throw into these CVS to help you to write them, to help you to craft them, to think about how they read from a reviewing perspective and we will drop a link into the show notes on that note, Elizabeth, thank you very much for joining us. It's been absolutely fantastic to get your views on these and to also know that I'm not the only one that struggles with them, as I'm sure many of our listeners will agree. So, over to you for the last word.

Elizabeth Adams:

Well, I'm wishing you all positive conversations about how you want your team to be, as much as what you want your team to do.

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