Many postdocs take on their first leadership roles soon after finishing the PhD or already supervise students and non-academic staff during their doctoral phase.
In order to successfully manage these initial leadership situations, the workshop provides a solid knowledge of key leadership tools for an academic context. You will learn how to successfully supervise bachelor's and master's students while acting as a supervisor in an approachable yet clearly structured manner.

Further, you will reflect on the different expectations others have of you in your specific leadership role, and get to know instruments for clarifying such expectations in your area. Communication skills are the key to successful leadership. In this course, you will learn how to address difficult issues with team members and colleagues and lead discussions solution-oriented.

Aims

• Recognition of one's own leadership style and strength
• Understanding leadership requirements in the scientific context compared to the economic context
• Knowledge of leadership expectations and how to deal with the role expectations associated with them
• Getting to know and applying proven leadership concepts and instruments
• Preparation for (future) management tasks

Seminar content

The two-day compact course provides you with the theoretical and practical basics of leadership:

• Basic model of dyadic leadership, leadership styles
• Your role as supervisor and (partial) project manager
• Leadership test: how do I lead?
• Expectation management in a “sandwich position”
• Delegation of tasks
• Maintaining motivation
• Target-oriented and inspiring leadership strategies
• Leadership pentagon: understanding, goal setting, trust, control, feedback
• Master difficult discussions/feedback with team members and on lateral level solution-orientated
• Collegial consultancy

Seminar methods
This course follows a process-oriented approach and will continually address the participants’ individual questions in single work and group discussions, exercises and reflection units. Interactive and inclusive methods will be used so that participants can optimally apply the skills learnt to their daily work at the university. Theoretical segments will be recapitulated in the form of short summaries and checklists for the participants to increase the depth of learning.