Building Enhanced Leadership Capacity to enable Psychologically Safe and Inclusive Research Environments

We strive to be a world-class research-intensive university, delivering discoveries and impact at scale, driving societal and economic change through our research. We want to nurture everyone’s talents, benefit from diverse skills and ideas, develop inclusive and collaborative spaces that foster creativity, and build more interdisciplinary and team working to tackle global challenges. To achieve our ambitious goals, we must provide a thriving research culture, and our community have identified a need to build more inclusive and psychologically safe research environments.   To improve our research culture in this way, we aim to enhance research leadership across the university. Our leaders are highly influential, and their actions and practices are vital in modelling the research culture our community wants to see. Thus, we propose two innovative and targeted interventions around: 1) Leadership development, and 2) Reward and recognition processes. Working in partnership with our research community using Participatory Action Research methodology, we will ensure our interventions are specific to our own research context, maximising impact. We will share learning, materials and toolkits with the wider sector, and engage in sector-wide conversations around issues we identify that are barriers to change in our own institution and beyond.