Building a good team means building the bases for you and your team’s success. You can’t do it alone if you want to achieve big goals. Just like companies that require a team effort, research groups and departments must invest in their team recruitment development. Here are a few tips on how to build a research team.
- Be clear on your goals and needs: You should know your next five years’ goals and be clear about what you want to achieve and what you need to achieve those goals. You know what expertise, knowledge, and connections you have, and you need to know what you are lacking. Then go and fill those that are lacking with people who compliment you.
- Be strategic: Research is not normally a short-term collaboration. It takes time and often is best paid off in long term. So, identify who can be a long-term collaborator and invest in it for the long term.
- Do a trial project: You can find researchers that look perfect on the paper as colleagues. But, the reality is you don’t know who a good match for you would be until you work with them. So, the best is to do a small project or paper together and see if you can get along well.
- Rapport and Match: Different researchers have different capacities in time and abilities and tastes in the way they do research. So be mindful of others and try to match them. If they get back to you in a day, get back to them in a day.
- Be open to ideas: This seems to be obvious but it is not. Be open to others’ suggestions and listen to what others have to offer. It is good practice to think critically and discuss to clarify things and make ideas mature.