How to turn an average collaboration into a dream team

Regardless of whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, working collaboratively is the foundation for being a successful scientist in the 21st century. Science projects are getting larger and more multidisciplinary with each passing year, and there has been an increase in the number of teams over the last 40 years. Questions that need to be answered by science are getting to be more complex and difficult to resolve. We need researchers from many dif­ferent backgrounds and disciplines, working together to tackle global challenges such as climate change, infectious and other diseases, and social issues that are dependent on both psychology and sociology, as well as to address questions about how technologies are affecting humans and global economies.

Anyone who has participated in collaborative science understands that sometimes it can go beautifully right and sometimes it can go catastrophically wrong. In the new science revolution of multidisciplinary, fast, large-scale research, we need to ask ourselves why things go wrong in collaborative projects – and, as importantly, why things go right. How do dream collaborations emerge that not only answer important questions in science, but also add deeper value and emotional connection to our lives?

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In college and graduate school, we focus on building our technical skills, understanding a particular field and thinking critically. We become highly trained, critical-thinking scientists. We are taught to be independent. Then, after graduate school and a postdoc position, we are often, and frequently suddenly, expected to be part of a research project team, designed to bring multidisciplinary experts together to answer larger scientific questions. Sometimes working with the team is rewarding, fun and productive. At other times, the team itself slows things down and puts glue in the research engine.

What goes wrong? What goes right? Given that we’ve been taught to become independent researchers, we might have less experience in working with other humans, with the key word being “humans”. No longer are controlling for variables and coding in R for some novel statistical analysis the most important factors in moving a project forward. When working with other humans, the most important thing might be understanding personalities and communication styles, building and losing trust, and comprehending our own and sometimes others’ puzzling emotional reactions to our colleagues, as well as their reactions to us.

Thankfully, many people around the world have been studying how teams of people work best and examining what can go wrong. As a close friend of mine says about every problem or challenge: “There’s a manual for that. On YouTube.” Yet, when it comes to scientific collaborations, what we often fail to consider are the feelings and thoughts that crop up when working closely with humans who are not our spouses or very close to us.

Science and emotions don’t usually go together – unless you are a researcher on the psychology of emotions. If we promise to give the data to our colleagues the next day, but our child gets sick and keeps us up most of the night so we don’t get the data to the team, what do we feel? Maybe vulnerability and shame? And how do we respond and behave if we are unaware of our feelings? We might lash out or pull away from our colleagues.

If peer-reviewed publishing is a foundation for moving scientific fields forward, then trust is the basis for moving scientific collaborations forward. Trust, however, is multifaceted and not all that simple. As author Stephen M. Covey said: “Trust is the one thing that changes everything.” So how do we build trust and keep it? How do we develop mindfulness about employing trusting behaviours in our everyday lives that can help propel our science teams to success? Knowing the technical aspects of research is not enough. Scientists must begin to hone their skills, not only of working within the same space, but also of working collaboratively.

With the competition for science funds becoming more rigorous with each passing year, researchers must focus on maintaining a competitive edge with others and achieving peak performances.

For researchers, this means working successfully with others, some of whom are from diverse backgrounds and situations, and who are sometimes in good moods and sometimes in bad moods. They might not be good at communication because they did not learn effective and efficient ways to carry out crucial conversations. Whatever the reasons, our job is to find empathy for our colleagues and understand that we are all doing the best we can with the resources available to us. This is a first step towards better collaboration.

Another sign of peak performance is feeling connected to others and enjoying the laughter, gifts and idiosyncrasies of our colleagues. Sharing our gifts and “leaning in” (persevering in spite of risk or difficulty) to learning with others who are following their own paths can lead to true joy and contentment. Conversations between scientists can now contain words such as “multidimensional spectra analytics” and “compassion” at the same time.

Learning how to effectively communicate, to be trustworthy and build trust, to be compassionate and have empathy, and to be technically competent is the goal of this book. Through a combination of stories and resources, it will identify the cornerstones for successful collaboration, as well as help people operate at peak performance level and work together to create engaging, fun and sometimes transformative relationships. Often it only takes a few little things to metamorphose an average collaboration into a dream team.

Jeanne M. Fair is a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory with a focus on ornithology, infectious disease ecology and climate change.

This is an excerpt from Scientific Collaboration: Strategies for Successful Research Teams by Jeanne M. Fair. Copyright 2023. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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