Facts & Figures:
- Date: January 13, 2027
- Time: 09 AM – 12 PM
- Language: English
- Location: imHinterhaus OG, Schottenfeldgasse 12 (im Hof)/Tür 6, 1070 Wien
Practical:
on-site, roughly three hours including breaks. Printed materials throughout, yours to keep. Frequent breaks that you can use however suits you, including doing nothing. An optional live backchannel so contributing by text is always as valid as speaking.
Self-leadership in academia
Leading research is rewarding, and many researchers with leadership responsibilities want to do it well and sustainably. They also operate under significant pressures that can affect their academic and leadership performance, as well as their health and well-being. Many of these pressures are systemic, such as intense competition for funding and positions and an accumulation of responsibilities driven by reporting and compliance demands from regulators and funders.
Self-leadership, the aspect of leadership concerned with how leaders steer themselves (their priorities and commitments, their responses under pressure and the support they draw on), matters for leaders’ own effectiveness, creativity and well-being, and is closely linked to how they lead others. Training can strengthen several of these capacities: clarifying what a role actually requires, deciding deliberately which commitments to take on, limit or renegotiate, and responding deliberately rather than habitually under pressure.
Improved self-leadership cannot change structural conditions, however. Training leader to decline more requests, for example, does not change who gets asked in the first place. Self-leadership is also not purely individual. It is shaped by colleagues, team norms and institutional expectations, so part of it is a shared responsibility. And those under the heaviest load often have the least room to develop it.
In this three-hour training we therefore focus on aspects of self-leadership where training can make a difference to individual performance and well-being. These are: clarifying one’s role through a personal role contract; negotiating commitments under strain, including the triggers, such as avoidance and uncertainty, that make this difficult; and working through cases with peers. Throughout, participants work with typical situations from academic leadership and are invited to bring in their own.
Who is the trainer?
Dr. Raffael Himmelsbach is an organisational development consultant, leadership coach and trainer based in Vienna. He works mainly with newly appointed professors, principal investigators and senior researchers at universities and research organisations. Before founding his practice, he spent more than twenty years in research and research management in Switzerland, Scandinavia, Austria and the United States. He holds a PhD in comparative public policy from the University of Lausanne, held postdoctoral positions at Aarhus University and Linköping University, coordinated the Centre for Digital Life Norway, and co-directed the Ludwig Boltzmann research group Senescence and Healing of Wounds. His trainings start from the conviction that the craft of leading researchers is learnable, even if it is rarely taught. They are interactive and practical, and work with real situations from academic leadership.
Why join & what to expect?
After this workshop, you will be able to:
- Draft a personal role contract, clarifying what your role requires of you, what you will continue doing, what you will let go of, and what you need to negotiate.
- Use a simple decision-making framework for incoming requests, including practical wording for agreeing, agreeing with conditions, renegotiating, or declining, and a technique for pausing before responding.
- Apply a structured peer consultation format to navigate challenging situations, both during and beyond the training.
- Identify and commit to one concrete step you will implement in your work in the coming weeks.
Who can join?
This training course is designed for researchers who have initial or advanced leadership responsibilities and are affiliated with a university in Austria. It is particularly relevant for research group leaders, Principal Investigators (PIs), junior and senior professors, project leaders, consortium coordinators, heads of research units or labs, as well as senior postdoctoral researchers with team or project responsibility.
The program is especially suited for those who represent teams, manage staff, and regularly negotiate with university leadership, funding bodies, or collaborative partners in academic and research contexts.
Facts & Figures:
- Date: January 13, 2027
- Time: 09 AM – 12 PM
- Language: English
- Location: imHinterhaus OG, Schottenfeldgasse 12 (im Hof)/Tür 6, 1070 Wien
Practical:
on-site, roughly three hours including breaks. Printed materials throughout, yours to keep. Frequent breaks that you can use however suits you, including doing nothing. An optional live backchannel so contributing by text is always as valid as speaking.