Wherever science graduates works, be it in the laboratory or marketing department of industry or in the research or academic institutes, they need to lead people to get work done, goal achieved. So science graduates should be taught how to lead technician or researchers. Mere technical knowledge is not enough for success in any career. On the hand, without high-quality leadership, high-quality research organization can not be established just by high-quality techical knowldge and skill.
The present situation in Bangladesh
Searching the available syllabuses with the word ‘leadership’, it shows that hardly any science department in the country teaches laboratory leadership.
On the other hand, if we look into the universities and research institutes of the country, we see many small conflicting groups among teachers and scientists/researchers and poor utilization of time, money, space, instruments and equipment. All these happening due to poor leadership in those institutes. Moreover, our research organizations seems currentless pond, hardly any invention and innovation. Without improvement of leadership of our researchers, we can not change the situation just increasing fund, space and instruments.
What should be taught:
- Goal setting
- Planning
- Motivating people
- Increasing creativity and innovation
- Effective communication,
- Delivering feedback
- Running effective meeting
- Conflict resolution and managing a difficult situation
- Research commercialization
- Project management among many other skills.
Benefits
Learning all these skills shall benefit science graduates not only in professional life but also in family, social and political life. The impact will be multifaceted and multilevel. Researchers with all these skills shall ensure much better use of human resources, research fund, time, space, instruments and equipment. As a result, our research organizations will become dynamic and performance or research output will be satisfactory.
Science leadership should be a compulsory part of the syllabus of all subjects of science. Science leadership can be taught in the final year of bachelor program or in masters program as soon as possible. On the other hand, the training institutes should make the best use of their training institutes and start training on leadership. This training shall reduce wastage of different resources and increase the performance of individual researcher and thus that of the institutes.
