Sets 2 and 2a

2 Questions to reflect on one’s own or others’ position and improve role competences

When looking at the model of roles chosen previously, you may ask:

1. Which role do you identify with most?
   What is the value and what are the risks of this role (for you personally, for the project team, and for the scientific system)?
   In front of what audiences do you make this role explicit?
   In what situations do you think that the quality of your work would be enhanced if you would communicate your role more explicitly?
   What support would you need to be able to better perform this role?
   What would happen if all researchers would perform that role?
2. Which other roles do you identify with? Repeat questions under 1.
3. Does/do the role(s) you identify with (most) depend on the research phase you find yourself in? If yes, how do you communicate this fluidity of roles?
4. Which role do you not identify with, but you value that other scientists do so? What is the added value of this role for science and other societal fields of action?
5. Which role do you not identify with, but has been ascribed to you by others? How do you deal with that situation? What kind of support is needed to deal with such expectations?
6. Have you ever experienced ambiguity or conflict between roles? How did you deal with this? What kind of support is needed to deal with such situations?
7. Which role is missing in the spectrum of roles?
8. Which role would you like to take on more, but don’t know well enough yet?

For a workshop setting, we recommend that you focus only on 2-5 of these questions. Make sure you take into account the level of awareness within the expected audience.

2a Additional questions for improving competences in a research team

In a workshop with a research team, you may want to draw consequences for teambuilding from the team’s reflection on roles. To that purpose, you need to visualise the roles that are performed by the team members (for example using figure 5). Then ask:

1. What did you learn from other team members today? (e.g.: was there a mismatch between self-perception and the perception of others?)
2. What does the distribution of roles in the group tell us about our collaboration?
3. Can you as a team become more explicit about the distribution of tasks?
4. Do you need to redistribute resources or hire someone to cover a specific role?
5. 5Do you have mechanisms in place to regularly monitor whether the roles have (implicitly or explicitly) changed?
6. How do you communicate these roles in interaction with change-makers?