A Strained Research team

Based on the skills approach, how would you assess Dr. Wood’s leadership and his relationship to the members of the Elder Care Project team? Will the project be successful? Dr. Adam Wood is the main investigator of a 3year project called the Elder Care Project. Reading about his behavior, it is visible that Dr. Wood has no human skills which may end up affecting his team and lead to a failure of the project. 2. Does Dr. Wood has the skills necessary to be an effective leader of this research team? Dr. Wood has excellent technical skills and conceptual skills. For this project in particular, he would give advice on research design, methodology question, theoretical formulations, and besides that he could see the big picture on research projects. But human skills are very important to make people work as a team, and keep them motivated and focused to achieve the goals. To be a leader of a research team there is definitely a need for someone that can have that skill to keep the team up and doing the work. Since there is no one doing that job, it explains why people are frustrated. They are working hard and they don’t find incentive, motivational words, or good comments on the big effort they are making. That’s one of the biggest reasons as to why the project may lead to failure. 3. The skills model describes three important competencies for leaders: problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, ad knowledge. If you were to coach Dr. Wood using this model, what competencies would you address with him? What Changes would you suggest that he make in his leadership? Dr. Wood has important knowledge but his social judgment and problem solving skills seems to be very weak, and this is definitely something that he needs to work on as a leader. Those social judgments skills are the ones that will help to improve his interaction with the colleagues and make him understand how they see things and what their needs are. I suggest that he starts talking positively about his project and how successful it will be when it is finished. He should also start praising the members on their hard work, encourage them to share knowledge and point of view, and convince them that the goals are feasible, achievable, and attainable. Even though the members were spending 20%-30% more time in this project than what was expected, the team still believed in the project until their main leader started to put all the motivation down by his comments.