Researcher Education and Development Scholarship Conference

Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development and Charlotte Bonner-Evans, InFrame Project Manager. Both authors are based at the University of Glasgow, UK, and are also Mentoring Leads for the UK’s Future Leaders Fellows Development Network.

The authors of this article both identify as ‘third-space professionals’ as we both hold university professional roles where we are regularly evaluating, researching, analyzing, writing about, and critically appraising our own practice as well as peer reviewing, applying for funding, and engaging with PGR supervision and examination. This dual or blended identity, and our ability to span the boundaries of professional and academic life is important to us, and is also important to our workplaces as a third space professional can “…offer coherence to institutions by the way they work across the clear, and often problematic, boundaries between academic and professional pathways.” (Whitchurch, 2015).

The boundary-spanning expertise of third space professionals like us, and our ability to contribute to cross-disciplinary working with a lived familiarity with the tensions and the struggles our academic colleagues face, adds value to our work and to the relationships we build. Those able to negotiate the cultural boundaries of academic/professional practice have also been defined as ‘integrated practitioners’ (McIntosh and Nutt, 2022) (which inspires us, as it leaves space for both professional staff and academic staff to shift into what is traditionally the others’ space) and it has been suggested that university leadership roles could usefully be occupied by integrated practitioners who can “challenge the academic power dynamic” (Caldwell, 2023).

In this article we draw upon our recent work in pairing leaders together across university academic and professional roles, and we argue that ‘integrated practitioners’ need not be, sole individuals who can ‘do it all’, but that both academic staff, and professional staff can enhance their development by drawing down the different knowledges and experiences each held by the other, through shared ‘integrated spaces’. We also support the idea that colleagues do not need to be installed in formal university leadership positions to experience this professional growth, or to offer each other this ‘challenge’.

Additionally, we demonstrate that a challenge to the academic power dynamic need not be what some are fearful of, that is, a confrontational struggle to claim long withheld power from the hands of ‘the academics’, nor a ‘taking back’ of power from ‘university managers’, but one of mutual enrichment and respect. Below we share preliminary data on how professional-academic mentoring partnerships can hold a ‘third space’ or ‘integrated’ learning environment.

Mentoring university research leaders

Mentoring is a mechanism for the mutual exchange of expertise which supports the growth of complex leadership practices (Ghosh et al, 2019). Where mentoring is designed with intentional aims and a clear understanding of the leadership context, it encourages both parties’ engagement in meaningful dialogue, and mutual empathy, trust, and cross-cultural awareness (Guccione and Hutchinson, 2021). Mentoring conversations, therefore, are a site of great potential for addressing academic/professional power tensions and imbalances and finding common ground. Yet many university mentoring programmes are designed to develop discipline-specific leadership. This heuristic habit speaks to the perceived greater value of intra-disciplinary knowledge. Being ‘an academic’ is an important social identity, leading individuals to seek mentors who are part of the group to which they belong and in which they matter (Thijm, 2023).

Yet, an ‘in discipline’ approach limits organisational leadership development. Working only with mentors who are similar, limits perspectives and reinforces power structures (Sarabipour et al, 2023). More, at senior levels, the available pool of ‘more senior’ colleagues who can act as mentors within the discipline is vanishingly small. Thirdly, disciplinary leadership, whether academic or professional, requires more than disciplinary knowledge, drawing on a wide range of strategic insights and interdisciplinary understanding, as well as familiarity with university conventions, policy, governance, and routes for influencing decision-making. These three factors combined, present mentoring programme designers with an intellectual and practice rationale for the design of mentoring for academic-professional leadership development. Preliminary evidence of the value of making academic-professional mentoring matches is presented below.

Mentoring for mutual enrichment

In 2021, the UKRI Future Leaders Fellows Development Network (FLFDN) Leadership Mentoring Programme was established. It prioritised a non-directive, person-centred leadership development conversations for UKRI-funded Fellows (emerging leaders in research and innovation). Leaders from universities, industries, third sector and charities were recruited as mentors, and partnerships made, including university academic-professional mentoring pairs. Participants were encouraged to seek commonalities, build trust, celebrate differences and similarities equally, and use the mentoring partnership to view leadership from a different perspective. Our first findings provide qualitative insights into the value of mentoring that creates a third/integrated space for dialogue, from mentors and mentees partnered between 2021 and 2023.

Value added for all parties

Initial analysis of mentoring evaluation data and follow up conversations with three mentoring pairs revealed benefits spanning areas of mutual value associated with third-space positionality. These include breaking down academic/professional barriers and building shared understanding that tackling contemporary institutional challenges coherently, requires different types of knowledge and expertise:

“The approach breaks down barriers Admittedly, I did wonder at the beginning whether the FLFs would even want to be mentored by someone like me, who has such a different background and career path to them. But I have been pleasantly surprised – maybe the fact that I DO bring a different perspective – whilst having a sound understanding of HE and academic careers has been helpful” – Mentor 1

“In an increasingly complex, unpredictable, and interconnected world, none of us can afford to live and work in silos. The […] programme is a welcome opportunity to break down barriers and help each other connect , learn, and develop across academia, business and civic society” – Mentee 2

“Being a mentor is a real privilege – whether I act as a sounding board, a connector, a confidante, or a champion. I applaud my mentees for trusting me to become part of their worlds, for some time, so I can help them make sense of and overcome the many challenges they face in their careers. In return, I gain deep insights into the world of being a fellow in academia, which makes me a better professional in my own right” – Mentor 2

“Working with a mentor outside of my discipline provided a powerful perspective and wider context that I would have imagined.” – Mentee 2

These preliminary indications are only enough to give us inspiration to dig deeper, and our next steps for this research will be to investigate more professional-academic mentoring pairs in more detail, in order to complete thematic analysis of the gains and value added on both sides, and start a discussion about further ways to create integrated spaces and mutual enrichment between university professional and academic roles. As integrated professionals have been suggested to be the antidote to silo working, enabling cross-disciplinary and evidence-based approaches to flourish, and modelling innovation in university business (McIntosh and Nutt, 2022), we suggest that academic-professional mentoring has the potential to have significant impact on the creation of a culture of collegiality and collaboration, breaking down barriers between groups of staff.