In my post about whether you even need a grant, I encouraged you to shift your thinking from the research you want to do (yourself) to the contribution to knowledge you want to make.
That’s not an easy shift. And I’m not going to pretend that it is.
In addition, for those in the humanities in particular, you have spent many years in a culture that values autonomy. A culture that might even look down on the cultures of other disciplines that routinely work in teams.
While your initial reaction to my suggestions might be focused on the external constraints to working this way (e.g. lack of funds with which to pay research assistants), before you can even secure those funds, you need to overcome those emotional and mental hurdles.
If your identity as a humanities scholar is intimately connected to doing every task associated with that scholarship yourself, then it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you are not going to find it easy to work with a research assistant.
The cultural value of autonomy also has material consequences: you have no training in how to work this way, nor many examples of using research assistants effectively in humanities research. And your senior colleagues might not have any useful advice to give you.
Beginning to think about delegation
Serendipitously, perhaps, I was reading a blog addressed to small business people the other day in which this issue of delegation was raised.
A lot of small biz folks are in the same position you are.
- Issues like autonomy and a do-it-yourself mentality are important to their identities.
- They don’t have the money (right now) to pay someone else to do things so it seems a moot point.
- They feel some vague external pressure to get themselves into a position where they can and do delegate things.
To get you started thinking about how you might think differently about your research program and maybe use research assistants or other types of team members to advance your program of research, I encourage you to read what Marissa Bracke has to say about delegation. Her business is to be the person stuff gets delegated to, and she has a lot of experience.
Here are some of her main points:
Forget about the rules you’ve heard about what you “should” delegate. There is no “right” set of tasks to delegate, and there is no “wrong” kind of task to hand off. What matters is what works for you, not what works for anyone else.
Don’t plan on delegating those tasks that you love doing.
Rather than looking at your assistant or team member as someone who does stuff you don’t want to do or can’t do, see that person as someone who allows you to do more of whatever it is you love.
Now, go read the whole post. (You might also want to read Marissa’s next post on nitpicking.)
I’d love it if you came back and told me how this might apply to your situation, where you are getting stuck in thinking about delegating parts of your research and scholarship, or what other concerns you have about working with a team.