In 2020 during a WINS Workshop by Dr. Sabine Blackmore, we were introduced to the concept of success teams. These are small groups of people supporting each other in their pursuit of individual goals and helping each other during challenging times. Resulting from that workshop, I teamed up with a fellow doctoral student, to create a success team.
We meet every other week (mostly online) and start by reflecting on the past weeks. We celebrate our small and big wins, and learn from each other’s challenging or unsuccessful situations.
After that we formulate goals for the upcoming weeks, and exchange our ideas with regard to feasibility, extent and planning of the goals which has become extremely helpful.
Since we began, we expanded the success team concept by elements from agile project management and the 12-Week-Year (Brian P. Moran, Michael Lennington) idea. The central advantage of success teams is that each member is accountable for the goals that have been set.
In our case, it is helpful that we have different scientific backgrounds, by which we do not dissipate our time on details and retain an outside perspective.
This team has now, after 2.5 years, become a major constant in my life and I attribute the majority of my productivity, and the boost to my mental health in the recent years, to this success team. The success team meetings are one of the highlights of my professional life. A few of the accomplishments that can be attributed to our success team: it has enabled my success team partner to finish her doctorate and start a PostDoc position, and I myself have been able to juggle multiple research projects, one of which was a multilab/multi-country research project. Scientific work can sometimes be challenging and, occasionally it can be very lonely. From our success team I have not only benefitted professionally, but – more importantly, made a wonderful friend.
If you want to know more, join our next networking session with Maria:
26 February 2025, 16:00-17:00
Celebrating Small and Big Wins. Experiences with a Success Team during the Doctorate
Virtual networking meeting with Dr. Maria Glaser (Gesundheitsforen Leipzig GmbH)
Maria Glaser is a psychologist who studied at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. After completing her doctorate at the HU Berlin, she is currently heading a medical database project in Leipzig.
Please register by 20 February
Zoom link shared after registration