48. Collaborative Research – Mindset: Dr L. Michelle Bennett on building the collaborative mindset researchers are almost never taught

View the full show notes, including a summary of practical tips on the Amplifying Research website: https://www.amplifyingresearch.com/podcast/48-l-michelle-bennett

Most research teams believe they collaborate well — until the first real disagreement, the first authorship dispute, or the first time someone bites their tongue instead of speaking up. Researchers are rigorously trained in methodology but given almost no preparation for the relational skills that hold a collaboration together — and when tension rises, most default to a self-protective mode that quietly erodes trust, psychological safety, and ultimately the science itself. In this episode, Dr L. Michelle Bennett unpacks what a genuinely collaborative mindset looks like in practice, and how something as concrete as a collaboration agreement can give your team the structure it needs to do its best work.

This is the first episode in a three-part miniseries based on the book How to Succeed at Collaborative Research, co-authored by Michelle, Howard Gadlin and Dr Sawsan Khuri. All three authors join the conversation to introduce the series before Michelle takes the deep dive on collaborative mindset. Upcoming episodes cover productive conflict (Howard) and collaborating with AI (Sawsan).

Michelle spent more than twenty years working with research teams at the US National Cancer Institute, where she helped launch interdisciplinarycollaborations and saw first-hand what made the difference between teams that thrived and teams that quietly fell apart. Howard spent his career as an ombudsman helping researchers resolve conflicts at Harvard, the NIH, UCLA and beyond. Sawsan teaches medical genetics at the University of Exeter and runs a consulting company, Collaborative Capacities.

"When we start talking about or people start talking about power over other people, that's not collaborative. So using your power to reward people or punish people, from my perspective, is not ethical. That takes away people's ability to speak up, share their different perspectives, and ensure conscious choice." — L. Michelle Bennett

Whether you're a research leader wondering whether your team is as collaborative as you think, an operations lead looking for practical tools to strengthen team dynamics, or an early-career researcher navigating the power structures of your first collaboration, this episode offers a concrete framework for building the kind of team culture that makes better science possible.

Our conversation covers:

The collaborative mindset vs the unilateral mindset — and why tension is the trigger that flips most people from one to the other

Why collaboration sounds easy but researchers are almost never trained for it

Self-awareness as the starting point for becoming a better collaborator

Naive realism — the assumption that everyone sees things the way you do

What a collaboration agreement actually looks like (and why one team's took nine months)