By Prof Paul Elwood

In this article Professor Paul Ellwood discusses the role of the ProfDoc Director. Prof Ellwood is the Professor of Management Practice, DBA and Executive Education at Maynooth University. His research interests fall into two distinct areas: research-informed management education pedagogies; and technology management and innovation. He has a particular interest in management education as a pathway to research impact. He has taught on both MBA and DBA programmes at the University of Liverpool and Open University in the UK.  His early working life included leadership positions within industrial companies.

Introduction

The primary responsibility of a ProfDoc Director is to safeguard the overall health of the programme. At its heart, this means ensuring that supervisors are well-supported so they, in turn, can provide the highest quality guidance to their students. Beyond this, the director plays a crucial role in shaping the culture of the programme; creating an atmosphere that encourages professional and academic growth. Equally important is maintaining and communicating rigorous academic standards. Each of these responsibilities demands careful thought and sustained attention.

Supporting supervisors requires aligning interests and opportunities

Supporting supervisors begins with identifying colleagues who are both suitably qualified and available. This involves matching specific research interests and ensuring appropriate supervisory experience. However, the director must recognise that academic colleagues already face busy schedules and have their own scholarly agendas. It is therefore a matter of aligning the opportunities presented by supervising a ProfDoc student with those agendas. There are no shortcuts here; the director must take the time to understand not only colleagues’ theoretical interests, but also the empirical contexts for their research.  ProfDoc students often bring access to fascinating organisational settings—opportunities that can enrich a supervisor’s research well beyond a single ProfDoc project. Personally, I prefer not to allocate supervisors at the application stage but rather wait until the student is on the programme, learnt about professional doctorate research and begins to shape their research topic accordingly. It is always beneficial to involve the potential supervisor in the refinement of the thesis proposal.

Building a supportive environment beyond formal teaching

Creating a thriving ProfDoc community is no small feat. Most ProfDoc students study part-time while working full-time, and in-person meetings are rare. Much of the interaction happens online, which makes intentional design of the learning environment critical.  Researcher development and professional development modules typically run in cohorts. These cohorts can become a productive source of peer-to-peer learning; if managed well. Left to chance, they risk devolving into fragmented WhatsApp chats.  My own approach is to facilitate the cohorts in an action learning process to address the generic challenge of “managing family and professional obligations whilst maintaining progress towards the timely completion of my ProfDoc studies”.  To this end the cohort meet once per quarter for an action learning discussion that operates in parallel to the formal teaching and thesis supervision.

Maintaining Academic Standards

Defining and then maintaining doctoral standards is an aspect of the role of the ProfDoc director that left unmanaged can lead to confusion and disagreements.  Supervisors accustomed to PhD norms may inadvertently apply those expectations to ProfDoc projects. Policy documents don’t always help with phrases like “original contribution” inviting debate and disagreement.  Originality in any doctoral education might be evidenced as publishable-quality research, even if candidates do not intend to publish.  However, we know from peer-review journal guidelines that the expectations and meaning of “original contribution” can take multiple forms.  In the case of ProfDoc research that originality might manifest as:

• An innovative application of theory to a pressing managerial challenge
• A reframing of a familiar problem that opens new avenues for intervention
• Evaluating the success (or failure) of an organisational initiative.
• Critically evaluating the relevance of an idea from the literature, developing it into an actionable form, and testing in in the organisation.

It is the role of the ProfDoc Director to define the meaning of the contribution that the ProfDoc candidate is expected to display through their written thesis and at viva voce examination.  Having done so, these standards should be communicated in appropriate guidelines to candidates, supervisors and examiners.

Final Thoughts

The ProfDoc Director’s role is multifaceted: part strategist, part facilitator, part guardian of standards. It’s about more than administration: it’s about shaping an environment where rigorous research and professional growth go hand in hand.