Cardea is the Roman Goddess of door pivots, ideal to describe our project to develop Research Managers (RM) who strengthen Europe's R&I excellence through a diverse set of support roles and responsibilities. Research Management as a profession is almost invisible from policy, career progression and tenure opportunities across Europe. Also, there is little consistency between countries, funders, policymakers and individual institutions. Cardea will develop supports to address this inequality. Our consortium has enjoyed considerable success doing this for Researchers already. We will create a detailed data-driven (500+ participants, 24 countries) knowledge space-defining and characterising the problem. Based on this, we will develop a range of solutions, including a Capacity Maturity Model to assess and improve RM activities, a novel RM Hub for networking and training to include a community of practice. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Widening Participation (EU13), Public-Private partnership actions will be at the core of our research, training and enhancement activities. Additionally, the mobility and networking of RM and those with responsibility for developing RMs will be included to ensure the RM ecosystem grows transnationally. We will learn from each other and support one another in bringing RM careers to the next level. Significantly these actions will provide a significant evidence base to advocate the inclusion of RM exigences in policy, and we will target this proactively, targeting 38 key decision making organisations. Amongst the impacts of Cardea will be an enduring network and Hub that can facilitate RM development and collaboration, a validated methodology to assess RM careers and a well-established baseline against which improvements can be objectively measured. This allows us to develop an RM Charter and offer a Concordat to institutions and organisations that make significant commitments to developing RM activities in a structured, mature manner.