Most lab managers receive little formal training before starting their role. Their reward for consistent excellence as a scientist is to lead scientists and manage labs—things they’ve never studied or learned.
Embarking as a professor at a research university has a similar path. A journey that often has lots of responsibilities, provides little leadership training before getting the job, and requires a significant investment in leadership learning to excel in the role. To help academic faculty embrace the leadership traits and skills required of the role, Jen Heemstra, professor and chemistry department chair at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, has written a very interesting book, Labwork to Leadership: A Concise Guide to Thriving in the Science Job You Weren’t Trained for.
A guide to academic laboratory leadership
Heemstra has produced a readable guide to leadership, aimed at professors and other academic leaders. She has a relatable writing style that explains complex leadership concepts in straightforward language, and she uses examples from her own career to illustrate different points and actions. I really appreciate her vulnerability in sharing some poignant examples. She writes with the experience of authoring technical papers, so the book contains ample footnotes and references for readers that want to explore specific concepts further.
The book is divided into three sections: self-leadership, leading others, and coaching future leaders.
Self-leadership
The self-leadership section covers personal attributes that are important for any leader to develop. Heemstra stresses the leadership qualities that have been important to her development as a leader, such as time management, goal setting, and resilience. The highlights are the stories she shares about her leadership journey. While she writes from the perspective of a research professor, these elements of self-leadership are broadly applicable, and technical leaders in any industry can find value from her guidance.
Leading others
The leading others section focuses on the leadership responsibilities and challenges of a professor running a research group. Heemstra chooses important elements of group leadership to emphasize and demonstrates how developing these leadership skills will improve the operation, performance, and motivation of a team. While I enjoyed this whole section, my favorite chapter was on ethical leadership. Heemstra gives this topic more emphasis than it often receives in other leadership and management books. I think her guidance around ethical leadership is important and needs to be shared more broadly. Heemstra emphasizes that the absence of ethical leadership can undermine the effectiveness of a leader independent of other strengths. “In essence, if you’re only going to get one thing right, it should be ethical leadership,” she says. In my own leadership journey, I’ve encountered people with very different perspectives on the rules guiding our behaviors, and I suffered from some of those interactions. I would have benefitted greatly from Heemstra’s approach to ethical leadership to help me deal with unethical behavior around me earlier in my career.
Coaching future leaders
The third section of the book focuses on teaching leadership. While all leaders need to share, coach, and mentor others to help develop future leaders, this responsibility is more focused in an academic setting. In industry, we generally have more time to develop future leaders, and we have the motivation to develop leaders for our own succession plans. However, as she makes very clear, academic labs are designed for turnover. Students and postdocs come into the program to learn specific things and then they leave and take their knowledge and experience with them. Heemstra states, “If you are leading a research group comprised of students and postdocs, then part of your job is training future leaders.” She shows us approaches to developing leaders despite knowing that they’ll practice those leadership skills to benefit other organizations, and adds, “…it means seeing each of those individuals grow and develop as researchers and leaders and then go out into the world and do incredible things.” This pay-it-forward approach to leadership training is refreshing. Perhaps all of us should invest more in helping the people around us develop better leadership toolboxes, even if they’ll take those skills away with them. Everyone benefits if the quality of technical leadership increases.
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This book contains helpful and useful guidance for technical leaders. It is aimed specifically at academic lab leaders, and I highly recommend it for anyone aiming for or currently in a professor or other academic leadership role. While the leadership content can be valuable to anyone in a technical leadership role, the stories and examples are specifically tuned to the academic world. Heemstra’s vulnerability in sharing those stories is the heart of the book.
