A positive work environment provides the foundation for a lab to excel. It is where people feel safe to be themselves and share their ideas. Leadership is open enough to ask for help, the team is aligned with the lab’s purpose, individuals prioritize high-quality connections, and authenticity fosters honesty. Labs with a positive culture enable staff to grow, learn, and develop without worrying about gossip, politics, and backstabbing. In the book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle describes a culture as what we care about. A positive lab cares about people, relationships, and delivering outstanding science.
Ensure safety
Staff need to feel safe to deliver high-quality work. Safety goes beyond the physical safety that most labs address, including chemical, biological, mechanical, fire, and radiation safety. For staff to feel safe, they also must experience emotional and psychological safety. Emotional safety enables them to bring their best self to work without worrying about harassment or teasing. Psychological safety enables them to freely share their ideas, questions, and observations without the threat of judgment or retaliation.
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Show vulnerability
Vulnerability in the lab means that anyone, including lab leadership, can ask for help, express half-formed ideas, ask basic questions, share incomplete thoughts, and admit to making mistakes. Nobody is perfect. The lab team functions best when it can help, teach, and guide anyone on staff. Everyone contributes their knowledge, experience, and expertise, and everyone benefits from the knowledge, experience, and expertise of the rest of the team. No one needs to have all the answers.
Drive purpose
A positive work environment benefits from a clear and concise purpose. It helps align the team to the common benefits of the work and effort. The purpose is to help people understand who benefits from their work, why they work hard, and why they show up every day. Staff who are aligned with the purpose are more likely to persist through the challenges of the science and produce outstanding results. It is the responsibility of lab leadership to define the lab’s vision, objectives, and purpose.
Build high quality connections
People have better well-being, higher morale, and are more creative when they have high-quality connections at work. In the book How to Be a Positive Leader, Jane Dutton describes interactions with high-quality connections as leading to greater energy and capability of action. Dutton goes on to describe ways a leader can develop a culture to enable more high-quality connections:
- Value respect: demand respectful behavior around the lab.
- Help others be successful: provide constructive feedback.
- Build trust: be trustworthy and focus on trust-building.
- Reward high relational skills: recognize the value of staff who generate high-quality connections.
- Model being a high-quality connection: lead from the front.
Be positive and candid
Some people think that being a positive leader is about being overly nice to everyone all the time. However, some of the kindest actions a positive lab leader can take are to provide direction, guidance, and constructive criticism to staff to help them grow, learn, and develop. Positive leaders will take the opportunity to have hard conversations to help staff improve. Being positive isn’t being happy and smiling all the time. It is being connected to the people in the lab, understanding their challenges, and helping them resolve those challenges.
A positive leader developing a positive work environment is creating a space for each member of staff to grow, develop, and improve. It is a conscious investment in everyone to make the whole lab perform better.
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