Sarah Bauder is the senior editor at Lab Manager. She possesses a diverse background spanning editorial, digital marketing and film and television production. She brings over 15 years of experience
In most laboratories, the difference between a lab manager who merely sustains operations and one who actively grows them comes down not to talent or budget but to whether they measure anything at all. That was the central takeaway of a session led by Dustin Jenkins, global technical director at Alpha Resources, at the 2026 Lab Manager Leadership Summit. Jenkins—whose career spans commercial testing labs operating under standards such as ISO/IEC 17025, a Fortune 500 polymer producer, and the reference-material laboratories he now oversees in the US and the UK—has run teams flush with funding and teams that were, in his words, bootstrapped. What separated the labs that improved from those that simply endured, he argued, was a pair of unglamorous disciplines most managers have heard of but few actually use: key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives and key results (OKRs).
For the modern lab leader, mastering these two tools is what transforms a vague desire for improvement into a concrete strategic plan the whole team can rally around.
Management vs leadership: why measurement is the bridge
Before diving into the mechanics of data tracking, Jenkins drew a vital distinction between two frequently conflated concepts: management and leadership. Management, in his definition, was about maintaining the status quo—directing work, allocating resources, and keeping the quality-management systems that underpin a lab running. Leadership was about driving change, casting a vision, and growing the team beyond its current state. The problem, he noted, is that most managers get stuck on the first without a structured way to reach the second—the kind of long-term vision that a strategic plan is built to deliver.
"The success of a group rises and falls on the shoulders of its leadership," Jenkins told the audience, emphasizing that both operational failures and triumphs ultimately belong to the person in charge.
Measurement is the tool that grants lab managers the clarity to accept that responsibility —and to act before problems calcify. KPIs and OKRs map neatly onto this framework: KPIs protect the status quo by monitoring whether the lab is holding steady, and OKRs push it forward by structuring the growth a leader wants to see.
What makes a good KPI for a laboratory
Dustin Jenkins, PhD, Global Technical Director at Alpha Resources.
KPIs are the more familiar tool because they are simply the metrics that show the work is getting done. Depending on the lab, metrics like turnaround time, sample volume, instrument downtime, backlog size, out-of-specification results, valid customer complaints, and labor efficiency are all fair game.
Jenkins offered a vivid example from his own operation. At Alpha Resources, which manufactures and certifies upward of 210 certified reference materials at any given time, one of the most important KPIs is the percentage of products currently out of stock. Because a single reference material can carry a lead time of six months to a year, an out-of-stock figure that creeps too high is an early warning that operations are slipping—and a signal that customers may soon abandon a calibration curve built on his materials and turn to a competitor.
Quantifiable: something a manager can attach a number to and track over time
Actionable: within the manager's control, so a bad reading points to a response rather than a shrug
Aligned: tied to the broader goals of the business, ideally feeding any corporate-level KPIs that already exist
Time-bound: reviewed on a steady cadence, most often monthly, so trends surface early
Jenkins also warned against the common pitfall of misplacing targets. A metric that is always green tells a manager nothing, and neither does one that can never be hit. "If you're never meeting your KPI, or if you're always meeting your KPI, then it's not going to tell you a whole lot," Jenkins said. The goal is a target with enough healthy tension that it occasionally dips below the line, prompting a look under the hood before recovering.
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Why tracking is non-negotiable
Underlying Jenkins' philosophy is a foundational management principle: a lab manager manages what they measure, and nothing else. "You cannot change what isn't tracked," he said, comparing a lab without KPIs to a household operating with no budget—spending resources with no visibility and no mechanism for course correction.
The payoff of consistent tracking is twofold:
Upward visibility: When a metric trends positively, a manager has a data-backed story to tell executive leadership, replacing vague impressions with empirical success.
Early intervention: When a metric dips, it provides an early warning to investigate root causes before a soft month mutates into a lost quarter.
Even metrics a manager cannot fully control are worth tracking. Jenkins noted that these data points can serve as vital "reporting metrics" to justify capital expenditure requests or build an undeniable business case for additional personnel.
Moving from monitoring to growth with OKRs
If KPIs keep the lab steady, objectives and key results are how a lab manager builds something new on top of that stability. Jenkins was candid about the widespread confusion surrounding OKRs, noting that even organizational experts frequently debate how to write them—which is precisely why managers shouldn't get paralyzed trying to do it "correctly."
To make it concrete, Jenkins walked through a familiar example. An objective might be to increase laboratory efficiency—deliberately broad. The key results give it teeth: reduce sample turnaround time from five days to three, cut sample reruns from 10 percent to 5 percent, and reduce instrument downtime from 20 percent to 5 percent. Each of those, in turn, invites a root-cause investigation and a set of concrete initiatives to get there.
The framework, he stressed, matters far less than the follow-through. "As long as you're being intentional about your goals and about breaking it down into tasks, you're going to be ahead of 90 percent of organizations," Jenkins said—because most labs never write their goals down at all, and follow-through is where the majority of goals quietly die.
The hidden discipline inside every OKR
One point Jenkins made deserves particular attention from lab managers, because it separates goal-setting that pays off from goal-setting that merely generates paperwork. An OKR carries an implied piece of homework: before committing to an objective, a manager should have estimated the time and money it will actually save.
He shared an example from his own career. In a previous role, his team was spending roughly a thousand labor hours a year on manual reporting of gas chromatography data. He invested about six weeks—around 75 percent of his time over that stretch—writing a program to automate the workup. The result was a recurring savings of those thousand hours, year after year. "That payoff seems to be pretty well worth it," he said.
The lesson is not that automation is always the answer, but that a well-formed objective is one that has been pressure-tested for impact. A key result like cutting sample reruns is worth pursuing only if reruns are actually denting the bottom line. If the payoff is marginal, the disciplined move is to spend limited attention elsewhere. "Just do something," Jenkins urged—but do the thing that moves the needle.
Start small, stay consistent
For lab leaders looking to implement these systems from scratch, the temptation is to wait until a flawless, all-encompassing dashboard can be built. Jenkins advises the exact opposite: A lab manager can set an initial KPI target that the team can reasonably hit, observe its behavior for a quarter, and adjust the baseline as data is gathered. Choose just one meaningful OKR for the upcoming quarter rather than ten. Write it down, loop in the team, and execute it to completion.
That incrementalism reflects a broader mindset Jenkins encouraged throughout the session—one of steady growth rather than perfectionism. Lab managers, he observed, are often analytical, high-achieving personalities who put themselves under intense pressure to deploy perfect systems immediately. The same grace applies to building a measurement culture: a partial system used consistently beats a perfect system that never launches—and, over time, becomes the engine of the kind of continuous improvement that reclaims time and productivity across the lab.
Final thoughts
The through-line connecting KPIs and OKRs is that both replace guesswork with visibility, turning laboratory performance into something a manager can see, measure, and improve on purpose. One keeps a lab manager honest about the health of daily operations; the other keeps them honest about whether the lab is actually growing. Neither requires a large budget, specialized software, or a consultant—only the discipline to decide what matters, write it down, and revisit it on a schedule as part of an ongoing cycle of continuous improvement.
That discipline is also what elevates a lab manager from operator to leader. The manager who can point to a trend line, explain what it means, and rally a team around a measurable goal is building something more durable: a laboratory that improves on purpose rather than by accident. As Jenkins put it, a lab manager who stays intentional and tracks their progress is already ahead of most of the field—and that is where growth begins.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the difference between a KPI and an OKR?
A KPI (key performance indicator) is a metric that monitors whether a lab is holding steady, such as turnaround time or instrument downtime. An OKR (objective and key result) is a goal-setting framework for driving growth, so KPIs track the status quo while OKRs push the lab forward.
What makes a good KPI for a laboratory?
A good KPI is quantifiable, actionable, aligned with broader business goals, and reviewed on a regular cadence, usually monthly. It should also sit at a target with enough tension that it occasionally dips below the line, prompting investigation rather than always reading green.
How often should lab managers review their KPIs and OKRs?
Most KPIs are best reviewed monthly so trends surface early, though some labs track certain metrics weekly or quarterly depending on the goal. OKRs are commonly set on a quarterly cadence, but the right timeframe depends on the scale of the objective.
How can a lab manager get started with OKRs without overcomplicating it?
Start with a single broad objective for the coming quarter, break it into a few measurable key results, and write it all down. According to Dustin Jenkins, follow-through matters far more than getting the format perfect—simply being intentional and tracking progress puts a lab ahead of most organizations.
Sarah Bauder is the senior editor at Lab Manager. She possesses a diverse background spanning editorial, digital marketing and film and television production. She brings over 15 years of experience in editorial writing, B2C and B2B content creation. A student of history, she graduated from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She can be reached at sbauder@labmanger.com.
