The lab manager and lab operations manager often work on different sides of the same problems. One may be focused on scientific priorities and team needs while the other manages equipment, facilities, vendors, and operational planning. When those responsibilities overlap, unclear ownership or weak communication can create delays and duplicated effort.
In this Q&A, Kelly Sullivan, PhD, discusses how the two roles can define who owns what, share the context each needs, use check-ins more effectively, and stay aligned on the decisions that affect lab performance.
Where do you see the most confusion around ownership between the lab manager and lab operations manager, and how should those responsibilities be clarified?
Confusion often comes down to reporting and communication, not the actual work. Lab managers typically oversee the direct reports, but that doesn't mean every issue belongs to them. A lot of what happens in a lab touches both roles, and scientists are left guessing who needs to know what.
Take a bench scientist who finds the flow cytometer can't be calibrated because of a machine error. That's actually two problems. Lab ops needs to know because the equipment is down and they own the fix, the vendor call, the repair timeline. The lab manager needs to know because the work scheduled on that machine has stopped and priorities need to shift.
If the scientist only reports to one person, the other finds out too late. Ops fixes the machine without knowing there's urgency behind it. The lab manager reshuffles the schedule without knowing the repair is already underway.
You can't ask scientists to figure out who owns the issue. Give them guidelines that remove the guesswork. Equipment failures go to lab ops, since they own the fix. Schedule impact goes to the lab manager, since they own the workflow. One incident, one message, both people copied. Nobody's left wondering whose job it is, and nothing falls through the cracks while people sort out ownership after the fact.
How can a lab manager set operational goals that support broader lab priorities without creating an excessive list of KPIs or metrics?
The mistake most lab managers make is guessing at what matters instead of asking. When you're not sure what the business needs from the lab, the instinct is to track everything just in case. That's how you end up with a KPI list that looks thorough and drives nothing.
Interview the teams around you, not just your own lab team. Talk to finance, the general manager of your campus, building facilities and maintenance, HR, sales, and operations. It might sound outside the lab manager's job, but every one of these teams is affected by how the lab runs, and all of them can tell you what matters to them.
Finance wants to know if turnaround time is costing money or capacity is going to waste. The general manager wants to know if the lab is creating bottlenecks for the rest of the campus. Facilities wants to know if equipment issues are becoming their problem. HR wants to know if workload is burning people out. Sales wants to know if the lab can support what's being promised to clients.
Once you've gathered that input, find the overlap. If finance, the general manager, and facilities all care about equipment uptime, even for different reasons, that's one KPI doing three jobs. That's how the list gets shorter instead of longer.
Lab Management Certificate
The Lab Management certificate is more than training—it’s a professional advantage.
Gain critical skills and IACET-approved CEUs that make a measurable difference.
What information or context does the lab operations manager need from the lab manager to make good day-to-day decisions?
The lab manager needs to translate scientific priorities into operational language. Be clear about what's urgent versus what can wait, what needs backup or redundancy, and what's occasional versus something that happens every week—all while keeping the operations manager in the loop on current projects and experiments. The operations manager doesn't need to understand the science itself, but they need to understand what matters and why.
This information can't just be a weekly update. It needs to go out monthly and quarterly so the operations manager can plan ahead. That zoomed out view is what makes preventative maintenance possible. If most staff are out for a week in the summer and only a few pieces of equipment need to stay up, that's the ideal window to run calibrations and maintenance.
Knowing the cadence of how the lab actually works, not just this week but the rhythm of the whole quarter, is what lets the operations manager plan around science instead of working against it. And this has to flow both ways. The operations manager should be flagging planned maintenance windows or vendor visits back to the lab manager, too.
Interested in lab leadership?
What should regular check-ins between the lab manager and ops manager focus on?
Often, check-ins focus on status updates, but that can happen over email or in a project tool. Plenty of digital tools already track tasks and handle that kind of reporting asynchronously. A 1:1 shouldn't be used for that. If it fits in a sentence, put it in the tool. If it needs two people talking it through, save it for the check-in.
The lab manager sees the science side, the operations manager sees the equipment and facilities side, and a lot of issues only become visible once those two views sit next to each other.
The questions that uncover hidden issues look different from status questions. They're built to surface things people haven't flagged yet because it didn't seem worth a full report, or because they've already started working around it. Questions like:
- Does anything feel off, even if you can't point to exactly why?
- Has anyone started working around something instead of reporting it?
- Is there anything you almost brought up this week but decided wasn't worth mentioning?
- Is there a piece of equipment that's technically fine but you're keeping an eye on?
Don’t lose sight of the other reason this time matters. Running a lab, you're still two humans working together to solve problems and push work forward. That's worth a real check-in too, not just a diagnostic one.
When reviewing lab operations more formally, such as during an annual process review, what questions should the lab manager be asking?
This is where you catch what never comes up in a weekly check-in: a process that still runs the same way even though the team has doubled in size, or a workaround from six months ago that became the permanent way something gets done.
Ask what band-aids you've been holding. Is there a process or schedule you've wanted to revamp but never had the time to touch? None of this breaks anything today; it just costs a little efficiency here and a little risk there, easy to keep ignoring until the annual review forces you to look at the total.
This is also the time to talk through budget and CapEx: is equipment aging out; does the CapEx plan match what's actually happening on the bench; has the lab outgrown what it was originally budgeted for?
How can lab managers stay informed and accountable for operations without duplicating the operations manager’s work or becoming too involved in day-to-day decisions?
Let’s go back to the flow cytometer example from the first question. The lab manager's job is knowing the equipment will be back online by Thursday, not weighing in on which vendor gets the call. The vendor relationship, the pricing, the repair approach belongs to the ops manager. Stepping into that process undermines the ops manager's trust and accountability.
Accountability without duplication comes down to data both managers agree on ahead of time, like downtime, recurring failure patterns, and missed maintenance windows. Once those metrics are locked in, they need a tool both managers can see, so the numbers stay transparent to both parties at all times and nobody has to ask the other to share anything in the moment.
When something slips, that shared data can change the conversation. Three flow cytometer failures in two months isn't a "why did you handle it that way" conversation, it's a "should we be looking at replacing this instead of repairing it again" conversation.
