When lab staff understand how their work connects to meaningful outcomes, from technological breakthroughs to life-changing therapies, they become more engaged, resilient, and innovative. But fostering this sense of purpose isn't automatic. Effective lab purpose communication is comprised of intentional communication, clear values, and the ability to help your team see the bigger picture. Kelly Sullivan, global director of operations and labs at CIC, shares her insight into transforming your lab from a collection of individual contributors into a unified team driven by shared purpose and scientific integrity.
The core values of the lab
If the lab’s purpose is its destination, then its values are the compass to it. Identifying core values will help you run your lab in alignment with its purpose. Core values play a key role in lab purpose communication, helping staff connect daily work to shared values. If staff feel that the lab’s values resonate with them and that their work is in step with those values, they will likely feel more motivated to press through challenging times and keep the lab’s purpose in sight.
Sullivan names three core values that shape her leadership approach and her lab’s operations. These values, she says, are largely universal for labs across industries:
- Transparency
“Transparency is really important to me,” Sullivan says. “A lot of times, because things can be so sensitive in terms of the science and intellectual property, you want to be as transparent as possible. . .and having that transparency is really important to making sure that everybody feels on board and connected to the work that they’re doing.” Indeed, when employees feel like they are trapped in their own silos, both motivation and innovation can suffer. Employees won’t have as clear of an understanding of how important their work is in pursuing the lab’s purpose, and without fresh eyes looking at challenges, the lab’s internal innovation may stall.
- Integrity
“Integrity is huge. Scientific integrity and ethics are at the core of all science work that we do,” Sullivan notes. Part of running a successful lab, she says, is holding employees to this core value in particular, because it represents the distillation of what they do: try to discover truth through the scientific method. Without integrity, the whole enterprise is undermined. Strong lab purpose communication reinforces why scientific integrity is essential to the lab’s mission.
- Remembering the human element
Informed by her time in the service industry before working in the lab, Sullivan says that the final core value is human centricity. “This core value, for me, is not getting so far away and tripped up in compliance and 21 CFR and all these day-to-day concerns. It’s about making sure that you don’t get far away from the human element. At the end of the day, it’s humans helping you achieve compliance and push things forward. You have to remember that.”
Human centricity isn’t just a core value; it’s the lens through which you can define your lab’s greater purpose. And for Sullivan, recognizing this core value was a catalyst in how she changed her view of her work.
Seeing your work in the bigger picture
According to Sullivan, the key to seeing your lab’s purpose—a purpose beyond profitability—is to view it in the bigger picture. She tells of the first time she experienced this firsthand:
“Early in my career, I was in academia. A lot of times, in academia, it’s so separate from what you’re working. . .you don’t really see what the end goal is, and how your work helps progress towards it.”
But things changed after her postdoc. Sullivan began working for a researcher who was focused on autoimmune disorders, seeking to help psoriasis patients in particular:
“When I started working with [the researcher], I met these patients and began to see how the work we were doing, the formulations we developed, were changing things for them. [And] these people had been trying everything. That’s when it really resonated.” After that experience, even when Sullivan sat at the biosafety cabinet—headphones on, podcast playing—she still felt the impact of meeting those patients, and that motivated her work in the lab, even though there was a degree of separation between her and the patients. She was aligned with the lab’s purpose. That connection was the result of effective lab purpose communication and firsthand experience.
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An important takeaway from Sullivan’s story is that resonating with the lab’s purpose is, ultimately, something that can only be experienced firsthand. As a lab leader, you can’t force the resonance top-down. But there are ways to encourage that mindset: namely, storytelling and aligning strengths with the mission.
Communicating the lab’s purpose to staff
An intuitive way to communicate your lab’s purpose is to frame it within a narrative. “A lot of communication about purpose is learning to be a storyteller,” Sullivan says. She used this technique to illustrate the impact of her team’s work running the labs at CIC decontaminating a drug development lab’s incubators.
“Saying to [my] team, ‘Hey, do you understand that the company we supported developed this [new drug]?’ takes the perspective from ‘The client’s incubators are decontaminated,’ to ‘Our decontamination played a small, but vital, role in bringing this drug to market.’ You become a part of something larger.” That client ended up creating a new hemophilia drug that was approved by the FDA, achieving something with only a 10 percent chance of success.
Having difficult conversations
Sullivan agrees that scientific work tends to self-select for intrinsically motivated, purpose-minded personalities. Lab managers have an advantage in this sense. “[But] there are a lot of people to whom science is just a job. They show up and do it,” Sullivan admits.
This attitude isn’t necessarily wrong. It can be healthy to draw such lines if you’re trying to maximize work-life balance, especially during life’s more stressful times. But issues may arise if this attitude impacts performance. As a manager, Sullivan says, you may need to have difficult conversations with staff who are clearly unengaged with the lab’s purpose because it could be a sign that this is not the right role for them. The meaning they’re seeking may be in another role that better aligns with their own interests and core values.
Key takeaways
Leading a purpose-driven lab ultimately comes down to three essential elements: establishing core values that guide decision-making, contextualizing your lab within a larger mission, and communicating that mission through compelling storytelling. When transparency, integrity, and human-centricity become your lab's foundation, and when every team member understands their role in bringing life-changing innovations to market, you create an environment where both scientific excellence and employee engagement thrive.
