Stepping into a lab manager role often means leaving behind much of the work that you know and are comfortable with for an entirely different set of challenges.
Here are a couple of things our Lab Manager audience has told us about the transition:
- Most lab managers are promoted from within and come from the staff of bench scientists
- Up to 70 percent of what lab managers are concerned with has little to do with the specific branch of science that the lab delivers.
Based on my own experiences over a 30-year lab career as a research scientist and lab manager, and many great conversations with other lab managers, a picture develops of what experienced lab managers look for when selecting new leaders, and which priorities set those new lab managers up for success.
Something new
In the book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith makes the argument that the skills and behaviors that generated success at the lab bench won’t enable you to be successful as a lab manager. Therefore, you’ll need to develop new skills and priorities to be successful. Some keys to learning these skills are:
- Humility – you might not know what you don’t know yet. Be humble and start learning how this role works and what you’ll need to develop.
- Vulnerability – ask questions. Get help. Admit your ignorance and your mistakes. I’ve often told the story that as the general manager of Intertek Allentown, people would ask me why I got the role. My response was that I’d made more mistakes than anyone else, so I had more opportunities to learn.
- Growth mindset – focus on learning and treat the challenges of this role as opportunities to grow and develop.
Leading people in the lab
As a senior scientist, my role was to deliver innovative problem-solving for our stakeholders. As a lab manager, my role was to help people successfully navigate the challenges our stakeholders presented and deliver useful outcomes. The focus moved from what I could deliver to what we could deliver. This change of focus required these priorities:
- Care – The transformational leader Melanie Klinghoffer says, “If you care, they’ll care.” Demonstrating that you care about the people in the lab, their lives, their success, their development, their challenges, and their delivery becomes the route to success. Everything the lab achieves is through the people
- Listen – practice active listening to learn from your people. Better information yields better decisions.
- Support – provide the scientists what they need to be successful. This is a combination of relationship building, communication, resources, and belief.
- Protection – protect the staff from unreasonable expectations, toxic personalities, unresolved conflict, and lack of support.
Lead the lab culture
Every lab has a culture, a way that the work gets done. Some cultures are exemplary, and some are negative and destructive. Understand the nature of your lab’s culture and take steps to make it more positive. Build a safe place to work where belonging, social connections, emotional and psychological safety abound, and effective teams can cooperate for success. Build a work environment that enables people to thrive and flourish.
Make decisions
The whole lab depends on the decisions made by the lab manager. To be successful, lab managers need to make consistent, well-intentioned, and data-driven decisions. Build an effective problem-solving decision-making process that uses all the expertise, experience, and data in the lab. Making prompt decisions enables people to move forward with their work and seek the outcomes demanded by your stakeholders.
No one is perfect, and not all your decisions will work out as planned. Understand that most decisions can be changed or nullified. A key learning from one of my previous supervisors, Sherri Bassner, vice president at Intertek, was “Document your assumptions.” By understanding our assumptions, we can make better decisions as new information becomes available.
Manage the systems
The lab manager is accountable for all aspects of the lab, including safety, quality, and operations. These are elements of the lab where success derives from doing things right. Learn about the details of these systems, so that you can drive improvements and engagement with staff. Incorporating safety, quality, and delivery into the lab's culture will deepen staff participation and improve lab performance.
In my own transition from scientist to lab manager, I went from resisting the quality system as an unwelcomed interference on by ability to innovate to implementing an ISO 17025 accredited quality program in the lab. My vision and understanding of the importance of lab quality changed with the perspective of a different role.
Dos and Don’ts
Here are some distilled lessons from my experience and my conversations with other lab managers:
Do | Don't |
| Actively listen to everyone on staff | Act like you already know everything |
| Incorporate everyone’s ideas | Promote only your ideas |
| Care about and support everyone | Seek personal gain |
| Consistently do the right things | Consistently do easy things |
| Ensure that important activities are done right | Ignore difficult situations and outcomes |
| Make prompt, data-driven decisions | Procrastinate on decisions while waiting for more information |
| Share your knowledge and help others | Protect your knowledge to keep power |
| Help everyone succeed | Help only your loyal favorites succeed |
| Admit your ignorance and ask for help | Hide behind a false bravado and forge ahead |
| Build a cohesive community and culture | Drive a homogenous follower culture |
| Emphasize curiosity, questions, and shared learning | Expect everyone to agree with you |
The transition from bench scientist to lab manager can be both challenging and thrilling. The opportunity to learn new things, gain a better understanding of how the whole lab works, and have input on the key decisions is worth the effort. Remember that most people leave their boss, not their organization. Be the manager who attracts people, rather than repels them.
