When asked what makes a great leader, many lab managers conflate two entirely separate skills: management and leadership. According to Dustin Jenkins, global technical director at Alpha Resources, that blurring was where many capable managers quietly stalled. Jenkins, who had run commercial testing labs operating under standards such as ISO/IEC 17025, headed global gas chromatography capabilities for a Fortune 500 polymer producer, and now oversees reference-material laboratories in the United States and the UK, made the case at the 2026 Lab Manager Leadership Summit that the two functions were not interchangeable. Management ran on authority, which was handed to a manager by their title. Conversely, leadership ran on influence, which no title could bestow. Confuse them, he argued, and a lab manager risked exercising the first while falsely assuming they were building the second.
The distinction was not academic. It changed where a lab manager looked when they wanted to grow beyond middle management and become better.
Why clear definitions had to come first
Jenkins noted that mainstream leadership literature is often a frustrating place to start because it rarely agrees with itself. "If you survey 12 different management and leadership experts, you're going to get different ideas of what management is and what leadership is," he told the audience. Reading too much of it often leads to operational paralysis: too many academic frameworks, and too little sense of what to actually execute on Monday morning. Rather than trying to reconcile every theory, Jenkins anchored his approach to a single working split that maps directly onto the daily reality of running a lab. Managers exercised authority, leaders exercised influence.
Dustin Jenkins, PhD, Global Technical Director at Alpha Resources.
Underlying this framing is a heavier operational truth that Jenkins repeatedly emphasized: "The success of a group rises and falls on the shoulders of its leadership," he noted. Given both the wins and failures of a team ultimately land squarely on the shoulders of the individual in charge, lab managers must know exactly which tool they are using—and which one they might be neglecting.
Authority is derived from a title, but influence is derived from trust.
The cleanest way to understand this split, Jenkins said, was to trace where each dynamic originated. Authority was derived from position and hierarchy. It lived in the job description—the right to direct work, allocate lab time and resources, and, when it came to it, enforce consequences. Jenkins is entirely unsentimental about why this corporate structure exists: "Nobody maintains productivity over a long period of time without there being some kind of hierarchy and some kind of standard that has to be lived up to.”
The defining feature of authority was that it worked without trust. The defining feature of authority is that it functions without trust. Staff members follow an instruction simply because it is their job to do so, regardless of how they view the lab manager. A title may confer positional authority, but that alone does not make someone a leader.
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Influence operated on entirely different terrain. It could not be assigned, it must be earned over time through consistent interactions and a visible track record. "It's tied to who you are and what your track record is like," Jenkins said.
- Authority—moves people through obligation
- Influence—moves people through ownership
The difference is highly practical: it is the distinction between a technician who runs a sample purely because they were ordered to, and one who proactively flags a subtle method discrepancy before anyone else notices. This shift from external compliance to internal motivation is the ultimate return on investment for a leader.
The same dynamic shows up well before anyone earns a title—leadership potential often emerges through influence rather than formal authority, long before a promotion makes it official.
The mistake Jenkins warned against was treating influence as a replacement for authority rather than a layer built on top of it. A lab manager who neglected the core mechanics of running a lab forfeited the professional standing required to lead anyone. "It's going to be very difficult for you to build influence with your team if you're not exercising that authority," he said. The fundamentals came first, and they were not optional.
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The three pillars of daily lab operations
To build the foundation required for real influence, a lab manager must first master the operational fundamentals. Jenkins framed this into three core categories that require a manager to genuinely understand the science, rather than simply assigning tasks from a desk: :
- Workflow oversight: knowing how long tasks should take, what each person is capable of, and where the bottlenecks actually sit.
- Personnel management: onboarding, attendance, behavior, and addressing problem employees before they drag a team down.
- Coordinating logistics: instrumentation, supplies, budgets, and the cross-training that keeps a lab from collapsing when a key person leaves.
Workflow oversight is where many modern managers try to fake their way through. In an accredited environment, this familiarity must extend directly to quality-management obligations.
Jenkins argued that a lab manager should know their governing standard cold rather than completely outsourcing it to a quality assurance since the accreditation bodies that assess laboratories against ISO/IEC 17025, such as A2LA in the US, hold the lab—not its QA department—accountable for competence.
On the personnel side, where day-to-day performance management lives, Jenkins was blunt about the cost of avoidance. Hoping a personnel issue resolved itself, he warned, was not a strategy; left alone, one difficult employee tended to pull others down with them. Logistics, meanwhile, was the least glamorous of the three and the easiest to let slide—yet it was the floor beneath everything else.
How lab managers build influence, not just authority
If managing authority is about maintaining operational mechanics, building influence is about how a lab manager conducts themselves when those mechanics are under strain. Jenkins highlighted three distinct levers to cultivate this:
- Integrity: within it, accountability was the fastest thing to build trust and the fastest thing to destroy it. "Nothing will destroy trust faster with your team than throwing your team under the bus," he said. The logic ran straight back to his opening premise—if the failures of a team landed on the leader, then owning them in front of superiors was not generosity, it was consistency. The reverse held too: the wins belonged to the team, and a leader who said so out loud earned something no directive could buy.
- Technical credibility: one of the quickest routes to influence available to a lab manager. Keep growing your expertise, stay current, and treat conferences and reading as part of the job, and you became the person the team went to for answers—a standing that produced influence almost as a byproduct.
- Mentorship: the heart of team development—knowing each team member well enough to tailor coaching to their strengths and gaps, delegating work that stretches them, extending grace when people made the mistakes people inevitably made, and giving direct reports the resources to actually succeed rather than setting them up to fail.
These were relational, slow, and unshowy, which was exactly why they compounded—and why they sit at the heart of the behaviors that distinguish effective lab managers from merely competent ones.
Frameworks for Action: Deploying KPIs and OKRs
To translate this leadership philosophy into measurable daily habits, Jenkins advises using two distinct goal-setting frameworks: KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). KPIs were the simpler of the pair—the handful of metrics that actually matter for managing lab performance rather than simply measuring activity. Turnaround time, backlog size, instrument downtime, labor efficiency. At Alpha Resources, a primary KPI was the percentage of certified reference materials out of stock at any given moment, a figure that signaled a deeper operational problem when it climbed and stayed high. A good key performance indicator, he said, met four tests:
- 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 rather than measured in isolation
- Timely: reviewed on a steady cadence, usually monthly, so trends surface early
It should also have lived in useful tension: too easy or too hard to hit, and it told you nothing. "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," he said. The underlying discipline he distilled to a single line—"You cannot change what isn't tracked." Used carelessly, though, a metric can distort the very behavior it is meant to improve, which is why some lab managers pair their indicators with a balanced scorecard approach to keep any single number from being gamed.
OKRs were murkier, and Jenkins admitted as much, noting that even the people who popularized objectives and key results disagreed on how to build one. His advice was to stop chasing the correct form and focus on the underlying habit behind every OKR: name a broad objective, break it into measurable key results, and follow through. Follow-through is where the vast majority of organizational goals die. Simply maintaining a structured framework to set and pursue objective-driven tasks puts a lab manager ahead of the curve. "Just do something," he told the group. The benefit, he argued, came less from precision than from intent: "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."
The bottom line for lab managers
Leadership is not a promotion given via a corporate announcement, rather it is an organizational layer built on top of an already well-executed foundation of authority.
The danger for most lab managers is that authority often feels like leadership from the inside—work is assigned, deadlines are met, and the lab continues to hum. However, compliance and commitment are entirely different things, and only commitment survives when the manager steps out of the room.
According to Jenkins, for a lab manager, the shift was one of attention. The question was not only whether the operation was running, but whether the people running it would follow the same direction if it were framed as a vision rather than an order—the balance between operational efficiency and strategic, team-centered decision-making that defines the strongest lab leaders.
That question led straight to integrity, to credibility earned rather than assumed, to the slow work of mentorship, and to the discipline of actually tracking what mattered. A leader who had mastered authority held a lab together. One who had learned to build influence on top of it maintained something far harder to replace.
