Most lab managers are academically trained and experienced scientists. This experience builds a repertoire of successful technical skills, often called “hard skills” because they pertain to things that can be easily quantified and measured. However, once these technically trained scientists earn the role of lab manager, they are faced with a wide array of non-technical decisions to make. Many of these responsibilities center around interacting with, influencing, and leading people. The skills most commonly associated with these activities are often called “soft skills.” This naming approach is ironic because, for many scientists, learning these soft skills is much more challenging than learning technical hard skills.
Key soft skills
Soft skills are important for any role that involves teamwork, influencing, or leading people. Lab staff are complex individuals with emotions, blind spots, passions, and inconsistencies. In other words, they are human. Getting these complicated people to work together, cooperate, and share requires a series of human-centered skills. Some of the most important soft skills include the following:
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Communication
Communication skills are vital, and active listening is a key component of effective communication. Successful leaders are good listeners. To make good decisions, lab managers need to get good information. So, lab managers need to master the skill of listening to learn from everyone.
Lab staff are complex individuals with emotions, blind spots, passions, and inconsistencies. In other word, they are human.
Lab managers also need to share a wide variety of information with staff. This includes speaking at meetings large and small, writing effectively, presenting on behalf of the lab at internal and external functions, developing proposals, and interacting effectively with individuals.
Emotional intelligence
Lab managers need to manage their own feelings and emotions as well as help staff find the right balance of emotions for their teams and the lab as a whole. This requires mindfulness and awareness of how our emotions impact our behavior and perspective, as well as helping others find that awareness. Effectively helping others with emotional situations requires skills in empathy and compassion. Being successful in the lab can be challenging, with lots of ups and downs as experiments succeed and fail. It is important for the lab manager to help staff manage this rollercoaster of emotions while staying focused on the lab’s mission and purpose.
Teamwork and collaboration
Modern science is done almost exclusively in teams. Enabling teams to develop, grow, and thrive requires patience and persistence. Being a good teammate involves emotional maturity, accountability, trust, and a willingness to share. Building coherence between words and actions, being dependable, and looking for solutions that benefit the team rather than individuals are key aspects that need to be mastered.
Conflict resolution
Whenever people work together, conflicts will occur. Building conflict resolution skills is critical to leading any organization. It is important to have the courage and willingness to engage in conflict resolution, to be able to impartially investigate situations, and to look for win/win outcomes. In addition, scientific advancement often requires some amount of creative conflict. Lab managers need the skills to participate in, and mediate, healthy conflict around ideas, observations, and outcomes. These creative conflicts can move science forward significantly—if they can remain respectful and balanced.
Adaptability
Science can move rapidly and sometimes unpredictably. Lab managers need to be able to manage change and make critical decisions, often with insufficient data. Learning to seek diverse input and make data-driven decisions helps the lab be flexible and adjust to the changes that happen with organizations and stakeholders.
Building coherence between words and actions, being dependable, and looking for solutions that benefit the team rather than individuals are key aspects that need to be mastered.
Being humble
Seek the best ideas, choices, solutions, and options, regardless of who has the idea. The best leaders are focused on the lab’s goal, not on who might get the credit. Demonstrating vulnerability by admitting when you need help or have made a mistake will help the lab grow.
Ways to learn soft skills
The most common way to learn soft skills is through painful experience. Most new lab managers interact with people the way their predecessor interacted with them. If they had a good leader, they may have learned important soft skills from them. Unfortunately, there are plenty of poor examples of leadership out there. Learning from experience is effective, but can be stressful, frustrating, and lead to poor outcomes.
One approach to learning soft skills is to look for training programs where you can learn specific leadership and management skills. Training programs might involve e-learning, conferences, webinars, or in-person training classes. Look for courses that combine knowledge with examples that are pertinent to lab management. These opportunities might be available within your organization, from external sources, or from local colleges and universities.
A more effective approach to developing better soft skills is to find a mentor. In essence, mentors teach you how to get things done. They show mentees how to accomplish different activities in ways that work for them. Try to identify someone you think is successful, whose approach you respect, and who demonstrates skills you’d like to learn. Mentors don’t need to be in the same organization—or even the same field. They simply need to have valuable experience they’re willing to share.
Ways to measure soft skill aptitude
One of the reasons why these skills are called soft skills is because they are hard to measure and quantify. While there aren’t universally accepted approaches to measure aptitude in soft skills, remembering that the purpose of these skills is to influence the people around you can help you understand your current competencies. To assess your own skills, start by seeking input from your staff about how well you perform in different aspects of leadership and management. They will have good ideas about the broad areas where you perform well and the areas where some improvement might be needed. However, it can be very difficult to get unbiased feedback directly. It might be helpful to ask your supervisor or HR to conduct 360 feedback to harvest some of this information. Some external leadership training programs also include getting feedback from your staff and coworkers.
An indirect but effective approach to measuring your soft skills is evaluating your lab’s culture and work environment. What are the strengths of your lab and its approach to delivering for stakeholders, and what are the weaknesses? These strengths and weaknesses reflect your approach as a leader. Improving your soft skills in areas where the lab’s work environment has a weakness will enable you to take more direct action to make improvements. For example, if you identify that the lab is insufficiently innovative, it could stem from a lack of idea-sharing, brainstorming, and creative conflict. If you can improve your soft skills in listening and vulnerability, you might be able to create greater psychological safety to help staff have sufficient trust to be more candid and creative.
Building soft skills is necessary for all lab managers. These skills enable better leadership and management for the lab. Investing in soft skills development for yourself and other key leaders in the lab will have direct benefits to the lab’s ability to grow, deliver, and thrive.
