Every laboratory manager who has attempted to fund a new instrument, retire an outdated method, or overhaul a workflow has run into the same wall: the idea is sound, the data compelling, the benefit obvious, and yet the proposal stalls somewhere upstairs, in a conversation with an executive who never quite understood what the fuss was about. Speaking at the Lab Manager Leadership Summit, Scott Hanton, PhD, editorial director of Lab Manager, put his finger on why so many technically excellent ideas die in the pitch: the problem is almost never the science, but that the manager is fluent in only one of the two languages a change agent must speak. They are missing the language that unlocks resources, approval, and momentum.  "So I've had many scientists walk into my lab and say, I am a scientist, I hate politics, I'm not doing politics," Hanton recounted. "And my response to them is that's fine, so long as you're okay if you lose, but if you want to win, you better learn how to do politics." He was quick to clarify that this is not about partisan politics. Reframing "politics" as the discipline of persuasion sits at the heart of what separates lab managers who drive change from those who merely propose it. It also reframes change management itself: less a matter of having the right plan than of communicating it in a language each audience can act on. 

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Two audiences, two vocabularies

The core insight is that a lab manager operates as a translator between two groups who rarely speak the same tongue: the bench scientists below them, and the executives who control the budget above them. Each group processes the world through an entirely different vocabulary, and a change that makes perfect sense to one can be unintelligible to the other.

Downward, the conversation is native. "This is about the science, right, and we're speaking a common language about science, and we're talking about things like experimental reproducibility, patient safety, data integrity, the technical capabilities of the instruments we're using," Hanton explained. Turnaround time, accuracy, precision, asset management, and the requirements of standards like ISO/IEC 17025 for testing and calibration laboratories—these are the terms a lab manager and their team share without effort.

Upward, everything changes. "When we go up, they're speaking a different language, they're speaking a business leadership language, and that's a lot more about risk, about revenue, about reputation, about strategy, about politics," Hanton explained. 

In practice, the two vocabularies break down along predictable lines:

• The language of the bench: experimental reproducibility, accuracy and precision, turnaround time, data integrity, instrument capability, and compliance with standards such as ISO/IEC 17025.
• The language of leadership: risk, revenue, reputation, strategy, and the internal politics of how resources get allocated.

The point is not that executives are unintelligent. It is that they did not come from the laboratory, they carry different priorities, and they are accountable for a different set of problems. Expecting them to learn the language of the bench is a losing bet. "It's our job to speak their language," Hanton said. The burden of translation falls on the manager.

The cost of refusing to translate

Lab managers who insist on speaking only science pay a steep price, and Hanton has the scar tissue to prove it. Early in his career, as a research scientist pulled into a project for his technical expertise, he found himself in a meeting locked in debate with a vice president. He believed his job was simply to be the person with the correct science.

"Suddenly everyone else in the meeting was quiet, and there was just one vice president and me who were debating, and at the end... he slapped the table, and he said, this discussion is over. We're going to do it my way, because I'm a vice president and you're not." 

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The story has a coda. "Six months later, the project tanked. He was fired." But Hanton did not treat it as vindication; he saw it as a lesson about his own blind spot. "I thought I had the data, but having the data wasn't enough. You've got to master these other skills in order to really make change."

Having the data is necessary. It is not sufficient. The scientist who believes the strength of the evidence should carry the day is applying the rules of one language in a room where a different language is spoken.

The art of persuasion: building influence before it is needed

If persuasion is the skill, influence is its foundation—and the art of persuasion in the lab rests on trust, credibility, and communication. "Persuasion is trying to help somebody else get to a better solution using a rigorous, data-driven, logical argument," Hanton noted. "But it's built upon a foundation of influence, which is equal parts trust, reliability, and respect." 

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Influence is not something a lab manager can conjure in the moment they need a decision. It is banked in advance, through the accumulated evidence that they are trustworthy, that they deliver what they promise, and that they treat others with respect. "You got to do the homework, you got to build the influence, but then you can persuade them if you build good answers."

One of the most powerful tools in that persuasion toolkit is social proof. Rather than trying to win every argument single-handedly, a manager can enlist others to carry the message. "Getting other people to speak up about the benefits of the idea, and to support your idea, will encourage other people to accept your idea through social proof." The manager who understands this stops thinking of themselves as the lone advocate and starts thinking of themselves as the conductor of a chorus.

This also reshapes who a manager talks to, since building influence across the lab often means leading without formal authority. Before pitching upward, Hanton advised identifying the people whose opinions the decision-maker already trusts. "If you're going up to make a change to line manager, who does your boss listen to? Get there first. Make sure that the influencers in your organization have the data, so they can have a conversation." The goal is to walk into the room with the ground already prepared.

Translating the vision into a business case

The mechanics of translation come down to reframing the same idea for different listeners. A change has a vision, a set of benefits, and an answer to the universal question Hanton abbreviated as WIFM—"what's in it for me." For the bench, those benefits are expressed in the currency of the lab: fewer errors, faster turnaround, less rework, better science. For executives, the identical change must be recast in the currency of the business.

That translation comes down to three deliberate moves:

• Connect to core values: "The closer you can connect your change to the core values of your organization, the more likely your change is to proceed." At Air Products, where safety was, in Hanton's words, "literally religion," he learned to tie instrument purchases to safety because "safety would get things funded." The core value differs by organization—it might be regulatory compliance under programs like the CMS Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA), patient safety, data integrity as defined in the FDA's CGMP guidance, or novel research—but the principle holds. This kind of alignment is central to winning capital budget approval for laboratory equipment investments.
• Adopt Strategic Language: "Listen to your senior leaders when they talk about strategy... listen to the words they use. They are going to tell you what the key words are. Use the keywords, connect your change to their strategy. That's the best way to get their support."
• Build a Genuine Business Case: That means translating lab priorities into executive-level business cases by naming the total cost, monetizing the benefits into a return on investment, and being honest about risk, including the risk of inaction. As Hanton framed the pitch: "One of the risks is doing nothing, boss. If you say no, here's the risk of what happens."

The Rosetta Stone in the middle

For lab managers who find the leap to executive language daunting, Hanton offered a practical bridge: managers can use their own boss as a translation exercise. "Maybe you go to your boss first. I'm hopeful that your boss, at least, knows where the laboratory is." A direct supervisor who understands terms like SOP or turnaround time, even vaguely, becomes a testing ground—a way to rehearse how technical value gets reframed for a less technical audience. "We can kind of use that conversation as a Rosetta Stone to get ready to go to the executives."

Working through a handful of diagnostic questions with a supervisor surfaces exactly where the translation will be hardest:

• What does the boss already understand about what the lab does, and what goes over their head?
• Where do they get confused, and which terms make their eyes glaze?
• What questions do they ask—and which of those questions will an executive ask too?

Each of those gaps is a preview of the translation work the manager faces one level up.

Communicate, then communicate again

Even a perfectly translated message rarely lands on the first pass. Hanton is a firm believer in the discipline of repetition, invoking a maxim in the spirit of the well-known "rule of seven": tell a team something seven times, and half of them know it. He admitted his own impatience with it. "I hate repeating myself. I hate having to communicate things twice, let alone seven times, and after seven times, half of them know it."

The takeaway he distilled from a summit participant has become something of a mantra. "If you think you've communicated enough, you have not communicated enough." His own addendum: "If you think you've communicated enough, double it. Communicate more."

This applies in every direction—down to the bench, across to peers, and up to the people holding the budget—and it is a recurring theme in why lab teams resist change and how leaders can respond. A change that is crystal clear in a manager's head remains invisible to the organization until it has been repeated, reframed, and reinforced in the language each audience understands. 

Final thoughts

The lab manager who treats change as a purely technical problem will continue to run into walls. Becoming a bilingual leader means maintaining scientific fluency with one’s team while seamlessly translating that exact same technical value into risk, revenue, and strategy for leadership. 

Persuasion is not beneath the work of a scientist—it is the work, if the goal is to actually get things done.