Find the Hat That Fits… And Wear It: A New Approach to Leadership in the Lab (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this post on leadership, I unpacked the preconceptions that I previously carried around the word "leadership," as a way to open the conversation about what I observe is a problem for many researchers leading labs today.
In this installment, we'll discuss another word we researchers often toss around: management.
That word is a bit like "he who shall not be named" from the popular story of a boy wizard written by a transphobic author.
We don't want to discuss it. We certainly don't want to do it. It's like a dirty word that is just not spoken in polite scientific company.
Yet this aversion to the term is not helping any of us. Let's dive into how to avoid becoming that thing which shall not be named.

Our associations with "management"
The word "manager" always made me think of the just-barely-past-teenagers wearing the orange-red hats at a popular fast food chain. They are the ones who would come out from whatever they were doing in the back (I shudder to think), to fix problems if the register wasn't operating properly, or if I was having a crisis over how my burger was cooked.
With that image in mind of what a manager is, it's no surprise then that I had an aversion to this idea of becoming one. It was an aversion shared by most of my colleagues.

It was not like any of us ever thought to ourselves:
"Let me work away for years of PhD then postdoc work, followed by the long road to tenure, only so I can become a glorified manager!"
No. Not happening.
Which is why I avoided anything that even had the faintest whiff of management to it. I would treat the subject much like a used COVID face mask: like, if I even touched it, illness would ensue.
Becoming a manager sounds like the death of everything we hold dear as scientists.

An unfortunate reality is that the term "management" can't be avoided if we want to grow and be productive in our research work, because it is inextricably linked with effective "leadership."
Note that I said "linked," I did not say "the same as." That's a key distinction that's often lost in discussions around the issue. It's common to fall into the mode of thinking that leadership skills are management skills. It's a bit like confusing an umbrella with the handle of the umbrella. The handle is a necessary part of the umbrella, but it is not the umbrella itself. Management is a component of leadership — one that you don't necessarily have to do yourself — but it is not equivalent to leadership.
Yet if you are like I was, and want to run away from anything smelling of "management," you can run into problems. If you aren't like I was, and actually embrace the idea of management, you can also run into problems.

The Wall of Chaos
The issues with management tend to become clearly apparent at a size of about three to five people.
It is as a lab grows that the inherent entropy all those people generate demands regular management attention to keep things moving in something resembling an orderly direction.
This is the Wall of Chaos. There are a few common approaches that people take to try to get around it.
If, as the leader, you, unlike I did, decide to take this needed rein-in-the-chaos (management) role seriously, you may find that your efforts to keep the team better organized and swimming in the same direction lead to more focused output and progress.

Great! Score one for management.

If you go that route, you may at some point find there's a significant drawback. You may jump in eagerly, yet effort and focus on management will consume an ever-increasing amount of your time and energy, especially as your lab grows. You might compensate for this with a courageous willingness to work nights and weekends, increasing your workload to 50, 60, or even 70 hours per week, just to keep up with the management needs of your lab.

There are hard limits that all of us must consider when it comes to how much we can shoulder: sleep, rest, family, and the immovable fact of there being only 24 hours in a day.
Even if you manage to balance it all, it will grind you down. The obvious results may not manifest right away, but eventually it will feel very old. It will feel like you're constantly distracted by "management" rather than actually doing the research that you started the job to do.
For many researchers, this becomes the internal "false ceiling" for growth. I've known many researchers to stop growing because they subconsciously — or sometimes consciously — want to avoid the seeming necessity of this ever-increasing burden as the lab grows.

Most people think: that's just the way it is. So even if they have big ideas of research that could be done, they find that they're self-limited by the notion that it will require the all-consuming tedium of managing, so they avoid taking on more work.
The impact they could have had is impact that never happens.
They are stuck at the Wall of Chaos. They can't grow, they can't take on more without dropping something else.
This is not intended to imply that every researcher should seek a bigger lab. No, indeed, each person has to find their own point of authentic operation, and for some that is a small lab.
However, it's important to be clear on the true reasons for wanting it to be small. In working with clients, there are those who are truly happy with that scale, and I'm happy for them when they find their sweet spot.
However, there are others who want to "go bigger" — for the challenge of it, for the impact of it, or even for the ego gratification of it — but if they don't get some kind of handle on this management thing, they can get stuck at The Wall of Chaos.
Unfortunately, many stay stuck there for the remainder of their careers, because they don't see another way of doing things. This is a situation that can create resentment, frustration, and disillusionment. This was termed "Middle Aged Disillusioned Colleagues," or MADCs by author Robert Boice. Nobody wants to become a MADC, but many do, by remaining stuck there, at The Wall, and never finding a way around.

I wasn't willing to get stuck at that Wall. I also wasn't willing to take on a larger management load. I was too far from the personality of a micromanager, and not willing to dive into all those gory details of keeping everyone on track.
So I took the second door, the other common approach to this problem. That approach is to simply give up the reins of management and let it "manage itself." It is the laissez-faire approach: just get good people, smart people, hard-working people, and let them figure it out.
I figured this couldn't be so bad, because I was in good company. It's what I'd seen from several of my own mentors, and it's what my father had done in his lab, which had grown to 20 people at its height.

Using this approach, I somehow managed to get my lab to a semi-functional state with 16 people, but the chaos factor was very high. Over time, the unfinished manuscripts accumulated — ones that just never seemed to get out the door unless I was willing to put in herculean effort. There were too many people doing their own thing that didn't feed into the core mission or purpose of the lab.
It started turning into a nightmare. Perhaps for someone more willing to just put their head in the sand, and ignore all the chaos, it would have sufficed. However, I couldn't stand by and idly watch as precious grant funds were whittled away on projects that didn't yield enough of the necessary outputs, like papers.
This laissez-faire method led to the major blowout of my career.

In late 2010, I announced my resignation to my department chair from my tenured faculty job at UNC Chapel Hill. The precipitating event was a dispute over internal monies that had been allocated to support a project in my lab, which we'd been working on for almost two years.

One day, a few months after a management change in the center that was sponsoring the work, I got an email. The email said in essence that the funds we were receiving were being yanked, retroactively by two months from the date of the email.
I was obviously not very happy to have after-the-fact notice of such a major change — the funds in question were covering two FTE staff members, almost amounting to an R01 equivalent of funding.
Following that, and the further machinations that occurred as I tried to sort it out, I decided to send a message by resigning my tenured post. Take that UNC! I'm taking my grant funds with me! (I guess with over $500M of NIH funding, my $1M/year wasn't that much of a kick in the pants to them — though I had just scored a $10M award with some co-PIs, so maybe it bit just a tiny bit of a blow).
That incident relates to the discussion of laissez-faire management in the sense that it was the underlying cause of those funds being yanked. I do not agree with the way UNC did this, but I do understand why they didn't want to continue supporting a project that was not well managed.

We were supposed to be building software to integrate several cores, and though the team was working hard, they needed management and direction to stay on track toward satisfying the goals of the project. I wasn't giving them that.
Unlike grants, where one can "wander" for several years without facing immediate consequences, these consequences of my management approach were in my face.
Perhaps quitting over the incident was rash, but it belied the deeper fear that I had. That incident strengthened my worry that we weren't being productive enough, and may not be able to get key grants renewed if it didn't change.
I was incensed about how I was being treated, but I was also burned out and demoralized by the chaos and lack of productivity.
This is an extreme example of what can happen with the hands-off management approach. While traditional science that's done by one person working alone may not suffer as much from this approach — something I witnessed in a few of the labs I'd trained in — with large-scale proteomics and genomics work involving coordination and complex software development, its inadequacy was made abundantly clear.
As a side note, not learning my lesson, I later also attempted this approach in my business. It yielded similarly dissatisfying results. Conclusion? If you care about doing a good job, and if you care about having ongoing funding, this method doesn't work.

So if neither the hands-on, do-it-yourself management style ends in overwhelm and overwork, and the laissez-faire approach ends in chaos and low productivity, what is the way?

In the next installment, we'll dive into the "third way" that is much less common, but that some people have tapped into by accident — such as one of the labs I trained in. There's a larger principle at work that we'll discuss, which can change your perspective on lab leadership.