Management skills

Yesterday a friend and I were swapping stories about our experiences with crappy supervisors and started discussing what we would do differently (which I think about a lot now that I'm a month away from having my own lab). This led to a more general discussion about good lab management skills and how a PI without good management skills can really destroy a lab. We're now both reading through this guide to scientific management and so far it seems to contain some really helpful information. I will write more as I continue reading through this manual, but for now I thought I'd share a couple of thoughts from yesterday's discussion.

1) In our field, lab dynamics are really important. Particularly because we all have to share the same equipment and work space, it is really important that the lab is filled with people who are good collaborators and co-workers. Even having one person who is inconsiderate of others' time and space can become toxic for a lab, leading to much anger and resentment. In my experience, this also destroys productivity, as people aren't usually great workers when they're miserable at work. Being a good manager means recognizing problems early, trying to fix those problems quickly, and recognizing when it's time to let someone go. For some reason, in academia there is very little "letting someone go," the status quo seems to be to avoid dealing with the problem person and just graduate them as quickly as possible (also, lots of scary stories about people writing great reference letters for bad people just to get them out of their lab quickly). As far as good management techniques go, this seems like a colossal failure to me and one that I am keen to avoid.

2) If a PI is a bad manager, there's no amount of good employees that can make up for it (unless the PI is so hands-off that they actually have no control over the lab). The PI typically makes all the decisions about which postdocs to hire, which grad students to accept, etc. So if a PI is unaware that there is a toxic person in the lab (or doesn't care, or cares but doesn't do anything about it) and no steps are taken to improve the situation, the whole lab will suffer. The PI is also the bottleneck for productivity, so even if a dozen talented students churn out top-notch papers, if the PI has poor time-management those papers will languish, unpublished, for months or years.

2b) The majority of people who end up in grad school are pretty competitive "Type A" people who want to succeed. If they feel like they are being prevented from succeeding by their PI in some way (or by other lab members) then they will probably end up being very unhappy, and unhappy people are not usually the most productive. Unhappy people also tend to want to get out of bad situations, which can mean really talented researchers leaving academia. Talented people leaving academia because they had a horrible experience with a supervisor is bad for science. If you are a scientist you probably love science, so it seems pretty counterproductive to behave in a way that's ultimately bad for science.