Lab Management 101: comment

CPP has a post up about lab management, in response to a post by Janus Professor about her problems controlling her own behaviour around her lab group. I started to reply on their posts, then my reply grew, so it came over here as a post....

Janus Professor wrote:

I have been getting frustrated with my group members lately, and since I have no internal filter, my frustration is narrated to them in real time. Some of the things I say are potentially destructive to our research and to my members’ morale. Even as these words pour out of my mouth, I realize that what I am saying is bad, and I feel guilt. The next time I see the student, I totally reverse course and shower them with praise as I try to put out my flaming guilt. From the students’ point of view, I probably appear to have wild mood swings. Actually, my emotions are pretty constant: CONSTANT FRUSTRATION.

and CPP's response included

you absolutely cannot display uncontrollable frustration to your trainees. That is the kiss of death for your entire laboratory.

You need to always maintain a calm and confident demeanor, even when people are fucking up egregiously and you want to wring their necks. You can express dissatisfaction with your trainees, but it must always be in a calm and confident way.

The moment that your trainees begin to think that you are not calm and confident in your expertise and in your ability to make your lab a success, they will lose trust in you as a mentor. And once they lose trust in you, you are completely fucked.

Everyone has their own style of managing a lab, and I don't believe we should all do it the same way. The best supervisor I had, for MY needs, was very over-emotional... (and male) - he threw things when his experiments didn't work (at the wall, not at people!), he stamped his foot and banged on the table in meetings, he shouted and bounced and hugged and praised and waved his arms around. He was also really considerate - he went way beyond the call of duty (from turning up with groceries when you called in sick to taking a single parent's kids out to the park when they were at breaking point to occasionally declaring spontaneous 'mental health afternoons' (usually the first day of spring-like weather, the first snowfall) and shooing us all out of lab to have fun). I couldn't run a lab like that, but it worked, for most people - and those it didn't suit (e.g. an ex-military mature student who felt the place was anarchic) moved on quite quickly - there was no slow period of discovering what the place was really like, you knoew within a week (maybe two if he was travelling).

I agree with PP that it is vital that lab members (the tech with 20 years more bench experience than me is NOT a trainee!!) don't sense that the PI is totally confused, afraid, flailing around... they need to have respect for the PI, believe that the PI believes in them, and believe that the PI trusts them, will be there for them and back them up when needed. Whether this requires that the PI appear to be confident and calm, I don't know.

Obviously, as a PI, I don't know what my lab team think about me! But we are a reasonably happy group, we churn out the data and papers, and I have low turnover of trainees (they tend to arrive and stay, and I even get transfers from other supervisors into my group because of problems with the other supervisor), so I am going to assume I'm getting some of it right.

I am a passionate, emotional person, and I am also not a very good 'team player' in the management books sense. These things are part of what makes me a good scientist. I am also very good at making mistages - clumsy, a bit prone to rush in over-enthusiastically without thinking things through - and at NOT making the same mistake twice (it is quite amazing how many mistakes there ARE to make, even in the most routine of proceedures). Acting calm and confident at all times is totally out of character, and I'm not good at pretending to be other than I am - I'm crap at 'wearing a mask', and have gotten worse with age and as health problems developed (acting contrary to your basic nature just uses more spoons).

I bring this out into the open early. When a new member joins the lab, we have the usual induction (hang your coat here, this is the booking sheet for Item Z, when you take the second-to-last box of doobries tell Person Y who orders new ones), and I include a quick chat about my style - the detail depends on their position. Let's assume we're talking about new grads/post-docs. I explain briefly that my job involves a lot of different roles, and whilst they're important, they have to expect me to not always be totally up on the details and focused on their work. I explain how I prefer them to stay in touch with me (e.g. if my office door is shut and you don't have an appointment, assume I'm not there and send email. If my door is open, pop in with any short question, but if it'll take longer than 5 minutes, pop in and make an appointment for later. I aim to reply to email within 48 hours - and would very much appreciate it if you have NOT had a reply by then if you resend me the email, as in term time my email box fills up very fast). I loan them a copy of "How to Get a PhD" and ask them to read the chapter on "how to manage your supervisor", then return a week later with some notes on how they best work - would they like to have a fixed weekly or fortnightly meeting time or to send me regular progress report notes, or to meet formally once a month and catch up informally in between as and when? (We try their method for a semester, then we review - I reserve the right if I'm not happy with progress to require them to try something different). I am also very clear, especially with post-docs (who in my experience are the worst at this), that I have a particular 'thing' about needing to know what's going on. I do not want to steal their ideas or data, I am sympathetic about slow progress and problems, I am not a particularly critical boss - as long as they TELL me what's going on. I like to see all data, wierd or dull or for-the-bin - I am a data junkie. I have no problems with them working 7am-3pm or 11am - 8pm, or taking a 3-hour lunch to fit in their sport training or to have lunch with their kids, as long as I KNOW.

I do have progress targets for a period of a month to six weeks for everyone (me included), and I try to restrict my complaints to when we review those.

What I do to calm down at the time, is not go to the loos for five minutes - I go to my office, and I write 'it' down, whatever it is I am mad about. By the time of the review, I can look at the page of notes and prepare: 'I was frustrated with Joey on 8 occasions for not having read those basic papers. So I need to bring that up today. But I was only upset once about him leaving the sink messy, so that is probably an anomoly not worth mentioning... oh yes, and I will remember to tell him that Technician said he was the only person who ALWAYS left the communal supplies cabinet properly restocked, when she was complaining about Sue and George'. If I have snapped, or criticised, or been annoying, I make a point of apologising and moving on. Saying "I was out of line yesterday", often accompanying that with a very very brief, me-focused explanation (I'd just come out of a four-hour meeting, I didn't get much sleep last night, I'm a bit distracted because my friend is having problems) which emphasises that it's not about them (I ALWAYS thought EVERYTHING was about me as a grad student, and my supervisor never told us anything about his day or schedule so it was easy to think that I was the only problem!), then moving on ('I signed the order for those supplies you need', 'I saw a cool paper in this journal, I'll email it to you', 'I love your shoes' - whatever).

I try never to say 'you're doing that wrong, do it my way' but to say 'can I show you something? If you hold it like THIS you don't have to put that down to do the other and you get done quicker! Isn't that neat? why don't you try it?' (except about health and safety things. Then I am always, consistently, hardassed about sticking to the rules).

If I had one golden rule, though, it is to always, always, ALWAYS make it clear that you believe 100% that the person can do their job superbly. The student who is messing up, is making a choice - although I may well write here and whinge to my friends about how so-and-so is not fit to be a PhD, will never do it etc., unless I mean that 100% for every day of a month or so, I don't let an inkling of that get to the person. I sometimes have hard conversations about them needing to step up their act, shift gears, whatever - but I always make it clear that I know they can do it - and I do genuinely believe in my gumdrop-unicorm world view that everyone is capable of doing much, much better than they believe, if they seriously want it. So I aim to present them with choices: 'Joe, we have a bit of a problem - I notice that whilst you're making a lot of progress in the lab, you're not getting to grips with the literature behind your project. I know it can be tricky to juggle different activities, but it's an important skill both to help with doing better lab work and with getting your thesis done on time. You need to learn the skills to read literature quickly and critically, to keep useful notes, to integrate those ideas into your work and discussion, and to do that whilst keeping up with this experiment series. And I get the impression that this isn't a skill set that comes naturally to you, so it might take some time and effort on your part to acquire it, but I know you can. Here are some suggestions of ways you could develop this skill (a course, a book, a habit) - you need to go away and make a plan that suits you, because carrying on as you are isn't getting you where you need to be, is it? Let's talk about it next time we meet - let me know then what I can do to help you.' (Obviously this tends to be a conversation not a monologue). (Yes, this is like toddler training - asking "red coat or blue coat?" rather than saying "put on your coat!").

I think that my group has pretty quickly learnt that I am short-tempered but that it blows over quickly, that I have crap days, that when I'm busy on something teaching-related I sometimes am short and brusk about lab questions, that I genuinely want them to do the best they can and to achieve their ambitions, whatever they are, that they can talk to me.

MY worst habit as a PI is talking about problems with one lab member to another - e.g. I might say "aargh, JewellaryStudent left the radio on again! She is so inconsiderate, she never turns anything off, was she born in a barn?" in a room where a couple of others are working or "SeniorStudent, KhakiWearingStudent made a complete dog's breakfast of his lab work again. It is driving me nuts! Do you have any idea what it is he doesn't understand? Would it help if I made a more detailed check list for the process he's doing?" during a general meeting with SeniorStudent. She's not my colleague, she's a PhD student - a senior one, and one who I'm involving in things like grant writing as appropriate, but I'm not very good at drawing the line!

I think my lab members, like my class-students, fairly quickly realise that I am a bit volatile. I'm trying to fix it by working on myself - but I'm also trying to be open, to make sure that students see thinking about how to best relate to people is a skill that needs developing, to treat each student as an individual with their own needs, with whom I have a unique relationship and who has unique strengths and 'areas of development' and ambitions and goals. I hope the latter makes up for the former!