Management position? No way!

Imagine your favorite spectator sport — opera, bull fighting, or baseball. As you're transported by the diva's vibrato, the matador's pass, or the stately home run, you marvel at what years of training has produced from what was once raw talent. And perhaps you reflect on where you started, and how far you've come yourself. But however good your training as an experimentalist, when you finally land that coveted job as a lab head you'll be in the position of an avid opera fan asked to step onto the stage at La Scala and fill in for an ailing soprano: raw, enthusiastic, untrained, and under pressure.As your sudden elevation sinks in, you may feel like Cleopatra in her salad days, when she was green in judgment. For you've been catapulted from a shop-floor position to manager of what is effectively a small business. Your raw materials are funds from granting agencies. Your employees are the technicians, students, and post-docs who work in your lab. Your products are information in the form of papers and presentations, and the next generation of trained scientists. Your consumers are your fellow scientists, the same grantees who financed you in the first place, and the public, who are confident that you're using their money to build a better world. So now you have to keep your employees happy, sell their product to the consumers, deal with your competitors, manage crises, maintain good relationships with your holding company (your university or research institution), and balance the books every year. Should be child's play.Thinking of science as a business may seem crass. But it's the starry-eyed view that science consists entirely of the unfettered pursuit of pure knowledge that propels managerially untrained people like us into demanding positions. Any student or post-doc who has experienced the first few years of a lab can tell you that the on-the-job training of a lab head can be a difficult time for all concerned. Do you know how to give productive criticism, resolve disputes between people in your lab, what to do when someone starts crying in your office, what to do when you start crying in your office, how to interview a prospective post-doc or technician, or any of the host of other things that you'll have to do within your first six months in office? You think you'll learn from your mistakes, just as you did at the bench — but remember that the old mistakes were made on test tubes, gels, and single cells, none of whom are known for their sensitivity. It wasn't until my first student graduated that I understood my mother's lament that she wished she could raise her first child (me) from scratch again to avoid some of the mistakes she thought she'd made on the first try.Just as many prospective mothers and fathers worry about how well they'll do with a new baby, many post-docs fret about how well they'll face the challenges of running a lab. Sadly, there is no scientific equivalent of the child-rearing manuals for anxious parents. One quick fix for this problem would be to add some training in management skills to graduate student or post-doctoral education. But just as most parents don't get seriously interested in child-rearing until the baby is due, budding lab heads care most about their imminent responsibilities when the end of their post-doctoral career is in sight, making this the best time for a burst of management training. So perhaps national granting agencies should develop a short, intensive course on running a lab, and make attendance a prerequisite for receiving a grant. Such a course could cover topics like the care and feeding of lab members, how to stay financially within your means, scientific ethics, how to manage your time, how to deal with bureaucracy, and how to write grants. The teachers would be professionals trained in the various fields and the participants would be made to practice, or at least simulate, the skills they were learning.The two most popular arguments against this idea are, first, that ‘people skills’ can't be taught and second, that the structure of science is so unusual we'll never be able to find management professionals who understand us well enough to help us. Hogwash! Although scientists certainly differ in their ability to deal with people, there is no reason to suppose that everyone's skills can't be improved by teaching as well as practice. And the idea that no-one has ever had to deal with a collection of bright, motivated, jargon-talking, and often iconoclastic people working more or less independently under one roof, would be strongly resented in the computer industry, where learning how to manage people is taken seriously.Maybe our resistance to a little training about people and their emotions is a reflection of our fear of the irrational. Our scientific training teaches us to identify and concentrate on those problems that will yield a single unambiguous solution in response to rational experiments. People problems always involve different individuals with different points of view that often extend to different descriptions of reality. Without tact and diplomacy, no amount of logic will solve these problems. Maybe experts can help us run our cottage industries more smoothly; if so, we'll have more time for experiments and spend less time chewing antacid pills.