What’s your reaction when you hear mention of a “Leadership Seminar?” Do your eyes glaze over as you wonder what you could possibly glean there that’s a better use of your time than buckling down to do the next experiment, working on that proposal that’s due soon, or corralling some students into getting real work done? Chop chop!
If that’s your Pavlovian response to “leadership,” you’re not alone. When I started my research career in the then-nascent field of bioinformatics as a heavily recruited young faculty member at UNC–Chapel Hill, I recall studiously avoiding anything with a whiff of that word. My own thinking was: “Leadership? Hey, I brought in all this funding, doesn’t that count? The rest is boring posturing, and as a dedicated and serious scientist, I’m not going to bother with it.”
And besides, isn’t leadership one of those inherent qualities you’re either born with—or not? That’s what I told myself then. (In case you’re wondering, I was convinced I was born without it.)
At the time, I was running a small lab with a few people, and although I had secured substantial funding for a startup lab, the stakes weren’t enormous. I didn’t realize how forgiving that context was for failures of leadership. But as I advanced in my career and the stakes rose, my view of leadership evolved dramatically.
More Funding, More Demand for Leadership
It took a shift in stakes for me to realize I needed a new approach. As I figured out the rigamarole of landing more than just the occasional grant and rose to a point where I was in charge of 16 people and over a million dollars per year in lab budgets, my leadership failings began to have serious consequences.
Lab output and productivity suffered. Manuscripts were slow to go out, and some never got submitted at all. I should have felt like I was winning the game at this point in my career, but instead, I felt like a massive impostor. This fed into a vicious cycle you might recognize from your own experience: I had convinced people to give us money, yet I knew, deep down, that we weren’t using that money in the most optimal way.
And yet, despite all this, I never once thought to myself, “Gee, I should go do some leadership training.”
Why Is “Leadership” Such a Dirty Word?
Why didn’t that even cross my mind? And why do so many of the smart, hardworking academics I’ve worked with avoid leadership training as persistently as I did?
It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize I had a problem—I had a plethora of problems. “We’ve got problems” could have been my lab motto. These included manuscripts that were slow to crawl out the door (if they got submitted at all), postdocs who couldn’t seem to focus and get the necessary work done, projects that were behind schedule, and bureaucratic nightmares.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t see how any of these could be problems of leadership.
My problems seemed very specific and pragmatic, while “leadership” felt vague and micro-managey. If you’d asked me what the word actually meant, I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with a satisfactory definition.
“Leadership” Doesn’t Imply Measurable Outcomes
The core of the problem is in the word itself. Leadership is the noun form of the verb “to lead.” It’s an action rendered static and, unfortunately for our busy brains, abstract.
But just remembering there’s a verb in there doesn’t solve our problem. To lead is abstract too. Yes, you can lead, but how are you leading? What kind of leader do you want to be?
A good leader, you might say, or an effective one. But how do we measure “good” or “effective?” Is it the total number of publications? The happiness of the lab?
We’re now stepping into some mighty squishy, hard-to-define territory. And as scientists, we like to measure and quantify.
Let’s examine what good or effective leadership looks like when applied to a concrete action—something like grant writing. I think we all know what the desired result is when we tackle this particular task.
A “good” grant proposal results in funding. A “bad” one falls short of that mark. The outcome is built into the action, making it easy to see the relevance of getting help with grant writing if you want to write more effective proposals.
On the leadership side, it’s not so clear. I’ve rarely heard anyone discuss leadership in terms of how it can impact us as researchers. I’ve never heard it explained in a way that would seem to solve some of the specific problems I had in making my lab run more productively.
The Leadership Crisis in Research
This gap in the conversation is why I’m putting pen to paper today. Let’s start with a very simple list of outcomes that would make any researcher sit up and pay attention.
Raise your hand if you’d like to achieve:
- A smoothly running lab
- Impact in the field and recognition for that impact
- Making new and interesting discoveries
- Having a team that you enjoy working with
- Meeting the bureaucratic requirements to keep the whole thing going
- An outlet for creativity and innovation, where you can render ideas effectively into reality
Back when I was running a lab, I’d have signed on immediately to learn a new set of skills that would lead to a smoothly running research team that’s fun to work with, makes interesting discoveries, and has an impact in the field. If “leadership” were thus framed, I’d have been much more likely to embrace it as a possible solution to my many problems.
But there’s still something off-putting about that word. We haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of it.
Up Next: The Problem with “Management”
In the next part of this article, we’ll dive into another word that haunts many researchers: “management.” We’ll explore why management feels like the death of everything we hold dear in science, and how this perception might be blocking us from solving the very problems that hold us back.
Stay tuned!
