The Top 5 (or 6) Essential Management Skills for Collaborative Scientists
First up: managing yourself
As I’ve mentioned a time or a thousand, I’m increasingly convinced that the key to becoming a successful team scientist is developing essential management skills. As I’ve been ruminating on this idea, I have begun to categorize those management skills – I am a librarian, after all – and am going to spend the next few weeks writing about these skills and why they’re important.
The Top 5 (or 6) Essential Management Skills for Collaborative Scientists
Managing yourself
Managing your team
Managing your systems
Managing your collaborations
Managing your science and your research program… still trying to decide if these are two separate things… stay tuned!
First up: Managing yourself
Managing yourself - your reactions, your responses, your time, your energy, your work, your deadlines, your vision - may well be the most important work you do in building, leading, and managing a science team. You are the role model to which other team members will look, not just to learn but also to understand the team’s culture, behavioral expectations, and vision for the future.
If you are unable to manage yourself, you will become the bottleneck in the team’s work, making it not only impossible for you to achieve your goals but making it impossible for others to achieve theirs.
Don’t let that scare you!
Managing yourself is simpler than you think, and, if we’re being honest, is the only aspect of work that is (more or less) completely within your control.
Getting good at managing yourself starts by investing time in understanding what you want to build, how you like to work, and what kind of team you want to lead. Without doing this work, you could end up building something that meets other people’s expectations but not your own.
You could also end up trying to work in ways that aren’t aligned with your personality, your natural energy rhythms, your values, and your goals. For example, if your peak creative energy is from 7-10 PM and your brain feels like mush in the mornings, stop trying to do deep work at 5 AM! If your advisor modeled a pretty hierarchical, authoritarian kind of leadership, but you are someone who values a more egalitarian approach to leadership, you are going to struggle if you try to emulate your advisor’s approach.
The goal here is for you to identify how you work best, how you want to work, and the kind of team and culture you want to build.
A few questions to get you started:
What do you want your personal life (life away from work) to look and feel like? Be as specific as possible with descriptors that resonate with you!
How would you define success for your personal life?
Imagine yourself in 10 years. What does your life look and feel like then? What did you do during those 10 years to make it look and feel like that?
If you’d like to start thinking more deeply about your research vision and how that might align with your personal vision, you can work through the questions toward the end of this post.
Most importantly, start paying attention! Pay attention to what works for you and what doesn’t. The ways in which you work, the ways in which you are managing yourself, are impacting your science more deeply than you may realize… and represent an opportunity for improving both your actual work and your experience of work.