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 …