Would anyone like to share their thoughts?Success in science is often measured by number of publications, citations, and similar metrics. But when Alice Sapienza, a chemist with a Ph.D. in organizational behavior who is now at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, asked experienced scientists what qualities they most admire in a scientific leader, she got a very different answer.
Sapienza says her research suggests that the best leaders are those with the best people skills. She surveyed more than 200 scientists and engineers from the United States, Europe, and Asia, asking them to describe the most effective scientific leader they knew. Leading the list were people of "caring and compassion," followed by those who "possess managerial skills" such as effective communication and conflict resolution. Technical skill was a distant third.
"Science is odd in some ways," says Robert Doms, chair of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "You spend all your time as a student and postdoctoral fellow learning how to be a good experimentalist. Then you become an independent scientist, and if you are successful, before long you are no longer doing experiments because you don't have any time, and personnel management becomes a major issue."
"There are some horrible pathologies in some labs in the relationships," says Edward O'Neil, director of the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who offers laboratory management workshops throughout the United States. "People stay because they are inspired by the science, but they leave the training in some of these labs really wounded people. … Then they will use that as a model for leadership."
In his workshops, O'Neil tries to get scientists to change their behavior by asking them to frame a hypothesis. For example, "If I stop yelling at my technician when he makes a mistake and work together to correct the problem, he will finish experiments more quickly and completely." Then, O'Neil asks them to collect and analyze data to see if the data fit the hypothesis.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org...redit_a0700160