“Ask Me Anything” about Lab Management

Academics are trained experts in their fields, but that training rarely includes a formal education in the skills necessary to manage and mentor people.

What does it mean to be a manager in an academic + design + community research setting, like the UC San Diego Design Lab? The Design Lab brings together designers, academics and communities via a collection of labs and teams that span multiple disciplines. Activities that Design Lab members pursue are broad, but share a desire to have societal impact in the San Diego region and beyond. Managing students, staff, volunteers and other people to accomplish these goals is not easy and reflects a set of skills that are not often “taught” in school.

Academics are trained experts in their respective fields, but that training rarely includes a formal education in the skills necessary to manage budgets, deadlines, and external relationships, or to mentor people. As a result, some lab management practices can develop from a sudden need to act, such as needing to resolve a conflict about authorship two days before a paper submission deadline, rather than a deliberate discussion about how to acknowledge the people who contribute to research. When an awkward situation occurs, people may not know what questions they can ask about the situation in-the-moment and they may not feel comfortable speaking up.

This summer we asked three leaders in the Design Lab to reflect on the following questions during an “Ask Me Anything” panel discussion on Lab Management:

1. How and when did you learn the skills necessary to lead a lab group?
2. How do you make decisions about which projects are in scope and out of scope for your lab?
3. As leaders of your lab groups, you play a lot of different roles, from being educators to project managers and principal investigators for sponsored research. How do you reconcile the tensions among these roles?
4. How do you know when a mentor-mentee relationship is working? How do you know when one isn’t working?
5. How do you discuss ethical issues that arise in your lab, such as recognizing bias, collaboration, data management, publication, (general disagreements), etc.?

The Ask Me Anything session was the first in a series of panel discussions hosted by the Cultivating Culture Working Group (CCWG), which was created to investigate opportunities for the Design Lab community to reflect on and promote a healthy lab culture. The CCWG includes Camille Nebeker, Brian McInnis, Elizabeth Eikey, Steven Rick, Maryam Gholami, and Emily Knapp. This article is a synopsis of key insights drawn from the panel discussion on Lab Management:

• Promote a healthy lab by setting goals for the culture you want to cultivate
• Create space for culture to blossom by asking for feedback and regularly evaluating lab priorities
• Provide mentorship that prepares people to be successful
• Identify issues early and create resolutions that are about the people
• Institutionalize social support for people

The panel included Mai Thi Nguyen, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the Design Lab, Scott Klemmer, Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and Engineering and Co-founder of the Design Lab, and Michèle Morris, Associate Director of the Design Lab and Community Team Director. The hour-long discussion was facilitated by Elizabeth (Lizz) Eikey, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Emily Knapp, Design Lab Industry Strategist who managed audience questions.

Through this series of panel discussions, we are working to identify best practices and strengths — as well as challenges and areas for growth — to foster supportive research environments. For us, cultivating the research culture of the Design Lab is an opportunity to turn inward, applying the community-centered and community-driven design practices we strive for in our projects to our own day-to-day practices.

In addition, we want to learn from people beyond this Design Lab community. To promote online discussion we have also included an extended list of questions related to Lab Management at the end of the article and encourage you to use the Medium commenting features to share your thoughts, experiences, and beliefs. Follow this link for instructions about how to share a comment using Medium.

Promote a healthy lab by setting goals for the culture you want to cultivate

Research labs are often evaluated by what they are able to produce, such as top-tier publications, awarded grant funding, community involvement, and by the accomplishments of alumni — i.e., former students who have moved on from the lab. While a lab can appear highly productive from the outside, it can also have an unhealthy culture within where people feel overworked, undervalued, and unsupported. The panelists shared several goals that they set for the type of lab culture that they each try to cultivate.

Goal of mutual support among all members of the lab. Learning to give and receive feedback can be a valuable way to promote mutual support among students as they grow through similar struggles in research (e.g., identifying relevant literature, critiquing study protocols, analyzing and reporting results). Moreover, lab members can benefit from understanding the role of a mentor and mentee in creating a supportive and mutually beneficial lab environment. Making mutual support a top priority for a lab can seed new opportunities for creativity and collaboration among lab members.

Goal of feeling safe to experiment and share unfinished work. Presenting academic research can be intimidating, so many people tend to only share their polished work. Motivating people to share unfinished work can help others within a lab to recognize opportunities to jump in with support: “I can collaborate with you on this,” “I have these data,” or “you could consider this statistical analysis and I can help.” By inviting every member of the lab to regularly critique and contribute to each other’s unfinished work, you can — over time — organize the entire lab around a pipeline of shared research.

Share a comment: Regardless of whether you are a student, staff, faculty or affiliated with academic research in other ways, what goals do you want to achieve with your lab group?

Create space for culture to blossom by asking for feedback and regularly evaluating lab priorities

All of the panelists emphasized that you learn to lead a lab by making mistakes, recognizing when you have made a mistake, and then trying to learn from the mistake. The following are a few tips to follow when introducing a new practice to your lab.

Invite feedback when you are trying out something new. A panelist stressed that it is important to be humble about trying something new, “ask for feedback from the lab about how it went.” By making a regular practice of asking for feedback — “this felt a little off, how did this go?” — lab managers can learn about what works and what does not, while inviting others to regularly talk about practices in the lab.

Share a comment: What practices have helped your lab group to support each other in research and in other ways?

Continuously evaluate the priorities of your lab. Managing a research lab involves setting goals for the culture and making hard choices in order to provide space for research as well as the culture to blossom. The panelists shared several strategies (or “filters”) to make decisions about lab priorities.

1. Dream projects. Maintain a shared list of projects for the lab, so that you always have a backlog of possible and interesting work. There aren’t enough resources and time to do everything, but adding the idea to the list of dream projects demonstrates value for the idea as well as the people who shared the idea.
2. Build on the unique talents within the lab. Choose projects that extend from the competitive advantages of the lab group. There are a lot of smart people out there; what types of projects can your lab group lead that other groups cannot as easily?
3. Evaluate return on investment. Choose projects that meet the four “F’s”: (1) a good fit, (2) fruitful research, (3) the work is fun, and (4) has focused expectations. Develop specific questions and metrics to evaluate the potential return on investment for a project and to avoid projects that might waste time, effort, or money.
4. Pass on some projects. Finally, say no to ideas that are filtered out.

Share a comment: What practices have helped your lab group to make decisions about projects, timelines, and objectives?

Provide mentorship that prepares people to be successful

One thing that came up from our panelists is that lab management can involve supervision, advising, and mentoring people. The panelists shared tips about student onboarding processes as well as strategies for navigating difficult discussions within a lab. The following are a few questions that faculty members might ask their students, or that students might ask themselves about what they need in terms of mentorship.

Ask students about their needs and goals for mentoring. A panelist described their mentoring strategy as “holistic” in that in order for students to bring their full self to their work, we need to meet students where they are. In practice, this can mean asking students to share their ideas about what they would like to see in the mentoring relationship: e.g., when would they like to meet, how often, what do they need from a mentor, what types of feedback would they like.

Help students to communicate their research. People find their academic voice as they transition from being trainees into independent researchers. Ask students about their academic role models, the vision for their work, and how they (aspire) to position themselves within their academic community: Who do you hope would be excited about your latest research? Questions about how a student wants to position themselves can also serve as an additional “filter” to prioritize the students’ time and effort: Will THIS research help you to become the scholar that you want to be?

Encourage lab members to become independent. One of the panelists shared an anecdote about a premiere restaurant in Germany: “What the head chef is most known for is that the people who apprentice with him go on to lead great restaurants.” Rather than hold on to people who are productive within a lab, this model of mentorship prioritizes providing students, trainees, and other lab members with the support and resources they need to ultimately be successful after they leave the lab. A healthy lab culture can help members to grow, whereas a toxic lab culture can leave people feeling uncertain about their abilities and their safety, until they simply leave the lab out of exhaustion or worse.

Share a comment: If you currently lead a lab group, what advice, opportunities, and support helped you to establish a lab of your own? What resources do you wish you had had (or known about) when you were just getting started as an academic?

Identify issues early and create resolutions that are about the people

The panelists shared experiences from their past and offered practices that have helped them to lead their labs through difficult periods.

Tensions can arise around authorship on research publications and grant proposals. A lot can change over the course of a research project, which can play into decisions about who to include and how to prioritize contributors to a project. It is important to be transparent about communicating expectations along with practices within a lab related to these decisions, otherwise senior members of a lab run the risk of tension and hurt feelings just before and long after a deadline. Panelists shared a range of strategies, from co-creating guidelines with the members of the lab group to adopting the existing guidelines for authorship set by an academic community, such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)’s Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Criteria for Authorship.

In some cases, specific people are not a good fit with a lab’s culture. It is common in academia to look the other way (or let things slide) until a behavior becomes problematic, but panelists stressed that we need to resist this mentality. A panelist said that, “when something feels off we need to flag it early,” so that conflicts do not go unaddressed. However, knowing when to document and what aspects of an encounter to note can be less clear at the moment (e.g., specific details about an interaction, any bystanders, feelings after an exchange, “screenshots” and other evidence).

Share a comment: If you are a faculty member (or senior member of a lab) and you begin to hear about behaviors happening related to a colleague or within another lab, what steps would you take to promote a healthier lab culture?

The panelists offered steps to navigate these situations. After recognizing that there may be a concern surrounding a specific lab member, panelists recommended a humanistic approach that involves documenting behaviors, while having an open and candid conversation about what you have observed with the people involved. A humanistic approach also means making resolutions about the people involved, such as by asking a series of key questions: (1) What does the person (or people) involved need? (2) What resources can we provide that support the people? (3) After providing resources, have the additional resources contributed towards a resolution?

When the tension in a lab is about “fit” within a lab, failing to recognize the issues and move towards a resolution early can interfere with work and can have long term impacts on lab culture. However, some of these tensions / difficult situations aren’t just about the involved member, but rather the lab as a whole and require all — but especially leaders — to be reflective and to do their own “work” to improve culture and really assess root causes, rather than the symptoms.

Institutionalize social support for people

The variety of practices related to research authorship decisions are just one example of the “hidden curriculum” in academia that people learn (and add to) throughout their career. Not knowing norms and conventions or related practices early on can make academia daunting for people to navigate as they develop from trainees into independent researchers. The power dynamics in academia can also block people from even asking questions about common practices, like authorship decisions. The panelists talked about some of the steps that they have taken within their labs to institutionalize social support for people and to encourage open conversations. The following are tips that bubbled up from the conversation.

Institutionalize mentorship across multiple faculty and lab groups. A faculty member might be the lead manager of their lab, but students within the lab may have formal and informal faculty mentors from across the department, university, regional area, etc. Institutionalizing a mentorship process beyond a “home” lab can create multiple “touch points” for students to receive feedback, which can expose them to a variety of academic practices while extending their social support network.

Create an onboarding process that involves current and former lab members. There can be a lot for students to learn when they are just joining a lab group. A formal onboarding process can provide time and space for students to gain this background knowledge, while introducing them to cultural practices within the lab, such as how to give and receive feedback. The onboarding process can also be a good way to introduce new lab members to current and former members, who know what it’s like to be “new” in the lab and can provide support.

Encourage people to share how they are feeling. Sometimes people are afraid to ask about the awkward situations that arise in a lab setting. Additionally, people who are less familiar with academic practices may not even know what questions they can ask. Recognizing that people may not know or be able to ask the right questions, it can help to encourage people to communicate when something is causing some angst, so that allies can help them to translate their feelings into impactful questions.

Panelists shared ideas about how to connect students with multiple faculty mentors as well as current and former members. Encouraging people to share their feelings, to ask questions, and to be willing to discuss difficult topics also depends on the lab and lab manager’s ability to actively listen, collaboratively explore possible resolutions, and to lead with humility. The space and people within a lab have to be trusted and promote safety, in order to cultivate a healthy lab culture.

Share a comment: What steps have you taken to help institutionalize social support for the people within your team, lab, or research center?

Background on the Panelists

Scott Klemmer shared that he has spent most of his adult life working in a design studio setting, gaining experience through an apprenticeship model that he strives to continue through the way that he facilitates the research activity of his lab — see Lave and Wenger (2001) Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. On the very first day of Scott’s PhD program in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, he was invited onto a paper. For Scott, this first research experience was really fun, and involved working with a good number of people: “I really like projects where there are more people on it so that you can arrive and leave in a more gradual way.” Scott strives to cultivate a similar experience of research for the students and other people who work with his lab.

Michèle Morris developed her management style through years of government service, law enforcement, and leadership in the business community. Michèle views herself as an “investigator” by training, applying design thinking as a way to understand why people do what they do and when they do it. Within the Design Lab, Michèle leads multiple efforts including the Community Team (internal and external partnerships and initiatives), Operations (policy, communications, administration) and our community counterpart, the Design Forward Alliance (designforwardsd.com). Michèle describes the DFA as a living lab, as it includes many partners and stakeholders from across the San Diego Region in an ongoing process of improving our broader community.

Before joining as Director of the Design Lab, Mai Thi Nguyen built the Equity and Resilience lab from the ground up at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Mai described her research lab at UNC as atypical in the field of urban planning. Mai shared how the Equity and Resilience Lab came from a personal desire to create an intellectual home for people who may come from various backgrounds and levels of experience, but share a common drive to identify and change urban policies that are unfair and unjust. At UNC, Mai worked to create a lab culture where people are not afraid to share ideas that are still early in their development, so that others in the lab can offer support and suggest ways to collaborate. Mai’s goal as the Design Lab Director is to focus on solving complex societal problems by addressing structural and systemic inequality.

Panel Discussion Questions

This article was co-authored by members of the Cultivating Culture Working Group — with feedback from the panelists. This summary will contribute to our “cultivating culture” community-centered design work that formally begins in Fall 2021. We decided to share this article broadly, because we felt that the insights as well as the panel discussion questions might help other lab groups at other universities to reflect on and promote a healthy and sustainable lab culture.

What steps will you take to promote a healthier lab culture? We encourage you to pick up some of the questions that we considered for the panel (copied below) and facilitate a similar conversation within your own lab group (please share what you learn!). We also want to encourage you to comment directly on the questions below, by using the Medium commenting features. Please share your thoughts and beliefs about lab management, so that other readers can learn from your experiences.

1. Setting and achieving goals: How do you make sure that the work you do advances the purpose and goals of your lab? How do you make decisions about which projects are in scope and out of scope for your lab/team?
2. Playing various roles: As leaders of your lab groups, you play a lot of different roles, from being educators to project managers and principal investigators for funding agencies. How do you reconcile the tensions among these roles?
3. Simultaneously managing several efforts: What practices have helped you to manage multiple projects at once (e.g., meeting structures, ways to stay organized, etc.)? What does an average week look like for you? What steps do you typically take when your team / students don’t meet a deadline?
4. Planning for student and trainee success: What strategies do you use (if any) to monitor professional development among your team members? How do you know when a mentor-mentee relationship is working? How do you know when one isn’t working?
5. Welcoming newcomers: How do you recruit and onboard newcomers to your lab group? What steps do you take when lab members are in the process of leaving the group?
6. Facilitating difficult discussions: What steps do you take when there is a disagreement within your lab/team? What about when you are directly involved in the disagreement?
7. What strategies have not worked: What practices haven’t worked for you (or for your lab) in the past? (Is there a practice that you would be interested in changing [“this is how I do it, we’ve always done it this way, but maybe there’s something I can do better”])?

This post was co-authored by all members of the CCWG, which includes Camille Nebeker, Brian McInnis, Elizabeth Eikey, Steven Rick, Maryam Gholami, and Emily Knapp. Follow this link to read more about the CCWG.