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I became familiar with the hiring process from the standpoint of an applicant, most recently as a newly recruited Assistant Professor. Despite this lived experience, being at the leading edge of hiring my own team is much less familiar. Here, I share some tips and tricks for new group leaders to consider when building their research team. My recent lessons learned.

Some of these steps can be done well ahead of your official start date. If you have the bandwidth to start hiring before you arrive, reach out to your department administrator about how to do so.

1) Writing a job advertisement: I recommend beginning by reflecting upon the role you hope the employee you hire will fill in your group. Will they have managerial or administrative responsibilities? Will they train others? Consider what technical, interpersonal, and organizational skills this person needs to possess to be successful in this role.

Next, write the job advertisement. Begin by reaching out to relevant division and human resources administrators as there may be specific requirements and language that must be included in the job ad. In addition to the requirements, I recommend providing information about your research program. Listing expectations for successful candidates will help prepare applicants for what is to come should they join your group.

2) Advertising your position: While your institution can advertise your open position through institutional job boards, professional websites (LinkedIn, Indeed, Academic Keys, etc.), and society job boards (ASCB, SACNAS, etc.), group leaders can also contribute to this process. If you have a strong social media presence, advertising on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook accounts may help bring attention to the opening. If not, you may have collaborators or trainees who can endorse the position on Twitter to help spread the word. Attend recruiting events to put a face to the name of their laboratory. These could be internal events (i.e., graduate program events and departmental poster sessions) or external events (i.e., society-sponsored online career events and networking hours at conferences).

3) Interviewing and preparation: Once you have decided whether an applicant is a good fit for the position, you can begin to interview candidates. The type of interview may vary depending on the position. For example, for a postdoctoral candidate, I first perform a phone “screener” interview (~15-20 minutes, conversational but led by a set of questions I wrote). If this phone screener interview is successful, then I host a full interview with the candidate and members of my lab. During this full interview, I ask the candidate to present a 30–40-minute virtual research presentation to my lab. However, because my lab was just me when I interviewed my first postdoctoral candidate, I invited members of the hematology community within my Division at Fred Hutch to join the seminar along with research colleagues/collaborators from other institutions whom I trust. It was SO helpful to have supportive and inquisitive scientists join the seminar! My colleagues asked thoughtful questions, helped show the candidate the diversity of research at the Center, and provided insight that helped me decide whether to make an offer to the candidate.

After the seminar, the applicant and I met for a more formal interview where we could speak in-depth about their research and discuss projects in my laboratory. I also created a list of interview questions that I used to guide this conversation. For a postdoc, these questions range from “What do you believe are your strengths as a scientist? What do you want to improve upon or learn during your next phase of training?” to “What traits do you want in a postdoctoral mentor? What style of mentoring do you prefer as a mentee?”. I use this list of questions to guide the interview while also making sure to leave time for the candidate to ask me questions. Using a list of interview questions to direct your one-on-one conversation helps ensure upon completion of the meeting, you have gathered the necessary information to inform your hiring decision.

Along these lines, I have a set of questions for all types of positions I plan to fill in my lab, including postdoctoral fellows, research technicians, undergraduate researchers, and graduate rotation students. Being able to take notes directly on this set of questions is also hugely helpful for me when I go back to review my notes.

Conclusions

As a new group leader, taking care to hire individuals who have the skills and qualities to be successful is incredibly important for your own success. Being thorough in creating a job advertisement and interviewing candidates can help ensure you make the best possible decision to support the success of your group.

Whether you have a few hours a week of a lab tech paid for by your startup funds or you’ve been running your own lab for years, a high functioning team can help you achieve your research goals. Senior research staff often have greater insight into the details of executing research than PIs (they’re paid to attend to the details and free your time!), and at least one senior mentor says she learned everything practical she needed to know about doing research from her staff.

The advice below comes from senior lab staff at Vanderbilt working in a range of scientific areas from wet lab to clinical research to quantitative science.

Keep them in the loop: Have regular meetings with a running agenda. (Protip: Use something like a REDCap survey or Google doc to allow all members of the lab to add to the agenda.)

Include them in meetings outside the lab when appropriate. Defer to them when you’re not sure—they probably know your study protocol better than you.

Have them write down systems and processes. Especially as your lab grows, it will get harder to remember those passing requests to order this reagent or fill out this piece of paperwork. Having documented methods of doing things also helps with cross-training.

Encourage communication with other areas at your institution (e.g., if you expect a staff member to keep track of your funds, ask your budget officer to cc that staff member on emails).

Understand the difference between research staff and administrative assistant. A whiz at writing IRB applications may not be great at calendaring. Research staff may not have the access that admin staff do to an institutional credit card or account to purchase a book from Amazon.

Use your power and funds for good: Build up your staff by paying for or allowing time off for courses, workshops, or intensives that will make them a better employee. Pay for their membership in a relevant professional organization. Buy them useful books or software.

Include staff as authors when reasonable:

• Did they write your IRB application and study protocol?
• Did they enroll 100-1000s of participants?
• Did they run experiments?
• Did they clean data?
• Would you have a paper to write without their contribution to the work?

On Teamwork

If you have multiple staff members, team members should be aware of what’s involved in their co-workers’ responsibilities. Emphasize cross-training and having predetermined backups for sick and vacation days.

A team with members who all understand each others’ work provides several benefits. Multiple connections between team members prevents siloing and allows for collaborative development and optimization of processes and tools. It also creates staff-to-staff mentoring opportunities. Backup coverage for days off is easier; no one feels guilty asking for coverage because it’s expected and not done as a favor. Critical functions will always be managed by trained, experienced staff even if multiple people are out.

Thanks to Sarah Jones, MPH, CCRP and Tonya Yarbrough, RN, for their contributions to this post.

More Resources

A Guide to Managing Research Teams

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

Simple Steps to Validating and Managing Others: A Bedtime Story

Research training programs rarely teach management of staff and trainees. Particularly for those of us who go on to careers in academic medicine, our ability to effectively manage a team is critical to the success of our career. Graduate school, fellowship, and postdoctoral training provide substantial opportunities to develop scientific expertise, but very little structured training in management and team building. I discovered very early on that staff and trainees can respond to the same type of management and oversight in different ways, which often left me at the mercy of how well a trainee could operate under my management style. With the help of my mentors and colleagues, I have developed a training infrastructure for my group that tries to balance highly structured onboarding with loosening oversight as a staff member or trainee demonstrates independence. Importantly, the system we have established leverages several modern web-based platforms that allow for more seamless oversight of trainee activities and progress, even when traveling (or working from home due to a pandemic), and reduces the flood of email chains that can often result in items slipping through the cracks. I hope you find this structure useful as you launch your own team.

Structured Training Agendas. Early on, it became quite clear that trainees would engage with training content in very individual ways, making it difficult to evaluate the degree to which a given trainee was prepared to operate independent of oversight. To address this challenge, my colleagues and I at the Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center have established highly structured training agendas that we use for all new staff and trainees that include boilerplate onboarding, individual training modules that are consistent across the center, and additional training modules that are specific to a staff member or trainee’s job description. After each training module, trainees are required to populate a short presentation that provides an overview of what they learned and they then “teach” the content to their primary mentor or supervisor. This provides a structured environment where the trainee can receive direct feedback on where they missed critical information, and begins to set expectations about work products, timeliness, and professionalism. These training agendas often require a few hours of commitment from the mentor or supervisor for the first few weeks, but we have found that the result is a more rapid transition to independence for high capacity trainees, and appropriate continuation of supervision for trainees who struggle a bit to get on their feet.

Developing the individual training modules can also be a bit of work, but we have found that the development of a module can actually be a fantastic training opportunity for new staff as well. Many of our current modules were developed during training by a new staff member, which provided them an opportunity to learn the material while also giving us an opportunity to provide feedback and help formulate the module in line with our expectations.

Evernote for Lab Notebooks. While lab notebooks are certainly the norm in many basic science laboratories, particularly when working in a wet lab, they are not as common in dry labs. We have implemented a system for lab notebooks in which I build an Evernote notebook for each staff or trainee that is owned by my user profile and shared with the trainee. Importantly, this means there is no risk of losing the notebook when the trainee moves on from the lab, and also provides an incredibly useful way to quickly check in on trainee progress without having to set up a meeting. Trainees’ notebooks include notes for training agenda items, and then eventually for individual projects and tasks that are assigned. At the top of the note the trainee records the location of all files (more details on the file structure below), details about the dataset being leveraged, and a short summary of the goals. Then, each project includes the down and dirty details of analyses, including bits of code, summary of results, basic figures, and any roadblocks. During mentorship meetings, I can just pull up the lab notebook, evaluate progress, and provide some feedback. Importantly, I can also easily see at any time exactly where a trainee is in terms of their progress, which means when I think to myself “I wonder where so-and-so is on Project A and why I haven’t received an update in a couple days?” I can easily hop on the note and check where things stand. This often results in either shooting a quick message or dropping by their desk to talk through an issue. It also allows me to do quick checks on progress very quickly outside of office hours by pulling up their notebooks on my phone.

At first, it took some time to get this off the ground because not all trainees fully embraced it. However, by being consistent in asking about the notebook, and having a few staff and trainees who could model strong notebooks, it has become part of our culture.    

Box for File Management. A major hurdle in providing feedback and helping to troubleshoot code is access to proper scripts and raw data files. Moreover, copying and moving raw data files can result in major data version issues that can easily be missed. We have established a lab Box directory where all raw files and all staff and trainee files exist. Most of our data analysis is performed in R, and the Box structure allows for easy cross-checking and troubleshooting by referring to centrally stored files. This means that I can easily hop on any script written in my group, run through it to find the broken piece, and troubleshoot if needed. It also means that manuscript “code” checks can be completed quickly without pushing data back and forth. Importantly, this also means that we only need to point to file locations in Evernote and never actually store any data within Evernote (which would not comply with the data use requirements for the datasets we often leverage in our work).

Asana for Project Management. The Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center is an interdisciplinary research center focusing on risk and resilience of Alzheimer’s disease. Many investigators within the center infrastructure have large-scale collaborations with faculty and staff biostatisticians that require constant communication and carefully documented progress reports. Asana is a web-based platform that allows project tasks, communication, and results to be tracked within a single space. Projects are built in Asana and individual tasks within that project (e.g., building an analytical dataset, performing primary analyses, performing sensitivity analyses, developing manuscript quality figures) can be assigned to team members. This has streamlined our collaborations and dramatically reduced confusion over missed emails or unwieldy email threads.

Slack for Communication. After a year of working remotely due to COVID-19 and onboarding several team members who have never met in person, our lab has found Slack to be an effective communication tool. The web-based messaging tool with a channel structure helps the team ask individual questions, share interesting publications to a central location, discuss shared hardware issues or computational bottlenecks, and celebrate wins among the team. Slack’s storage and search features also allow team members to locate and refer to past conversations, as needed.

Other programs and techniques can certainly be leveraged to help navigate the challenges of team management; these are just the ones that have worked for me! When you prepare to launch your team, I recommend taking the time to think about and organize your workflows so that your system can easily scale as the team grows!

More Resources

How to Manage People as a New Investigator

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Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

I recently came across this post on Twitter that said, “I’m mentoring an undergrad researcher for the first time! What advice would you give for how to be a good mentor?”

Supervising students is one of my favourite parts of academic life. The post made me think about how I supervise my interns and what tips I would give people that are new to it.

The first thing that came to mind was what I call the “3 rules of my lab.” I always tell these to students when they start in my lab. They reflect my approach to research, supervision and, I suppose, also reflect my personality.

The three rules in my lab:

1. There are no stupid questions
2. If you stuff up (break something, etc.), tell me. It’s okay, we all make mistakes; it’s part of learning.
3. Don’t ever assume I know what I am doing. I could be wrong, so if you think so, say something

On a more serious note, these are the ten tips that I would give to people new to supervising undergraduate interns. Besides number 1, these are in no particular order.

1. Be KIND. Be patient. Doing an internship is a great experience, but it can be overwhelming and scary.
2. Ask the intern what they want out of the experience. Why are they doing the internship?
3. Communicate expectations. I usually emphasize that I am always happy to help, but they are in charge of their own learning. The more you invest, the more you get out. Let the intern take ownership!
4. Be honest about what you can and can’t provide and what is achievable within the time-frame they have.
5. Encourage the intern to ask questions, lots of them.
6. Encourage them to share their ideas and thoughts. To me, great research happens when people just think out aloud and bounce ideas off each other. For every 10 crazy and unfeasible ideas, there is a great one.
7. Include the intern in the group. Have the intern attend group meetings, seminars etc. A large part of an internship is being part of a research team (if that is possible).
8. Train the intern properly, then supervise but let the intern explore things themselves. They might break something, but that’s (mostly) ok. (AKA don’t give the intern that previous sample.)
9. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. It might not be the data they wanted or expected, but they likely learnt something about their system. Welcome to research! Remind the intern that the main point of research is to ask questions, to experiment (in the literal sense of the word).
10. Tell the intern that a large part of science is living with uncertainty. Many times, if they ask a question, you might not know the answer. Again, welcome to research. Let’s find out together, then guide the intern to the next experiment.

Finally, also be kind to yourself! Remember supervising is not something that we are explicitly taught as academics. You are learning as well. Don’t be shy about asking more senior mentors for advice.

More Resources

Microaffirmations

10 Takeaways for Managing Undergraduate Research Assistants

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

61 million people in the US—one in four—have a disability. Beyond stereotypes, “disability” can include conditions that can’t be observed directly. Consider these examples:

• A staff member with depression is struggling to mobilize in the mornings and get to work by 8:00.
• A postdoc with chronic pain wishes they could sit in the lab rather than standing most of the day.
• An employee going through chemo needs specific times off work for appointments, and fights severe nausea at times when at work.
• The fluorescent lights in your space trigger migraines for a student trainee.

Medications can have disabling effects like drowsiness or foggy thinking, which may not be immediately obvious.

At some point in your career, one of your staff or trainees will come to you requesting accommodations to do their job. Many of us are concerned that we won’t know how to handle it when someone comes to us needing help or that making accommodations might be expensive or difficult. The rules and requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act are actually straightforward, and provide a clear path to getting your employee what he or she needs.

The ADA mandates that employers engage in an interactive process with employees with known disabilities in order to provide reasonable accommodations. Important Note: This does not mean you are required to hire or retain certain people simply because they are disabled. Employees must be able to perform the essential functions of their job.¹

Here’s how to recognize when someone needs help and how to work through an interactive process.

Recognizing an Accommodation Request

An accommodation request can come in several forms, none of which require the individual to say the words “disability” or “accommodation.” The staff member can:

• Have obvious limitations, such as requiring a wheelchair or crutches.
• Show a change in performance (tardiness, not finishing work assigned, not performing tasks as well as previously).
• Request an accommodation, with or without using those words. They can request to avoid a repeated wrist motion when performing a task, mention having trouble with their memory or concentration due to a new medication (without then asking for accommodation), or show you a doctor’s note stating they shouldn’t lift more than 20 pounds.

Accommodation option: Employees with difficulty concentrating in an open office or lab environment may need to wear headphones to do their best work.

Any of these should cause you to start a conversation and determine the sort of restrictions or limitations the individual has, whether these limitations impede essential job functions, and how you/your institution can even the playing field with accommodations so the employee has the same opportunity to be successful at their job as an employee without a disability.

Keep the conversation to the whats and whens: What can/can’t the person do, what do they need, and what is the duration of the restrictions or limitations? Don’t ask for details you don’t need to help them, such as what disease or condition caused their impairment, what treatment they are receiving, or if they’re taking their medications. If the individual volunteers information or asks for advice, it’s okay to engage them, but don’t go there without an invitation.

Making Reasonable Accommodations

When working out reasonable accommodations, consider:

• Is the problem activity essential to that job? Could it be given to another employee and another task substituted?
  • For example, your research assistant normally spends the day at a desk analyzing data, but four times a year you ask her to walk around a local event for three hours handing out flyers about your study. She says back pain prevents her from standing and walking for that long. Since the activity is so infrequent, can it be given to another member of your team while the employee needing accommodation takes something off that team member’s plate or has a different role?
• If the activity is essential to the job, can it be done in a different way? For example:
  • Can the activity usually done standing be done sitting?
  • Could the time be shifted? (I.e., an employee can no longer drive and needs to access public transportation at a set schedule; a sleep disorder prevents working an early shift but would allow later start and end times.)
  • Would an assistive device allow the employee to do the activity? (The Job Accommodation Network has a dizzying list of assistive devices, including vendors and model numbers, broken down by type of limitation and disability.)
• Are there multiple possible accommodations? If so, consider the employee’s preference, but the decision of which to use is ultimately the employer’s.

Accommodation option: Screen magnifiers may be useful assistive devices for people with low vision.

In a survey of 781 employers who made accommodations for disabled employees, the Job Accommodation Network found that 59% paid nothing for the accommodation, and of those who did have to spend, the median cost for the accommodation was $500.

Once you and your employee have settled on an accommodation, discuss when and how you will check in to make sure everything’s working as expected. Keep iterating as needed to ensure success.

People with a disability may not see it as a disability or may not feel comfortable coming forward to request an accommodation. If you see someone struggling—especially someone you mentor or manage—ask if they need help, or if something about the work environment could be changed to make it easier for them. Let them lead the ensuing discussion, but make clear that you are available to talk about accommodations if necessary.

¹ “An individual with a disability must…be qualified to perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation, in order to be protected by the ADA. This means that the applicant or employee must:

• satisfy your job requirements for educational background, employment experience, skills, licenses, and any other qualification standards that are job related; and
• be able to perform those tasks that are essential to the job, with or without reasonable accommodation.” Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.