Congratulations on starting your new lab! In addition to the countless logistical, scientific, and administrative duties on your plate, this is the moment to define your lab environment. Let’s talk about some ways that you can define a mentoring style that both encompasses your own unique strengths and fosters success in your mentees.
How hands-on should you be?
You are likely coming to this PI (Principal Investigator) role straight from a postdoctoral fellowship, clinical fellowship, or similar traineeship where you were the one carrying out the research on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps you truly enjoyed data collection and analysis, all the many hands-on duties, and also your first experiences mentoring junior trainees (undergraduates, medical students, or residents).
How hands-on should you be now that you are in the PI role?
Now you are in a leadership role, where you have to delegate some of your research duties. There are two opposing tendencies I’ve noticed with new PIs getting started. One tendency is over-involvement because they get excited not only about the scientific end-results, but also the hands-on processes of executing research projects. The other is under-involvement, which may happen inadvertently when the PI is stretched too thin.
The Over-involvement tendency often stems from fear of delegating or relinquishing control. The PI may think that execution will be faster, and better, if they do it themselves. In many cases at the beginning that may objectively be the case, so it’s hard to step back and let mentees and staff take the lead. Mistakes may be made, and this can be scary! Yet, problem-solving especially when your team members feel ownership of the process, is a crucial component of self-efficacy. Part of your job as a mentor is to foster self-efficacy by creating an environment where it is safe to fail, and then – crucially- try again.
Importantly, team members who are really deep in the hands-on work may generate solutions and innovations that you would have never thought of. And the PI that can’t hand over the reins will potentially miss out on the benefits of having a mentee bring their unique self to the process.
On the other hand, the Under-involvement tendency can happen when a PI gets spread too thin with other duties (teaching, admin, clinical, and even grant-writing) and expects the new team members to be quickly up to speed… Perhaps assuming the team will be as proficient as the PI was during their own scientific training. But any new team–even if a very lucky PI’s team consists of experienced staff and trainees with great intuition–still needs a lot of guidance at the beginning. The epiphany for me was attending a career development workshop at Vanderbilt where the speaker clearly told us, “At the beginning, do not expect your trainees to be you. They are not you.” He went on to explain that they may not be able to be as autonomous as you were in your previous phase of training, and also that your new trainees may have different destinies in research (not all are destined for the PI path, and that’s okay–they are not you!).
I was expecting my students to be more independent than they were ready to be. We can forget how much learning each of us did along the way! Individual learning, project learning, methods learning, and team-work learning. I’ll talk more about this in Part II: Developmental Trajectories.
Stepping back, there is a lot of fine-tuning necessary in your new PI role in terms of how much guidance and hand-holding to do. Trust your gut and relish the joy of creating an environment where each team member, including you, plays a unique role. There will be some decisions only you can make. And your team members might need more direction or specific details from you if you want the work to be done in a rigorous manner.
One of the most productive mindsets you can adopt as a mentor is to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses, determine how to effectively delegate responsibilities, and jump in when mentees get really stuck. When in doubt, I suggest erring on the side of being actively engaged in oversight and doing regular check-ins, but check yourself if you find you are doing the heavy lifting on too many detailed research tasks yourself. Ultimately, as the PI, you have the opportunity to create your own vision for your program of scientific research and your own brand of mentee success.
Reyna L. Gordon, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she co-directs the Vanderbilt Music Cognition Lab. She also has faculty appointments at the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute, the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, the Department of Psychology, the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, and the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.
Reyna L. Gordon, PhD, in collaboration with Verna Wright
