Why do some scientific researchers excel in big team based projects while others prefer to work on solitary ones? Is it a personality trait or something that's taught (or not) during graduate school and in early years of people's careers?
Bernard Tulsi put together a kind of humorous, but accurate, portrayal in Lab Manager magazine of how
managing people doing research is like herding wild cats. Most of the points stem from an interview with Vish Krishnan, a professor at the Rady School of Management, UCSD, who says:
“The challenge in a lab
management setting is that we are dealing with a highly trained and
knowledgeable workforce—so you can’t use hierarchical management
techniques.”
He is careful to point out, “This is not exclusive to the
lab but can be seen in other types of knowledge-oriented businesses as
well. .. These workers are highly capable and extremely talented, and that is
an important part of the challenge in getting their cooperation and
commitment”
Strong traits like individuality, competitiveness, and turf protection are pointed out as negative elsewhere in the article and it's suggested that the general style of scientific training is partly to blame.
I doubt negative traits are taught anywhere as part of formal grad school training, but rather it's the lack of training in skills required to work on teams that's the root cause. Working in a team is very different than flying solo.
A research lab: That untameable workplace filled with huge egos.
There's also this zinger:
“Labs are very much the prototypical example of the highly trained, high-ego workforce type.”
Was this supposed to describe a workforce filled with recalcitrant narcissists?
I imagine this kind of lab as one filled with Alphas ready to bludgeon competitors (and each other) using pipettes and keyboards to secure control over a source of data. Thankfully, this situation is ridiculous and one I've never been in and have rarely seen, even after working in multiple institutes and departments.
Are scientists highly trained? Definitely. Do they want to be successful with their work? Absolutely. Do they think they're more important than they actually are? Usually not. So I'm against the stereotype of labs being run by highly trained cowboys, with no offense meant to actual cattle farmers.
Again, Academia versus Industry
Lastly, there's this observation:
“From my experience, academia seems to have a worse problem than corporate entities.”
So yes, while a lab environment can definitely be dysfunctional, I don't think it's as much to do with whatever training people had in academic settings, but of motivations inherent in the job each person holds.
Everyone has personal goals for their work, and sometimes those goals conflict with the needs of the business or lab. This is especially true in academic environments, where many people are trying to get degrees or publish papers - uniquely personal goals - so if the person managing research doesn't structure each person's project with the whole picture in mind, the group ends up being an entity that's not firing on all cylinders, as Krishnan observes.
If you want a research project to succeed, you need to try and motivate each person with research that fits their personal goals. It doesn't matter what those goals are, but you need to make sure you're helping people hit them. In doing so, and if you've structured the work correctly, hopefully they'll hit yours too.
All that said, there are several memes that circulate in academic environments which can lead to the teamwork problems described above if they're misinterpreted by people early on in their training.
Here are two major ones that can lead people in training astray:
You need to establish yourself as independent.
Almost everyone should strive to establish themselves as independent. Jack Welch, ex-CEO of General Electric, once quipped that you could give someone
lifetime employability, but not employment, by training them and giving them skills to go elsewhere. In academia, students are sometimes told to demonstrate that they're independent, and instead of trying to build and defend their own independent opinions, they extrapolate 'independence' to mean that they should not be dependent on help from anyone.
And so, some students gladly go off and spend hours and days learning to do everything technical themselves to demonstrate "independence". The result is that they learn to do everything, but since they don't do anything particularly well (or efficiently for that matter) their progress slows down. Of course, no one notices because they're not communicating with anyone.
At this point, I'd say the fault starts to fall back on their manager or PI, who should set them aside and say "Hey, I understand you want to learn everything, but let's pick one or two areas of expertise for you and you'll become the expert in that around here. Joe and Jane over there are pretty good at all the other techniques so let's split up your work." Trading a little work here and there doesn't really hurt anyone.
Division of labour isn't anything new, but it's not taking advantage of the concept that's a scientific management mistake.
Eventually, the real danger of "having to establish yourself as independent" is that people stop helping others who don't help them, so eventually no one is helping anyone and the research group naturally breaks down.
Someone is trying to scoop you.
Here's another concept that's more damaging than it is helpful. Unless you're working on something that can be replicated exactly somewhere else: defining a protein-protein interaction; purifying an enzyme complex; determining a protein structure; explaining something about a particular mutation, no one is trying to scoop
you.
Surely, someone else is trying to beat you to the goal, but that someone is very likely elsewhere and probably not in your lab or even your department. Your co-workers are very unlikely to take your work and sell it to the competition, at least not in an academic environment.
So if you're showing around slides containing your work, you don't have to throw in a non-disclosure condition (I've actually had that happen to me), because frankly, most people are too busy with other projects to hatch plots and steal your data.
The only thing secrecy to protect against being scooped is guaranteed to yield is a delay in finalizing your work. Students afraid of being scooped end up
hoarding data, and in the end finish projects months or years later than if their colleagues helped them all along.
And ironically, they risk getting scooped.
