When I stopped trying to have all the answers, my lab members thrived

From ScienceMag:

As a new assistant professor running my own lab for the first time, I tried to be everywhere at once. I rewrote my students’ manuscript drafts until they sounded like me, redrew figures and reorganized a postdoc’s slides, and dominated the discussion in lab meetings to sug­gest the next experiment before anyone else had the chance. The lab looked productive—we were publishing high-impact studies and had just secured a major grant. But underneath, something was going wrong. After one lab meeting, a grad student came to my office and said something I have never forgotten: “I feel like I’m doing science near you, not with you.”

My academic path to that point had felt precarious, marked by a decade of temporary positions, constant evaluation, and pressure to prove myself. When I finally became a professor, I thought the biggest obstacles would be obtaining funding, securing state-of-the-art imaging equipment, and hitting the metrics of high-impact publications. To meet those challenges, I made the classic mistake of trying to solve everything myself. At one point, a stu­dent joked that if I kept “editing” so much, I might as well submit the article under my own name and save us both time. I laughed because it was uncomfortably close to being true.

Then came my grad student’s comment. Deep down, I knew she was right. I’d already started to wonder whether my efforts to protect my team from wasting time and making mistakes were actually just holding them back. But it took time to figure out how to let go and lead without hovering over every single move, to be there when people struggled without taking the wheel.

A few years into leading my lab, I was unexpectedly offered a position as vice dean for research. I worried it was too soon for me but saw it as a duty to my institution. I expected to be working on the university’s long-term strategy, upgrading re­search infrastructure, and conducting faculty recruitment. But I kept finding myself discussing issues that were much more human. A technician was frustrated by spending weeks solving problems no one noticed and then feeling blamed when some­thing broke. I once met with a staff coordinator who was strug­gling with a personnel conflict between departments, assuming she wanted me to propose a solution. Instead, she said, “I don’t need you to fix this. I need you to listen to me without judging me.” That moment taught me the importance of leading with dignity and respect.

I tried to apply this lesson in my lab. I started to speak last in meetings and create space for disagreement by asking, “What am I missing?” or “Does anyone see this data differently?” When I met individually with students, I asked them to propose the next experiment before offering my own suggestions. Slowly, a shift began to occur. People stopped looking to me for guidance every time an unexpected result appeared and started to talk to each other instead. Students began to mentor each other. Postdocs started to design entire projects with much less input from me. I began to see that my job was not to have all the answers, but to create the conditions in which others could find theirs.

This realization, in turn, influenced how I approached my job as vice dean. When I was tasked with putting together a proposal for a major infrastructure project, I brought all the researchers, administrators, and their teams into the same room. Previously, I would have arrived with the entire plan already worked out in my mind. But this time I made sure everyone had space to speak. In the discussions we had over the following weeks, people didn’t just contribute ideas that helped shape the proposal, they began to take responsibility for running different parts of it. When our funding was approved, that shared energy became part of the project itself.

Today, my proudest moments go beyond articles, grants, or awards. They include moments when someone I mentored had the confidence to make their own call, like a student who chose to pursue a risky experiment that would truly test our lab’s core hypothesis instead of a safer plan I had suggested. It paid off, leading to a much more significant discovery. Leadership, I now see, is not dominating the room or trying to be everywhere at once, but creating a space where others can become stronger, more confident, and more responsible than they believed possible.

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