Nobody Hands You a Syllabus: The Management Skills New Principal Investigators Wish They'd Learned
The offer letter from a research university is, among other things, a promotion into management. The new principal investigator becomes, overnight, an employer, a budget officer, a mediator, and a mentor — responsibilities that no qualifying exam ever tested.
KSMV spoke with a dozen early-career faculty members at institutions ranging from R1 research universities to primarily undergraduate institutions about the parts of the job their training never covered. Their accounts were strikingly consistent: the science was the easy part.
The Hiring Problem
Nearly every investigator we interviewed described their first hire as an act of improvisation. Postdoc and graduate student recruitment in US academia typically rewards technical brilliance and publication records, yet few PIs had ever been taught how to assess whether a candidate would thrive in their lab's specific working style.
One assistant professor at a Midwestern public university described interviewing a candidate with an exceptional CV who ultimately struggled in the lab — not for lack of skill, but because neither party had discussed expectations about feedback, independence, or hours. "I assumed we agreed on what a working relationship looked like," she said. "We didn't, and it cost us both a year."
Budgets Are Not Grant Applications
Grant writing teaches scientists to justify future spending. It teaches them almost nothing about reconciling a monthly ledger, negotiating equipment service contracts, or deciding when a fading freezer is a maintenance request versus a capital emergency.
Several of the PIs we spoke with admitted to discovering mid-semester that personnel costs had quietly consumed funds earmarked for supplies — a mistake that is entirely avoidable with a one-page monthly review habit, but one that no coursework had prompted them to adopt.
Conflict Comes With the Territory
Labs are small workplaces where colleagues live with their conflicts. Disputes over authorship, credit for ideas, unequal workloads, and interpersonal friction are not aberrations; they are structural features of shared research spaces.
The investigators who described the healthiest lab cultures shared a practice: they addressed conflict early, in private, and in writing. Those who deferred difficult conversations reported that small grievances calcified into lab-wide dysfunction that took years to unwind.
Mentoring Without a Map
Formal mentorship training remains rare across US doctoral programs. New faculty frequently default to modeling their own advisors — for better or worse. The PIs who reported the most satisfying mentoring relationships had sought outside frameworks: reading about supervision, joining mentoring communities, or simply asking senior colleagues how they handled a struggling trainee.
A Checklist for Day One
Based on our interviews, we offer the following as a baseline competency list for first-time lab leaders:
- Write a lab expectations document covering hours, communication norms, authorship criteria, and feedback cadence — and revisit it with every new member.
- Build a simple monthly budget review that separates personnel, supplies, and equipment costs.
- Learn structured interviewing for lab positions, with consistent questions and written criteria.
- Practice the difficult conversation — rehearsal with a trusted colleague is worth more than any management book.
- Identify your own advisor's habits you intend to keep and those you intend to leave behind.
- Find a management peer group of fellow new PIs; the problems you face are not unique to you.
A Structural Fix
Individual preparation helps, but the interviewees were unanimous that the gap is institutional. A handful of US universities now offer semester-long lab management courses for senior doctoral students, and several federal training grants have begun to encourage — though not require — management coursework. KSMV believes such training should be a standard component of postdoctoral development, not an elective pursued by the already-conscientious.
Science has solved harder problems than teaching scientists to run a workplace. It simply has to decide the curriculum is worth teaching.
