Creating a concrete, ambitious yet achievable mission and vision for your lab will simplify your staff and student recruitment by proactively explaining your work, your values, and your goals. It can also help guide discussion with potential collaborators as others can see how their own goals intersect with yours.

As James Clear notes in Atomic Habits: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Spending time now to put into place simple, accessible project, data, and information management systems that can scale as your lab grows and you start to collaborate with other labs reduces the risks of lost information, lost time, and lost data. It also means less work for new staff as there are documented procedures for communicating with the team, saving documents, and storing and accessing data. Clear expectations help everyone work more efficiently and effectively. Further reading: Info management; Info behaviors; Best practices

You already know the type of leader you want to be and the culture you want to create in your lab. Years of watching others lead has given you a taste of what you want and don’t want to do while leading your own team. This month, we’ll explore the type of leader you want to be and the values you bring to the unique leadership style best suited for your work, and we’ll begin to plan how you will implement your lab’s mission, vision, and expectations.

The work of a research scientist can be all-encompassing and recent research has shown that a majority of academic researchers are feeling burned out. In this module, we will revisit the definition of success you created in month 1 and explore ways that the environment in which you work may derail your best efforts, then devise strategies to ensure you stay on your chosen path.

The process of growing the staff of your lab can be overwhelming as you shift from focusing primarily on your own career development to being responsible for that of others. From writing a job description to creating an onboarding plan to providing honest constructive feedback, in this module, we will cover the basics of hiring and managing staff to help you achieve your research goals.

For many researchers, the “business” side of the lab is confusing and opaque. This module will give you the basics of creating a federal funding proposal budget, working with your research administrators and finance staff, as well as strategies for identifying internal funds that can help you stretch your research dollars. We will also cover the basics of administrative and diversity supplements.