Once, quite some time ago, I worked at a large national lab as a visiting collaborator. The leader of the group I worked with was very senior in the organization, but still came in to run shifts on the experiment. The fact he worked shifts like everyone else really impressed me. I suppose it appealed to my egalitarian sensibilities. When I mentioned my admiration to my thesis advisor, however, he said something to the effect that the group leader was indulging his desire to play with the toys at the expense of his people. I was rather taken aback and a bit perplexed.
Jump forward a decade or so, and I now lead the diagnostic and instrumentation group of an energy technology start-up. That experience has given me the insight to understand exactly what my advisor was talking about. The truth is that it takes a lot more than lab work to make science happen: strategic vision, communication, coordination, fund raising, team building, politics, personnel development, administration, etc. It is typically the leader’s job to get those things done. Therefore, if the leader is in the lab, then they are probably not focusing on their actual job. This is what my advisor meant, and it is a fact of life that is hard on a lot of physicists who feel that they are not working unless they are in the lab, at the chalkboard, or writing code. I can remember a time when I wondered if my superiors did any “work” because I rarely saw them doing those things. It makes me chuckle to think about how wrong I was.
Another way to look at the difference between being a physicist making individual contributions and one acting as a group leader is through my five roles model. Here is what the distribution for the two jobs might look like:
Individual Contributor: Artisan – 40%, Sage – 30%, Leader – 10%, Manager – 10%, , Teacher – 10%
Group Leader: Leader – 30%, Manager – 30%, Sage – 20%, Artisan – 10%, Teacher – 10%
Clearly, the person filling each role spends most of their time doing substantially different things. In particular, the group leader spends most of their time do things that most people would not consider “physics,” yet are critical to the progress of physics in most contexts. Understanding this is vital to reduce the risk of falling into the “promotion paradox” one day. Technically talented people may find themselves slated for promotion due to their technical talents only to find their new leadership position requires a completely different set of skills and time commitments. This paradoxical situation usually plays out in one of three ways:
- Happy Leader – Happy Organization: The newly promoted leader understands what they are getting into and successfully adapts to their new role.
- Happy Leader – Unhappy Organization: Despite the promotion, the new leader changes what they do on a day-to-day basis superficially or not at all. In this case, the new leader is happy (for a while) because they received a promotions and basically nothing has changed for them, but the organization suffers a leadership vacuum. Eventually, the organization will take some sort of action that will take the reluctant leader out of the leadership role.
- Unhappy Leader – Unhappy Organization: The new physics leader honestly tries to adapt to their new role, but is either not good at it, hates it, or both. In this case, no one is happy and everyone would have been better off if the person in question had stayed in an individual contributor role. These situations tend to get resolved fairly quickly because of the turmoil they cause.
These cases are in no way theoretical. I have seen all of them in real life multiple times. The latter two situations are, unfortunately, fairly common. Therefore, if you aspire to leadership in physics (and I argue that includes a professorship), then you need to understand that you will not personally do a lot of physics in the leadership role. I remember the CTO of my current company asking me if I understood the implications of the new role before he signed off on my promotion to group leader. I did understand the ramifications, and I have adapted well, but it is not easy to give up delving into data and interesting physics puzzles on a daily basis. Fortunately, I find solving my new leadership challenges even more rewarding.
So, now you know what it means to be a leader in physics and the trade-offs involved. Next time we will look at how you can become a leader if you want to.