From Research to Management Consulting: Why and What Did I Learn
All my life I pictured myself as a scientist or a leader in something. I was raised in two places, one small apartment in the city and at the deep jungle with no neighbors in Costa Rica. My jungle stories were considered “too fantastic to be true” on the city. I was the weird kid in school. Living in the jungle gave me a magical realism kind of mindset, dreaming of impossible but possible things. As an adult I started training to be researcher. I had the best mentors’ life could give me and learned the best of them. It was until one day when I was sitting on the couch of some MIT MBA students and told them “This business case is boring, I like building space habitats with Carolina (A fellow friend and researcher)”. But after going home and thinking about that one case a little bug inside me started thinking how maybe science should work like a business somehow. Scientist should use different methodologies, PI’s could use indicators for their students to have better performances and get less mentally, unhealthy and unstable ones, papers should be written for everyone and not with ostentatious words. I realized that I was not going to change anything about it if I wasn’t an influential leader and not just another researcher. I also understood I was becoming as square minded as those who called me a weird kid in school, and I was losing my ability to think impossible things. Therefore, I decided to change what I was learning to become a leader in STEM. I found out that if I learned management, that was going to help me with a better methodology undersatnding and a different perspective to accomplish projects and manage my own scientific and innovation team. After a year, I learned many things, but what I expected was to become a better leader and here is what I found. I hope it can help you on your journey to leadership as well.
Few women are CEOs’ and even less are CEOs’ of a Tech company
After working with 9 different companies and closely with C level members I realized none of the directors or CEOs that I worked with were women. Doing some research, I found out that there are only 33 women CEOs on the fortune 500 list of corporations. This is a representation of just 6.6%. We have been deeply worried about introducing woman to careers in STEM, but there is still a long way to go to get more woman on leadership positions. There is a great connection between learning about management and engineering at the same time and promoting both. Science, research, innovation all happens because leaders use money from a planned budget for them.
To become a leader, strategical thinking is as important as analytical thinking. The good thing is that both can be developed with practice. Practice can be obtained from mentors and aspiring to leadership roles. Management consulting is the best school that I found to grow both skills fast.
While you become a leader yourself, it is your personal responsibility to invite women to important meetings and promote younger females to actively participate in important decision making, regardless of the field.
Train for the position you want to work on
One of the CEO’s I worked with once told me “A person should be actively working just 80% of the time, the other 20% of the time, the employee should use her time learning and training for the next position she will want to work”. As an aspiring leader, make sure to prepare yourself for the role that you aim for. Make sure your managers know your objectives, goals and become a shadow when possible. If you have a leadership position, promote mentoring inside the company, the team or the lab. Encourage your team on getting certifications and going to conferences; promote growth. Something important that was mentioned before was using 100% of the time, not more and not less.
Burnout is dangerous in any field
When learning, you might get the bad habit of using more than 100% of your working hours’ time (normally 8–10 hours) ending in burnout or well, you feeling extra tired, not exercising and caring for your personal life. Burnout goes beyond loss of creativity, curiosity and performance; it is closely related with mental health disorders, heart problems, overweight and diverse illnesses. I learned that you should have enough time to plan your career, to learn new skills and work out or just relax. If you work until you burn out you will become a work zombie and not a working brain, you won’t be as able to provide new insights, new ideas and ways of doing things. Your leadership skills will suffer and becoming a robot-like person that just works by command is highly possible. Avoid by all cost a prolonged burnout feeling. You want to become a leader not lose yourself in the making.
For those how already are managers this is a key thing to consider, you want thinking team members that question things and disrupt, you want less sick time out and generally happy teams that feel committed and loyal to what they are working on. Promote healthy working hours and don’t overwork your people, you’ll get better performance. All the past mentioned applies to you, manager as well. Keep yourself sane.
Great leaders know the abilities of their team
There is no excuse for a manager to not know the abilities of each team member. There are multiple tools to understand what each member has a bigger ability on. Not asking what your team members like or dislike is a clear lack of communication skills. While becoming a leader empathy, the ability to read people and expressing job related feelings are soft skills you sure need to develop. Soft skills are in fact rare and not native in many people so keep them in the top of your head when learning.
As a leader, potentiating the skills of everyone in the team will eventually show on great projects. Provide tools to develop opportunity areas, but don’t push people on only working on them. Skills that are not natural for an individual can be slowly developed; but forcing them just to work on them and not developing their gifts will just create frustration and dislike from work.
Leaders who empower are by far the best
Old-school management? It’s over! Just telling employees or students what they should do is not the best way to promote creativity, self-recognition and learning. Empowering is providing the tools to solve problems. It’s mentoring, not commanding. Trusting your team is trusting yourself. A great leader should always work with individuals smarter than herself; permitting them to solve problems together is what makes the difference. Empowering takes away the micromanagement. If you are learning, ask for responsibilities and don’t be afraid of making mistakes
Finding the correct problems to solve is important
Great leaders anticipate problems before they know how to solve them. We, makers, engineers and scientist have an affinity for solving problems; but when trying to find what the problems are, we struggle. Knowing and understanding the root cause of problems and how to look for them is key for innovation and keeping solutions simple and lean. Developing curiosity about why and how things happen and work; are, the more important base for novel discovery and strategic thinking. Stimulating simple exercises using methodologies such as design thinking inside a team can stimulate curiosity regardless of the field.
The path to becoming whatever you desire or fulling your goals is never easy, it’s never linear and it takes courage and some luck. Never surrender or be afraid. Find great mentors and you will never be alone on whatever path you choose to follow. Also, dream so big, that people think you are crazy or “the weird kid”.
If you have any advice or question, feel free to contact me.
