Intuitive Management Posted on December 10, 2007 John E. Bates (bio) describes his fluid personnel-management style.

I’m probably not a really good person to ask about people management skills. I’m an intuitive manager rather than a scientific manager. I’ve certainly learned a lot in my many years of running a lab, but every person you work with is so different and you have to work with them in different ways, or at least I have to work with them in different ways, and I try to be clear about what I want, but I’m also a pretty flexible guy so there’s a lot of different ways to satisfy me, a lot of different ways to get me what I want.

But there’s certain kinds of basic bottom line things that I really emphasize over and over again, for example, accuracy, respect for the participants. These basic things, no escaping those, but a lot of different ways for people to work. And my style of management is evolving. If you were to look at what I do with one research coordinator, it’s really quite different from what I do with another research coordinator. It just changes from person to person.

I like to get really smart people with a research background, especially if it’s relevant research background. And I like to give people flexible time, but I like them to keep track of their time, so a lot of our work is done in the evenings and on weekends. And if I ask someone to put in a 40 hour week from 8:00 to 5:00 in the daytime, that isn’t going to work very well. Lately we have fairly young coordinators who are using the job as a stepping stone to graduate school and that works out pretty well, because they have an ability to manage their time pretty well, because they’ve been students.

They also work well with the undergraduate students who work in the lab and they work well with the participants who are young adults too, so that’s been working out pretty well. But if, in the future, I end up getting an older coordinator, well, we would adapt in some way, as long as we get the work done.

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