The last few weeks, I’ve been writing about development principles for Biotech data teams. This next one continues with the theme of collaboration:
Delegating decisions and accountability as far down as you can is the only way to continuously adapt to an unknown and changing environment.
Delegation is something that most leaders will agree is important, but there’s some subtlety to how you go about it. One common pattern is for leaders to delegate the work, but to keep control of decisions making and accountability (as opposed to responsibility). Delegating work means handing it off to someone who can act as an extra set of hands, an extension of yourself. Delegating accountability means giving someone else the authority and resources to make the work happen. You want them to be answerable for the outcome, not just the work.
The last few principles were all about pushing your team to communicate directly with their colleagues in the wet lab. The more they do this, the more they’ll start to understand the problems, risks and opportunities better than you ever could. So if they have to push this all up to you before they can finalize a decision, you’re still a bottleneck. It’s much more efficient to give them the authority, resources and accountability to make their own calls.
This type of delegation is fairly well established in the tech world. But Biotech is heavily influenced by academic biology where labs heads tend to exert more control over the details, and employ lots of students who need more direction. So to build effective collaborations between wet lab and data teams, you often need to be very deliberate about how you delegate and how you encourage other leaders to delegate.
Leaders who don’t delegate become bottlenecks.
One aspect of a bottleneck is that it may become bi-directional. Important details observed by the hands-on team are likely to be filtered out, rather than percolate upwards. It's hard to pick out early warnings from a flood of messaging, so management needs to cultivate active listening. One outlier might just be noise, but getting the same outlier weekly or from different directions just could be news.