How it works
PI Leadership Coaching runs as a 3–6 month engagement, structured around your specific situation and goals. Sessions are conducted individually or in a small cohort of 2–4 PIs from the same organization, a format that works especially well for research institutes and biotech companies investing in a cohort of new lab leaders simultaneously.
Engagements begin with a diagnostic conversation to identify your highest-priority challenges and build a coaching plan from there. You leave each session with specific, actionable next steps.
This is available to individual PIs and as an organizational offering for COOs, VPs of Research, and HR leaders who want to proactively support their new lab leaders.
PI Leadership Coaching
People management skills for scientists running their first lab.
You earned your lab because of your science, but nobody gave you a roadmap for leading the people in it.
PI Leadership Coaching is a structured coaching engagement for new principal investigators in biotech, pharma, and research institutes — built specifically for the transition from brilliant scientist to effective lab leader.
Not generic management training
PI Leadership Coaching is grounded in Organizational Culture Design™, a proactive methodology for building lab environments where your science can actually thrive. This isn't a leadership seminar or an HR checklist. It's applied systems thinking for research environments, built around the specific culture challenges that show up in labs.
We work on the real problems: how to give feedback that lands, how to set expectations clearly from day one, how to navigate conflict between team members before it stalls your research, and how to build the kind of lab culture that retains the people you've invested in training.
What the coaching covers
Each engagement is tailored to where you are. Common areas of focus include:
Building trust and transparency with lab members without undermining your authority
Designing feedback systems that work
Navigating conflict between team members early, before it compounds
Creating a Lab Culture Document that sets clear expectations from day one
Embedding flexibility into your lab systems without sacrificing scientific rigor
Recognizing and leveraging the expertise of everyone on your team at every level
Building systematic celebration and recognition into your lab culture