Building an Inclusive Work Environment: Understanding how Leader Gender Influences Employees’ Stress and Well-Being  This presentation will review a study on the gendered nature of leader behavior with take-aways to build an inclusive work environment.  The research studied the critical role leaders play in fueling or attenuating employee stress and well-being, considering the leader's gender. The study considered two critical leader behaviors - initiating structure (providing direction and structure to employee tasks and schedules) and consideration (offering social emotional support that helps employees navigate taxing aspects of their job) that have been demonstrated to be critical for leader effectiveness.  The study examined the potential impact of gender implications of initiating structure versus consideration of leadership behaviors.  Dr. Mitchell will discuss the implications of the research and provide suggestions on how to build an inclusive work environment.

Presenter - Marie Mitchell, PhD

Doing More With Less - Building, Negotiating, and Selling the Lab Budget
Developing an annual budget is more than just duplicating last year’s numbers. Understanding what drives the lab’s costs and revenue are essential to developing a realistic budget. Managers are often faced with selling flat, growing, or declining budgets to senior leadership and each case has pros and cons. As all are expected to do more with less, how can a lab manager budget for and keep capabilities current but spend less?

Presenter - Greg Bowen

Implementation of Electronic Inventory Systems through Effective Stakeholder Management
This presentation will delve into the implementation of electronic inventory systems, focusing on strategies for addressing common lab challenges such as inventory tracking, item locations, and reordering optimization. Using a digital, barcode-driven inventory system as a case study, you'll learn practical approaches for implementing these systems in lean environments and crafting compelling business cases to secure management buy-in.

Effective stakeholder management is essential for successful implementation of electronic inventory systems and other efficiency initiatives. Drawing from over a decade of experience in lab management across diverse settings, this presentation will provide valuable insights into key stakeholder management concepts such as identification, prioritization, engagement, and communication. Learn how to leverage these concepts to overcome lab efficiency challenges and drive impactful change.

Presenter - Christopher Toomey, PMP

DELEGATING - Develop, Don’t Dump
Delegating is usually simple but not always easy.  Learn how to get beyond your challenges to effective delegation, and get more done while having your team members flourish.  In this talk, we will cover:

• Why delegation is important
• The most common challenges to delegation
• Warning signs that you are not delegating enough
• Tips for effectively delegating
• Delegating does not mean dumping

Presenter - Bill Spreitzer

The Lab Manager’s Survival Guide for Dealing with Difficult People
I once asked a colleague how her transition from Lab Tech to Lab Manager was going. Her response, “I majored in Forensics for a reason, dead people don’t talk back”.  While funny and slightly morbid, many Laboratory Managers feel the same way. The idea of managing people with their opinions, emotions, stresses, and the various ways individuals deal with and express those can be a daunting task. Especially for Laboratory Managers who are more comfortable dealing with controlled experiments and logic-based outcomes than the variable elements of human interpersonal reactions and response cues.

In this session, we will develop an understanding of what constitutes difficult behavior, how to identify difficult personalities, and the root causes of behaviors that are challenging. Self-reflection activities are included to help participants analyze their own behaviors, attitudes, biases, and beliefs. Participants will walk away with a Survival Guide for dealing with difficult people with science-based tools, tips, and strategies that can be implemented immediately to deal with challenging individuals, learn how to survive difficult situations and deal successfully with different personality types, including challenging individuals.

Presenter - Tamara Perry