The first time I was asked to “own” product research at work, I thought I would build a Mad Social Science Lab… in about 3 months-time. That was wrong. The building never ends and “I” wasn’t the one building anything.

Honestly, I was an admirer of the Mad Scientist trope in fiction. Not the world destroying part. The pursuit of an applied scientific purpose with funding and support part. The Mad Scientist (MS) worked in environments with ample budgets and many highly skilled coworkers that applied their talent and inventiveness wholeheartedly to the directives of the MS. The MS always had a boss with a clear vision (sometimes evil, sometimes good-ish) and gave the MS freedom to do work to accomplish that vision. Their boss provided money, staff, and lots of time pressure.

What’s not to like?

Well, a lot actually. To put it simply, the Mad Scientist generally works without regard for their team or society as a whole. This is a recipe for mayhem.

When I stepped into my first research leadership role, I immediately centered on an ideal that was largely based in fiction (yet tempered with my own morality). I believed I was in a research leadership role to bring social science to technology development and my leaders enthusiastically wanted me to do that. I expected my company and its leadership to rally around the idea of Me as Scientific Advisor.

Research Leadership is Different from Mad Science: 2 Culture Norms

Luckily, I learned some lessons over the last decade that helped me to work through my experiences and change my perspective. The (ethical) Mad Scientist model does not fit the way organizations filled with humans actually work. There was not a big red switch flipped when I became a leader. Instead that change in role unlocked a new set of challenges, relationships, and responsibilities for me to work through. There are two organizational culture elements that stand out as important for new leaders when working through those challenges – understanding the implications of ambiguity and navigating how administrivia impacted my effectiveness.

1. No one is in charge.

This is an overgeneralization, but it is often what it feels like on the ground. Your organization probably has a CEO, a mission, and a core set of products and services; but what those translate to in terms of day-to-day work is open to interpretation.

That idea made immediate sense to me. What took a while for me to grasp is that “interpretation” is not just up to me, my manager, or their manager to decide and then share on down the chain — it is open to everyone’s interpretation.

On one hand, I wanted to be “in charge,” but I very quickly realized that what I really expected was a clearly defined goal, a path already cleared to get there, and people ready to follow that path. I just expected to be in charge of the paving part and enabling people to flow. I did not expect that goal to change very frequently, did not consider there would be an unmanageable number of goals to focus on, a general lack of resources to do what I thought needed to be done, or people that needed convincing and coaching to do the thing that I set before them.

Mad Scientists definitely didn’t have to deal with this.

But in reality, I’m sure you’ve heard the terms “dealing with ambiguity” or “self-direction” in the course of your professional life. This interpretation of ideals into meaningful business elements is part of what they mean. You have to learn to apply principles of empowerment, collaboration, and accountability when things get fuzzy.

Leaders look to their teams to turn vague goals into actionable work (with their guidance and support, if you’re lucky). Sometimes I or someone on my team was more equipped to determine what to do than my leaders because of my specialization or because I had the time and space to explore, plan out, and experiment with how to get something done. Communicating that approach to my leaders (including listening and supporting the critical feedback to me as a leader from my own team) was an important part of the job.

2. Budgets are not wishes granted to the worthy.

I am an “experience research professional.” What that means is that I do research (or lead teams that conduct research) that examines how other people perceive, react to, or interact with various technologies with the goal of improving the experience of interacting with those technologies.

In terms of internal business lingo, that means that my work is part of a “cost center” that may indirectly lead to revenue. In addition to our salaries, people like me need to spend money to do our jobs. We spend money on finding people to fill out our surveys, paying them to give up their time to participate in our interviews, and focus groups and such. We spend money on special software and equipment to collect feedback, monitor eye movements, track web activity, do statistics, etc.

As a new leader, I was surprised when my leader asked for budget projections and justifications for my requests. My thought process was something like: How do they expect me to do the job if I didn’t get money? How was I supposed to know how much money I needed for science? And to add insult to injury, were they seriously asking me to determine the value of measuring things?

This was definitely never a thing that a Mad Scientist had to do.

Turns out I wasn’t being unfairly subjected to an unreasonable level of questioning as a research leader. This method of building a budget is a fairly standard practice that I didn’t have much exposure to before moving to a leadership position. Before, while I was aware that things cost money and our team only had so much to spend, I’d never given any thought to where that money came from.

As a leader however, my perspective had to shift from the contributions of my individual work efforts to managing how groups of individuals’ work aligned to the larger corporation’s needs. “Cost centers” like research have a role to play in the complicated world that is corporate finance.

Companies have overall operating budgets – revenue and expenses have to be carefully balanced to keep (or make) the company an overall profit. A corporation only has so much money to spend. Although that amount of money may seem large, the number of requests for that money are almost always larger than the available pool. For the various finance teams to decide who gets money, they need some insight into how the budget will be used to generate “value.”

So, although it was hard for me to make budget projections, it would otherwise be impossible for someone without any connection to a research team to decide how much money we needed or whether our request was higher or lower priority than some other request.

While not every corporate process is useful, you have to how different parts of the bureaucracy enable the success of your team.

If not a Mad Science Lab, then what?

Once I shifted my perspective to one more grounded in how humans work together to get things done, I learned that I actually enjoy the reality of research leadership more than I imagined enjoying the fantasy of mad science. Since that first role, I have applied what I learned (and continue to discover) to build and scale research teams of varying sizes and scopes of responsibility.

Share knowledge to empower.

The leader having all of the skills and information (like a mad scientist working with minions) is problematic for quite a few reasons. For one, a leader cannot do all of the things, be in all of the places, or know all the things. It is important to fill research teams with talented team members that have a depth and diversity of skill to address an unknown variety of business problems. Or in other words, hire people that know more than you do and constantly share what you know about organizational goals, best practices, broad team dynamics, or whatever. Your team needs access to that information to make the right decisions, interpret vague goals, and understand what they are accountable to deliver.

You need more than science.

Being a great social scientist is only one part of doing well as an experience research professional. Operating inside of any team requires communication and prioritization skills. Leading a team inside of an organization requires bravery, humility, self-awareness, business savvy, and an understanding of how to customize your approach to resonate best with the individual humans around you. The latter point is related to emotional intelligence, which is a skill I have had to especially focus on building as a leader (especially one that dreamt of being a mad scientist).

Morals and purpose win out.

The mad scientist is famously amoral. While I never believed in doing work in service of the destruction of humanity, I did initially believe that my feelings and beliefs had no place at work. Since no one is actually in charge of all the things that happen inside of a company, I now understand that to be a successful research leader, I must regularly demonstrate my values publicly and model the behavior I hope to see in my team and the people around me.

If an organization does not value my perspective, even after I put forth a legitimate effort to align my approach with the humans around me, then it is not the place for me.

Importantly, as a product experience research leader, my team and I are often the conduit of the voices of users and decision-makers outside of the company to our coworkers. Part of this responsibility involves highlighting when our organization’s product experiences do not live up to the standards we set for ourselves. We must speak up and help define how we translate high-level business goals into actionable product decisions.

Leadership as a Researcher in a Complex Multiplayer Game, not as a Mad Scientist

Having a good idea and having data to support the viability of that idea is not enough to make that idea into reality. In the case of research teams, new researchers quickly learn that simply finding an insight and delivering it to someone is not enough. As a research leader, I had to relearn that lesson applied to the act of leading a research team itself. Work is collaborative on a hugely complex scale.

This meant facing into questions from coworkers as opportunities to grow rather than as affronts to my expertise. It meant dedicating time toward understanding how different teams worked together at a more macro level to ultimately form what a corporation is. It also meant taking an active role in defining what a research leader looks like, versus getting overwhelmed by ambiguity, process, or even calmly fitting into a previously defined mold (like the Mad Scientist) that does not fit well into a future I’d like to help to build.