What Changes Between Bench and Boardroom

Peg AtKisson and Jet LeBlanc of ATG spent a valuable hour recently with Equalize Startups, as part of their year-long cohort experience for rising women entrepreneurs. We discussed the topic “Bench to Boardroom: The fundamental difference in leadership for academic laboratories vs business.” It was a lively, interactive discussion, and we are sharing the best bits with you.

Every scientist who has a successful lab is already a leader. But what does it take to broaden your leadership to a business environment? To thrive as an entrepreneur, you must consider a number of differences, and they mostly come down to roles. In your lab, your role is as mentor and the “workers” in your lab have the role of trainee. Their motivation lies in earning a degree. In the startup lab, the people in the lab have the role of employee.

In your business, what role do you need to take on? CEO? CTO? CSO? Something else? As the founder, it’s worth the time to research the different roles. You may not have the skills or desire to be a CEO. If that’s the case, do you need to find someone to take that role?

The roles of your team will differ, as noted above. You may find that that your response to infractions changes when you have the right (and responsibility) to fire a non-performing technician, as opposed to mentoring and educating a grad student. On the other side, if a trainee is unhappy with the environment, they may put up with it because of the time investment toward their degree. If a technician isn’t happy, they can go back out on the job market.

In our short discussion, we did our best to point the way to some habits of thought that will help you determine where  you are on the path to business leadership: Thinking a little differently about your leadership presence, the needs and motivations of employees vs. lab members, concrete deliverables vs publications. And though we promised a jargon-free hour, at the end we presented the one acronym that we believe holds the key to staying on course as you build the teams you lead: VIP. Originally found in Kouzes and Posner’s book The Leadership Challenge, as leadership models go, it doesn’t get simpler than this.

Vision: Your Big Why. What are you here to do? And how does it align with Values? Yours, and those of the institution or business you represent.

Inclusion: How you treat people. This doesn’t mean sharing everything with everyone. But does everyone have what they need to thrive, including clear and specific expectations?

Persistence: This means realizing that your leadership will always be a series of experiments. Not all will succeed, but what got you your PhD. will not take you to the next level as a business leader.

Thank you, Equalize for giving us this opportunity to facilitate this conversation. We wish the 2025-2026 cohort success in their enterprises!