An Excellent Manager in a Frozen Lab

Gregory Scott Muhs
4 min readJul 20, 2023

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I often run into the stereotype of a terrible boss. This was illustrated well in the 1960’s animated sitcom “The Jetsons” and is such a common phenomenon as to be expected as almost the norm. I’ve seen a number of polls where employees rate toxic workplace culture as the number one reason why they want to leave or have left their most recent position.

While I have had a few bad experiences myself, most of the supervisors and managers I have worked with in my career have been amazing individuals, and I think that should be highlighted more often.

Discover The Top 5 Reasons Workers Want To Quit Their Jobs (forbes.com)

This is a story of a very respectful colleague who was promoted to supervisor early in my career, and the beneficial impact she had on workplace culture.

Shortly after graduating with my bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology, I began work as a contractor in a frozen storage lab. The work was pretty straightforward. Samples were received from clients, logged into our system, and placed in our various freezers. Then when the clients wanted the samples sent to them again, we would log them out of our system and send them back out. And, of course, we would perform QC work making sure the information on the paperwork and test tube matched what we had in our computer system.

Pretty straightforward stuff. But being new to this lab, I was nervous. You never know what people are going to be like when you start a new job at a new company.

Image from the movie Interstellar (2014). Image credit here.

During my tenure, one of the team leads, (we will call her Katie), was promoted to supervisor. “Katie” was young, in her early to mid-twenties.

One day she called me into her office and asked how things were going. I responded that I was scared I was going to get fired because I was only getting through five boxes of samples per day while other people were getting through six or seven.

Katie smiled in amusement and answered, “We don’t fire people here. Anyone can see that you are working. You come in, and you are doing your work. If you weren’t, we would see it.”

Her reassurance put me at ease with being in a new environment.

Shortly after our conversation, she assigned me to double-check other people’s work. I did not make the connection at the time, but Katie could obviously see that I had attention to detail. QC work can be very repetitive and take its toll, but even after looking at thousands of samples each week, I still had strong attention to detail.

A few months later, I was trained on a task that involved comparing two lists of samples in Excel. The process took four hours twice per week however, I was able to program an Excel spreadsheet to semi-automate the process so that it only took a few minutes.

I showed this project to Katie. She was very thankful and clearly impressed by my contribution. At the time, I had accepted a higher position in another department within the parent company, and Katie was very supportive of that decision. Because the lab was in the process of upgrading to a new system, she was not sure if the spreadsheet I programmed was going to be used or not, however, she was very thankful and showed her appreciation to me.

Years later, I worked on larger projects to semi-automate data processing in the lab and found other supervisors to be very appreciative of my work to improve laboratory efficiency. But to this day, I still look back at a supervisor who was very respectful and supportive early on. Because she made me feel comfortable, I felt like I could share ideas on how to improve the lab.

Not long ago, I read a book that said that 80% of ideas for improvement come from the “front lines” within a company. I’ve also heard of managers who have an attitude of looking down on laborers. Such Classism has no place in the workplace, especially in America.

The moral of the story is to make sure your colleagues and team members feel comfortable at work, especially if you are in a position of authority. A lot of people on the “front lines” have a lot of good ideas, and will gladly share them given the opportunity. Besides just being a good human being, respect and encouragement also bring out the best in people, and these values can do a lot to create an innovative and exciting work environment.

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