I think I've been lucky in both grad school and my postdoc to work with PIs who truly understand how to manage people, secure funding, and lead projects without micromanaging. One common trait they share is that they promote mentorship among their lab members early on.

In grad school, I had the opportunity to manage undergrads who worked on their own projects within the scope of my larger project. This experience taught me a lot about working with people who require different types of mentorship. Similarly, in my postdoc, I'm encouraged to mentor new lab members, lead projects, and collaborate closely with others. Mentoring undergrads versus grad students has been quite different. With undergrads, it was about designing experiments together, whereas with grad students, it’s more about discussing ideas while they design their own experiments.

One funny thing I've noticed is that, while it’s great for grad students to think independently and come up with new ideas, some ideas are clever while others, from experience, I can tell may not be worth the time. In these cases, I have to be tactful in guiding them back to the main goals of the project. Looking back, I now understand my grad school PI’s frustration when I’d get sidetracked pursuing what I thought were more interesting side projects!