Managing the Laboratory Animal Facility

Jerald Silverman

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498742788
• eBook ISBN: 9781315352046
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Praise for the Previous Editions

"The author brings in management wisdom from the world outside laboratory animal medicine and veterinary medicine. As a result, there is a rich mixture of the experience of a seasoned professional and the theoretical framework used by schools of management …. I recommend this book to managers and laboratory animal specialists at any stage of their careers." —Franklin M. Loew, DVM, PhD, DACLAM, JAVMA, Vol. 222, No. 6, 2003

"… This book is a good informational resource for any new manager to the field of laboratory management. The information is presented in a way that will keep your interest and stimulate you to think how it can benefit you and the facility in which you work."
—Susan K. Cutter, BS, RVT, RLATG, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, LAMA Review

Written in Jerry Silverman's trademark style, Managing the Laboratory Animal Facility, Third Edition provides the reader with sound management theory and associated management practices that are easy to read, easy to understand, easy to implement, and pertinent to the daily management and leadership of laboratory animal facilities. Maintaining the practical focus of previous editions, this greatly expanded volume presents the critical knowledge needed to help you make efficient and effective use of the key resources that are used every day by vivarium managers – people, time, money, and information.

New to the Third Edition

Incorporating the latest developments in management theory and application, the edition contains approximately 100 pages of new and expanded material. This more detailed coverage:

• Discusses lean management concepts and practices and their application to laboratory animal science
• Adds information on many essential topics, especially in human resources management in its treatment of negotiations, influence, and performance reviews
• Provides a large number of revisions and updates to Appendix 2 in its presentation of Per diem calculations
• Includes an extensive list of references for further study of specialized topics

Chapter 1

The Basics of Managing a Laboratory Animal Facility

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

Peter Drucker

I grew up in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of an apartment house surrounded by other apartment houses. When we moved down the hallway to an apartment with two bedrooms, I thought we had struck it rich. In retrospect, my experiences in Brooklyn were typical. We were all kids from middle-class families, and like most of the neighborhood kids, I was pretty sure that I knew a lot about life because I equated being streetwise with knowing everything there was to know. In reality, I knew very little. None of us living in Borough Park knew much about what happened in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, Canarsie, or Flatbush. That was because Brooklyn was, and still is, a series of neighborhoods. You lived in your neighborhood, not Brooklyn. Yet, there were some areas of commonality among Brooklyn’s 4 million residents. The rides and food at Coney Island, the Prospect Park zoo, kids diving for pennies in the murky waters of Sheepshead Bay, and even the gangs in some of the schools were shared experiences for many of us. But one of the strongest threads that held us together was the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers, or the Bums, as they were affectionately known, were an integral part of our world. The Dodgers were the good guys. The Yankees were the bad guys. The Giants weren’t worth mentioning. I left Brooklyn many years ago, but I still remember the day—actually the moment—that Bobby Thompson hit the home run that gave the Giants the 1951 pennant over Brooklyn. I was just a kid, but I remember feeling sick and dejected, as if somebody squeezed all the air out of me. The only salvation was that the Yankees beat the Giants in the World Series.

We would usually take the bus to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers play. The manager of the team was Chuck Dressen, Jake Pitler coached first base, and Cookie Lavagetto was the third base coach. As a kid, I could never understand if there was any difference between a manager and a coach. I thought that the words meant the same thing. In fact, I was sure that Lavagetto and Pitler, who you always saw, did most of the work, and Dressen, the manager who stayed in the dugout, did very little. The only time I saw him was at the beginning of the game or when he went out to the mound to change the pitcher. At the time, that didn’t seem particularly important to me. Now, many years later, I’ve figured things out. Dressen was responsible for overseeing the entire field operation; he made the final decisions on the batting order, the playing positions, and the game strategy. He had final responsibility for molding the individual players into a team. No matter what the quality of his players, it was his job to get the most out of them. Lavagetto, Pitler, and the other coaches were his helpers, consultants, and administrators. Dressen delegated certain responsibilities to them, but he was ultimately responsible for the game and the season. He was also responsible to the team’s upper management. If the Dodgers didn’t win, Dressen and his coaches would be looking for jobs.

Chuck Dressen wasn’t much different from today’s laboratory animal facility manager. On the field, Dressen was top management, but in the scheme of the entire organization, he was middle management. He had to make the best use of the resources he had, and even if resources were scarce, he was expected to win the game. The same analogy holds for most business executives, head chefs, orchestra conductors, and fire chiefs. Even though they have different duties on a day-to-day basis, as managers, they have similar responsibilities and problems.

As you might expect, the word manager can mean different things to different people. In large part, it depends on whether you are the manager, the one who is being managed, or somebody in between. If we were to ask a hundred people on the street what it means to be a manager, I’m willing to wager that the majority would provide an answer such as “being a manager is the same as being a boss. You’re in charge of supervising other people.” They would say that because many people believe that telling other people what to do, where to do it, and when to do it is what management is all about. Actually, I used to think the same thing. That’s not to say that managers never do those things, but supervising people is only one part of a manager’s responsibilities. There is more to management than meets the eye, and one of the goals of this book is to help you understand what a manager is and what you should be doing as a manager. This is more important than it sounds because almost nobody can do a job well unless they know what they’re supposed to do. Now, the cynic who has been in laboratory animal science for 20 or more years might say that there aren’t too many things he hasn’t seen or handled, so there really isn’t much more to know about management in laboratory animal science. That, as you might guess, is nonsense. Management changes just as fast as laboratory animal science changes. Bad or outdated techniques with animals and bad or outdated techniques in management are inevitable. I vividly remember the admonition given to me and my classmates by Dr. George Poppensiek, dean of the veterinary school at Cornell, on the occasion of our first day of class. Poppensiek said that in order to be considered an expert in performing a surgical procedure, it was generally accepted that you had to do it at least 500 times. And even then, you could do it wrong 500 times. I’ve never forgotten that caution. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of people who became an expert at doing things wrong for many, many years. They survived in laboratory animal science because of reasonably good technical skills, a modicum of basic management skills, a lot of luck, and more job openings than there were people to fill them. I want you to be better than those people. I want you to know what a manager is supposed to do. I want you to have, at the least, the theoretical knowledge needed to be a competent manager. Then, as I wrote in the preface, you have to put this knowledge into action every day you are at work. It doesn’t mean much to read a book and then fall back into tried-and-true bad habits when you are on the animal facility floor. That’s just a shortcut to becoming an expert at doing things wrong.

In some ways, this book will give you some very traditional thoughts about management, and in other ways, I hope that it will help you with the unique aspects of managing a laboratory animal facility. Overall, I like to think that this book is a guide, not a compilation of specifications that must be rigidly followed. More often than not, a good manager is an adaptable person, and if you want to do a good job managing an animal facility, you will have to be very adaptable.

A Definition of Management

We all know how to manage. If you can get out of bed in the morning, brush your teeth, and go to work, you have managed to do something. In this case, you managed to reach one small goal—getting to work. For those of us whose hearts don’t start to beat until noontime, that’s no small accomplishment. On a small scale, that is (in part) what managers do. There is a goal (getting to work on time), a specific plan to reach that goal (getting out of bed on time and getting washed up in a set amount of time), and a means of organizing the goal (using strategies such as setting an alarm clock the night before and making sure clothing is laid out for the morning), and you even made a decision that doing all this was the best way to proceed. On a more serious note, the concept of setting goals and developing plans to accomplish those goals are two of the cornerstones of successful management.

Setting goals and developing plans to accomplish those goals are two cornerstones of successful management.

Since most people can manage (or at least manage a little), for most of you this book will take some of the things that you intuitively know and place them in a logical order to help you become a better manager. I’ll talk to you about the things expected of good managers by other good managers. I’ll try to point out problems that have confronted many managers of laboratory animal facilities and give you suggestions on how to approach them. In many instances, you many think, “That’s just common sense.” That’s probably true, but the trick is to recognize that there are some basic actions that good managers use in almost all situations in order to reach a goal.

Let me begin by providing a working definition of management. Management is the art and science of using resources efficiently and effectively in order to accomplish a goal. This definition should hold whether you are managing an animal facility, a baseball team, or a multinational corporation. It’s not perfect; some people would add or subtract a little, and some would disagree, but in general, it will do.

Management is the art and science of using resources efficiently and effectively in order to accomplish a goal.

To put this into plain language, if you have a job that has to be completed or a problem that has to be resolved (both are goals), you should develop a plan and use all the resources at your disposal to reach that goal. Don’t waste time or money, but make sure it gets done right. If that sounds like common sense, you’re right—it is. I’ve used the phrase “art and science” to emphasize that although there is a good deal of textbook knowledge that is part of the science of management, there still is a large amount of finesse that is needed, and that only comes with experience. That is the “art” of management, and it is often more important than the science of management. This definition of management raises further questions that are important to managers. What is meant by resources, efficient, effective, and goal? As you read through this book, you will start to find the answers to these questions. First, however, let’s see if you are a manager.

Are You a Manager?

There is no universally accepted definition of what it is about work responsibilities that makes a person a manager. One well-known management theorist defined a manager as “that person in charge of an organization or subunit” [1]. I don’t subscribe to that definition because “in charge of” is far too vague a statement and says nothing about goals. It can include every person who has any control, no matter how limited, over a specific resource, such as a cage washer. My preferred definition of a manager, which is shown below, is derived from the definition of management I just presented.

The most important criterion for being an animal facility manager (or any other manager) is that you are expected to establish goals that can significantly affect your animal facility’s operations and you have the authority to use all or some of the resources of your organization (such as money or people) to reach those goals. If you can do that, you’re a manager. Everyone has goals, but not everyone has a responsibility to establish goals that can significantly affect the functioning of his or her business (in this case, the animal facility). Managers have that responsibility. On the other hand, if the only work you are responsible for is your own, and if you really don’t have the authority to use resources in order to make significant decisions toward reaching a goal, then you are not yet a manager. The fact that you are not a manager has nothing to do with the importance of your work. For example, we all know that laboratory animal facilities could hardly function without animal care technicians.

Don’t worry about titles. You may be called a facility director, operations manager, supervisor of animal care, administrative assistant, or any such designation. The question is not one of titles; rather, it is whether you have the authority to use resources to reach goals that can significantly affect your organization. If you have authority to hire a new person, you have controlled at least one resource (people) that can have a significant impact on organizational operations. If your authority includes making purchasing decisions for the animal facility, you have control over another resource (money). In either case, you have fulfilled the basic criterion for being categorized as a manager.

Even though a manager has the authority to use an organization’s resources, it does not follow that a manager has unlimited authority. I manage my department and I have the authority to approve a vacation request from a direct report of mine, but I have no authority to close the school due to a snowstorm. The chancellor of the medical school has the authority to close the school in a snowstorm, but does not have the authority to dictate how often a mouse is to be given a pain-relieving drug. In short, almost all managers have limitations to their authority.

A manager is a person who has the authority to use an organization’s resources to establish goals and make decisions that can significantly affect the organization’s operations.

In a laboratory animal facility, most animal care technicians are not managers. They may have the authority to separate animals if they are fighting, to perform certain diagnostic tests when they feel it is appropriate, and to meet with vendors or order supplies when needed. But they probably do not have the authority to purchase animals, cancel a contract with a vendor, hire another technician, or order a new cage washer. They are responsible for their own actions, and they have very limited ability to make decisions that significantly affect the organization’s overall operations.

Unfortunately, not all people with the title of manager are truly managers. Consider the “manager” whose primary responsibility is to make sure that animal care technicians are getting their assigned work done in an efficient and effective manner. If that person requires the approval of a higher authority within the animal facility to reassign a person to a different area, initiate a salary raise, send a letter of reprimand, approve time off, initiate a purchase order, cancel an order, and so forth, then we have to wonder about that so-called manager’s ability to use resources to make significant decisions that can affect the animal facility’s operations. That person may be a very talented supervisor, but at this time he doesn’t fit the definition of a manager.

A manager does not have to use all of her available resources all of the time. Consider an accountant in a small company. There may be no people working for this person (people are a resource), but because the accountant may have the authority to set goals and make decisions about another resource (money) that can significantly affect the company’s operations, that person is considered to be a manager.

Are You a New Manager?

So far, I’ve given you a definition of management and told you a few things about management in general. In a little while, we’ll begin a discussion about the resources managers have at their disposal, and then we’ll delve into what managers actually do on a day-to-day basis. But for right now, let me say a few words about becoming a new manager because it’s easy to talk or read about management until the time you actually have to do it. I want to try to put your mind at ease (a little) by reassuring you that whatever you are feeling as a new manager, others before you have had that same feeling. There are very few people who are natural managers. In fact, it’s been stated that only about 1 in 10 people ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Author
• 1 The Basics of Managing a Laboratory Animal Facility
• 2 The Organizational Environment
• 3 The Management of Human Resources
• 4 Managing Financial Resources
• 5 Management of Information Resources
• 6 Time Management
• 7 Leadership
• Appendix 1: Productivity Goals and Measurements
• Appendix 2: Setting Per Diem Rates
• Appendix 3: Hiring the Right People
• Appendix 4: Training and Mentoring
• Index