Learning to manage people

As we grow in our careers as scientists, we start to do less research ourselves and instead we start to manage other people to do our research. Eventually, all of our research is done by other people’s hands, but we rarely receive real training in how to interact with these people. 

Currently, we are having quite a situation in the lab that involves me and the technician that works on my project, but because I can’t think of a more anonymous way to write about the problem, I won’t go into any more detail. I emailed my PI about it yesterday and we’re going to talk about it today. 

I do have a question for all of you: do you have any recommendations for books about managing people that I should read? Because right now I feel that I’m just doing something…