Being a PI is complex

You’re leading yourself, other humans, and a system inside an institution. No wonder it feels hard.

I (and I suppose you also) didn’t become a PI because we were dying to run meetings, build onboarding systems, or mediate conflict between team members.

I became a PI because I’m curious and I care about the science. The ideas. The questions that keep you up at night and make you forget what time it is.

But here we are. Once you have a lab, your days are suddenly full of everything but deep thinking: inbox triage, emotional support for struggling students, performance issues no one trained you to handle, last-minute grant demands, institutional politics, broken handovers.

Some days you are both the bottleneck and the safety net. If you don’t hold everything together, who will?

Most PIs I work with reach a quiet, uncomfortable point where they start asking themselves:

Why do I keep burning out right before big deadlines, even when my team is objectively “fine”?
Why do our systems look great on paper, but in practice everything still feels last-minute and scrambled?
Why do I feel like a decent mentor one-on-one, but the lab as a whole never quite feels how I want it to?

If that resonates, you’re not broken. You’re inside a really complex job.

You’re leading yourself, other humans, and a system, and all of that has to function inside a larger ecosystem you don’t fully control.

You can see that the role of a PI is a messy, very human mix of three layers that are rarely named, let alone supported:

You, the human being with a nervous system, triggers, values, and an evolving leadership identity.
You, the leader in the room with other humans—each with their own needs, histories, fears, and motivations.
You, the architect of a small sociotechnical system: your lab’s structures, processes, habits, and unwritten rules.

When one of these is ignored, the cost usually shows up somewhere else:

You do a lot of inner work, but your calendar is still chaos.
You design beautiful SOPs, but when things get stressful, nobody uses them.
You learn coaching questions and feedback models, but under pressure you suddenly hear “your old PI’s voice” coming out of your own mouth.

It’s painful, because you’re trying. You care. And yet it can still feel like you’re failing yourself and your team.

I don’t believe the answer is to “be nicer,” “delegate more,” or “just get better at time management.” You’ve probably tried those already.

What actually seems to make a difference is understanding how self, skills, and systems fit together in a way that can hold you and your lab over time:

Self-awareness: what’s happening inside you as a leader: your triggers, regulation, values, and leadership identity.
Leadership skills: what you actually do with other humans: feedback, delegation, coaching, culture building, hard conversations.
Systems: how your lab runs when you’re in the room and when you’re not: meetings, handovers, writing pipelines, workload management, norms, checklists.

All three matter. And the gaps between them are exactly where most of the pain shows up:

If you have a strong inner game and good skills, but no systems → everything still rests on your personal effort. The moment you’re tired, traveling, or overloaded, the lab slips back into chaos and you feel like you’re starting from zero again.
If you’ve done inner work and built systems, but your leadership skills are limited → expectations stay fuzzy or awkward, people tiptoe and second-guess, and the good structures you’ve built never fully come to life.
If you have skills and systems, but little self-awareness → the lab looks efficient on the surface, but people quietly organize around your moods and blind spots instead of around the work. That’s lonely—for you and for them.

Where all three overlap is what I call Sustainable Research Leadership: your lab runs on solid systems, you lead with both skill and humanity, and your nervous system isn’t constantly on the edge.

In our 6-month transformational program, Research Leadership Mastery, I don’t ask you to become a different person. I help you lead your lab as more than just “a collection of smart people trying their best” and move toward a version of leadership that is ambitious and livable, for you and for the people who trust you.

If you read this and think, “This is uncomfortably close to my reality,” you’re welcome to reach out to Ariel (ariel@stefanierobel.com) to get on my calendar so we can see together whether this is a fit for you.

And, if you do decide to join Research Leadership Mastery, you’ll get a gentle head start in 2026: you can join our “I strategize 2026” Bootcamp (January 5–9) for free. In that week, we’ll connect your long-term want-to-achieves with next year’s must-achieves and sketch a plan that feels realistic for a human nervous system, not just for an idealized calendar.

Stefanie