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Laboratory Leaders
It takes a “village”
Teamwork makes
the dream work
“Alone we can do so little;
together we can do so much.”
Helen Keller (American author, political activist,
lecturer, and the first deafblind person to earn
a Bachelor of Arts degree)
We’ve all heard the clichés
and slogans about teams
and teamwork:
• TEAM: Together, Everyone Achieves More
• Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success Laboratory Leaders feature will be Power Couples
• There’s no ‘I’ in ‘TEAM’’
These are more than just trite sayings. Teamwork is
an essential part of workplace success. Despite the
depictions of the lone scientist toiling away in the
lab … all too often, portrayed in fiction as a “mad”
scientist (think Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and Emmett
“Doc” Brown from the Back to the Future film series),
science really is a team “sport”. And with the
increasing complexity of tests, specialization of care,
and changing regulatory requirements, the clinical
laboratory is a perfect example of how essential
teamwork is to successful outcomes.
In the clinical lab, team members with specialized
knowledge and skills have specific objectives.
These subject matter experts pool their collective
knowledge, expertise, and experience as they
Teamwork makes the dream work,
but a vision becomes a nightmare
when the leader has a big dream
and a bad team.
John C. Maxwell (American author, speaker,
and clergyman)
work together towards a common goal.
Individually, each team member has the potential
to be a star; working as a cohesive team makes it
possible for them to be champions.
For the next several issues, the focus of our
in the Laboratory. We’ll explore the importance of
teamwork in the laboratory and the major discoveries
made by scientists who collaborated and were
supported by teams of researchers, technologists,
and technicians.
In our first installment, which will appear in our
Q4 2018 issue of SCC Quarterly, we’ll discuss
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Marie-Anne Pierrette
Paulze Lavoisier, the “father and mother” of modern
chemistry, who discovered the key role played by
oxygen in combustion and in the respiration of plants
and animals. Their experiments proved the law of
the conservation of mass—according to which the
amount of matter is always the same at the beginning
and the end of a reaction—and they discovered that
water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen.
– Martha Abell Shrader