Julie Sikorsky didn’t know the technical leader role existed until the day she was hired into a laboratory that had one waiting for her. She’s led a forensic biology unit for years since. She still remembers not knowing.
That gap between what the role is and what most people understand about it before they’re in it is the subject of a recent episode of Crime in the Courtroom. John Collins, Dr. Pamela Marshall, and Julie Sikorsky spent the conversation working through four things: why labs built this position in the first place, what makes it a genuinely hard job, what helps the people in it, and what a lab can do structurally so the role doesn’t run entirely on individual resilience.
Why the Position Exists
The technical leader position took shape inside DNA testing, as CODIS was coming online and labs across the country were scaling up casework fast. Labs and the FBI needed a way to guarantee that the people producing profiles bound for the national database understood the science well enough to catch their own mistakes, independent of whoever happened to hold the supervisory title. John Collins, who entered the field in 1993, watched the position get built in real time. The concern driving it, in his words, was straightforward: leadership needed confidence that “the people that are doing this work, that are producing the profiles and uploading them into… the national databank, are doing it right or doing it competently.”
Sikorsky’s read on why the position stuck goes a layer deeper. Forensic science, she pointed out, is unusual among technical fields in requiring hands-on expertise from the person overseeing it. “A lot of other disciplines, you don’t need to be the expert at the thing in order to manage it. You just need to be a good manager,” she said. “But I think forensics is very different. And so I do think it was somewhat of an insurance policy against that… what we do is too big to take that risk.” The position was a direct answer to a specific failure mode: a technically unqualified person landing in a role with technical authority.
The model has since moved well past DNA. Labs now build the same structure into latent prints, firearms and tool marks, and drug chemistry: any discipline where someone needs to own validation, methodology, and emerging technology full time, separate from day-to-day supervision.
What the Role Actually Is, and Where It Gets Hard
A technical leader owns the technical side of a lab’s operations: validations, method changes, technical exceptions, and often the training program that determines how analysts are prepared to testify. In many labs, that gives the technical leader more authority than the supervisor in specific, defined areas. “The technical leader manages all of the technical aspects of everything, and the technical leader has more power than the manager in certain aspects,” Sikorsky said. “And not all managers can stomach that.”
That split authority is the first source of friction, and it’s structural, not personal. Most public forensic labs evolved inside a law enforcement command structure, hierarchical by design, long before the technical leader existed as a role built specifically to overrule a manager in its own lane. Nobody in the profession had to negotiate that overlap before it existed. Now every lab that has both a supervisor and a technical leader is negotiating it, usually without a template.
The second source of friction is more personal, and it’s the one Collins has spent over a decade coaching people through. Moving into a technical leader role, he argues, isn’t a promotion so much as a career change. “You didn’t just get promoted, you changed professions,” he tells his coaching clients. People build real identity around bench work in this field. Stepping away from it, even partially, can feel like a loss before it feels like anything else.
Sikorsky offered something she said she’d never said publicly before, and it’s a useful measure of how long that adjustment can take even for someone who is, by every visible measure, good at the job. “I felt guilty. There was a lot of guilt,” she said. “I actually just this year finally stopped taking proficiency tests. I’ve been in management for 14 years.” It took her fourteen years to release the last formal tie to bench work.
The third source of friction is credibility itself. A technical leader has to earn ongoing respect from analysts who can tell, quickly, whether the person signing off on their work still understands it. “You cannot lead technically if the analysts don’t respect you and your technical knowledge,” Sikorsky said. That respect has to be maintained without doing casework directly, which means it has to be built through other means, deliberately.
What Helps: Recommendations for Technical Leaders
None of the above gets solved by pushing through it alone, and none of it gets solved by choosing between full detachment from the bench and never leaving it. The mentors pointed to several concrete practices that help technical leaders manage the transition without losing the credibility, or the identity, that got them there.
Staying visibly connected, without doing the work directly, is the first one. Sikorsky reviews case files, sits in on trainings, and walks the lab floor regularly, not to work cases but to stay current enough that her technical opinion still lands. Staff have started noticing and asking why she’s there, which is itself doing real work.
Explaining the why matters just as much as the decision itself. Technical leaders are frequently the only person in the room who has to justify a quality or validation decision to a management chain that’s driven to move fast. Naming the reasoning out loud, every time, is part of the job rather than an inconvenience to it.
Where labs have a strong quality assurance manager, both mentors described that role functioning as an intermediary between the technical leader and the supervisor. “It’s almost like an intermediary,” Sikorsky said. That relationship works best when a technical leader treats it as a deliberate ally rather than letting it develop by accident.
Leadership style matters here too. Collins offers a coaching framework built in reverse: if you want to fail as a new leader, be a dictator, don’t ask your people any questions, and never let anyone see you without an answer. “By being a dictator,” he said, “what you do is you cut off the conversations with the variety of people that makes you look informed.” The reverse move is simpler than it sounds: “You don’t have to be the person with every single answer. Give them an opportunity to influence you and you will earn their trust.” For someone still settling into a new professional identity, that’s a lower-pressure way to build authority than trying to look infallible.
The identity shift itself deserves to be named on purpose, not worked through silently. Sikorsky’s fourteen years is not a benchmark to hit. It’s evidence that the adjustment is real and takes time even for people who are clearly succeeding in the role. And in the meantime, the small moments count: the instances where a technical leader is the only person who can grant an exception or unblock a stuck problem are real trust-building opportunities, even without daily bench presence. They add up.
What Labs Can Do: Setting the Technical Leader Up for Success
Everything above is what a technical leader can do individually. Most of it works faster, and holds up better under pressure, when the lab around them is built to support it rather than leaving it to the individual to figure out.
The clearest starting point is writing the technical leader-supervisor relationship down. Most labs never define where authority overlaps and where it doesn’t, which means the first real test of that boundary happens live, under pressure, with no reference point to fall back on.
The quality assurance manager role deserves the same attention. If that role is functioning as the buffer between technical and administrative priorities, it only works when it has the bandwidth to be more than document control.
Workload planning matters more than it might seem. Protecting some technical review or training time in a technical leader’s schedule keeps the bench-level connection that makes their authority credible with staff, rather than letting full administrative absorption quietly erode it.
Training-program ownership, including courtroom readiness, is worth building into the role formally rather than leaving it informal. Technical leaders are already shaping how analysts testify in most labs, and naming that as an explicit responsibility ties it directly into audit readiness.
And the identity transition itself is worth naming out loud, the moment someone steps into the role. A single direct conversation acknowledging that this is a career change, not just a new title, can shorten what took one experienced mentor fourteen years to work through without anyone naming it for her.
Where to Go Deeper: FLA Workshop and 1:1 Coaching at ISHI 37
The FLA is bringing a related, hands-on version of this conversation to Providence this October. The full-day workshop Build Your Brand – Build Your Culture: Putting Success in Succession Planning works through exactly this territory: what technical leadership actually requires, and how labs build the structure around it deliberately instead of by accident.
FLA mentors are also holding complimentary one-on-one coaching sessions on-site at ISHI 37, open to anyone currently in a technical leader or supervisor role, and to anyone who sees that role in their own future.