At a recent life sciences symposium, I was struck by the breadth of expertise in the room. People were talking about cell therapy expanding into gene therapy, analytical and CMC challenges, stem cell therapy, artificial intelligence, employment law, human resources, organizational consulting, and leadership. That breadth says something important about the life sciences industry.
No single person, not even the most brilliant scientist or accomplished CEO, has all the expertise needed to move a therapy from an idea to a patient. Success depends on collaboration. That may sound obvious. But collaboration can be particularly challenging in life sciences because many of the people who rise into leadership have spent much of their careers being rewarded for something very different: individual expertise.
Moving from expert to leader is hard.
Scientists are trained to question assumptions, analyze evidence, defend their conclusions, and become deeply knowledgeable in a specialized area. Those qualities are essential to good science. They don’t necessarily prepare someone to lead a team.
In my book, Consulting to Technical Leaders, Teams, and Organizations, I describe a common transition for technical leaders. People often rise into leadership because they were highly successful individual contributors. Then suddenly the job changes. Their success is no longer determined primarily by what they personally know or accomplish. It depends increasingly on what they can accomplish through other people. That is a profound shift.
At the symposium, several panelists described leadership in relatively directional terms: leaders establish the direction, set expectations, and model the way forward. I agree that leaders need to provide direction. People need to understand the vision, the goals, and what is expected of them. But I would add another dimension: leaders also need to serve the people who are doing the work.
The leader does not have to be the person with every answer. The leader’s role is to create an environment in which talented people can contribute their expertise, challenge assumptions, solve problems together, and do their best work. That requires less emphasis on being the smartest person in the room and more emphasis on creating the conditions for the smartest thinking in the room.
Life sciences makes collaboration especially complicated.
Life sciences organizations are filled with highly specialized people. Scientists, clinicians, regulatory professionals, quality experts, manufacturing leaders, commercial teams, attorneys, HR professionals, investors, and executives may all be looking at the same problem through very different lenses, as they should. Different perspectives are valuable precisely because no one discipline sees the entire picture.
A scientist may be focused on whether something is technically possible. A regulatory leader may be concerned about whether it will pass review. Manufacturing may be asking whether it can be produced reliably at scale. The CEO may be thinking about funding and the competitive landscape. HR may be worried about whether the organization has the people and leadership capability to deliver it.
None of these perspectives is inherently more legitimate than the others. The challenge is integrating them. This is why leadership teams in life sciences cannot simply be collections of accomplished executives reporting on their individual functions. They have to operate as an actual team.
Being right can get in the way of getting it right.
There is another complication. Scientific and technical professionals are frequently rewarded for being right. There are hypotheses to test, data to evaluate, mechanisms to understand, and problems to solve. People learn to defend their conclusions with evidence. That mindset is enormously valuable. But when it moves unchanged into leadership, disagreement can become a contest.
Instead of asking, What are we missing, people start asking, Who is right? Instead of solving the problem, they debate positions. Instead of becoming curious about another person’s perspective, they defend their own. Intellectual disagreement is healthy. In fact, leadership teams need it. Different viewpoints improve decision making when people are willing to examine them.
Personal conflict is different. A useful distinction for leadership teams is to separate the idea from the person. When someone raises a concern, ask what is the concern, not who said that? The minute the identity or status of the speaker becomes more important than the information they are providing, leaders risk losing valuable data.
Hire people who fill your gaps, not people who look like you.
One of the strongest observations I heard at the symposium was the importance of hiring people to fill gaps in the organization rather than hiring “mini-mes.” That is an important leadership discipline. It is comfortable to surround ourselves with people who think like us. Meetings move faster. There is less friction. Our ideas receive more immediate support. But agreement isn’t necessarily collaboration.
A strong leadership team has complementary expertise, perspectives, temperaments, and experiences. The point is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to make disagreement productive. That requires people who are both capable of challenging one another and willing to be challenged themselves. It also means hiring for temperament as well as technical ability. Behavioral interviewing can help identify whether someone is curious, coachable, able to receive feedback, and capable of working through disagreement without making it personal. Technical brilliance does not compensate indefinitely for an inability to work with others.
Leaders have to create safety for disagreement.
Several symposium conversations came back to culture: creating a safe place to make mistakes, giving feedback, and dealing with conflict. This is especially important in industries where mistakes can have serious consequences. When the stakes are high, leaders may unintentionally create the exact behavior they don’t want. People become reluctant to raise bad news. They avoid challenging senior leaders. Problems remain underground until they are much harder to solve.
The leadership team’s behavior teaches the rest of the organization what is safe. If executives interrupt people, dismiss concerns, punish mistakes, or react defensively to disagreement, employees notice. If leaders genuinely listen, ask questions, acknowledge uncertainty, and change their minds when presented with better information, employees notice that too.
One question I often ask leaders is: When was the last time someone on your team changed your mind? And then: What did that person have to do to get you to listen? If you cannot remember the last time you changed your mind, that is worth reflecting on.
The CEO cannot afford to become isolated.
Leadership becomes harder as an organization grows. CEOs naturally become more removed from day-to-day work. Their calendars fill with investors, boards, strategic partners, financing, and external stakeholders. Information becomes filtered through layers of management. Isolation can creep in without anyone intending it. That makes deliberate connection increasingly important.
Walk the halls. Talk to people who don’t report directly to you. Keep your one-on-ones. Ask questions to which you don’t already know the answer. Pay attention when people hesitate before speaking. And resist the temptation to put your idea on the table first. Once the CEO says, “Here’s what I think,” it takes an unusually confident employee to say, “I think you’re wrong.” Try asking the team what they see before telling them what you see.
Collaboration is not the opposite of accountability.
Creating a collaborative culture does not mean tolerating poor performance. People need clear goals. Roles need to be defined. Skills need to be matched appropriately to tasks. Expectations need to be established early.
Accountability and collaboration work together. When someone is struggling, get curious before making assumptions. Find out what is happening. Is the problem capability? Expectations? Resources? Conflict? Role clarity? Leadership? Something outside of work?
Sometimes people need coaching. Sometimes they need clearer expectations. Sometimes a performance improvement process is appropriate. And occasionally someone is simply not a fit for the organization. Even then, the culture you say you value should continue through the separation process. How people are treated when things go wrong communicates as much about culture as how they are treated when everything is going well.
Collaboration has to start at the top.
Life sciences organizations are tackling extraordinarily difficult problems. Cell and gene therapies, new drug development, manufacturing, regulation, clinical research, artificial intelligence, and patient safety require expertise that no single leader possesses. The complexity makes collaboration harder. It also makes collaboration essential.
Leadership teams set the tone. If executives operate in silos, protect their territory, avoid difficult feedback, and compete to have the winning idea, the rest of the organization will learn to do the same. If leaders listen, challenge each other respectfully, share information, admit mistakes, ask for help, and put the organization’s goals ahead of their individual functions, that behavior travels through the company too.
The most important question for a leadership team may not be, Do we have the smartest people? In life sciences, you probably already do. A better question is: Have we created an environment where all of those smart people can solve problems together? Because ultimately, scientific breakthroughs may begin with individual expertise. Getting them to patients requires a team.
