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The qualities that made yesterday’s R&D Leader successful are insufficient today. With an increasingly competitive and cost-conscious landscape, and the intensifying demands to see genuine differentiation by HTAs, Payers, Physicians, Patients etc., unless a new therapeutic is meaningfully innovative, incremental improvements are no longer being rewarded in the drug development industry. Companies need to demonstrate that their new therapeutics offer substantially better outcomes which patients want, need, and the market is willing to reimburse. Those market forces are now accepted as being an integral part of the drug development strategy, not just in Phase 3 and beyond, but much earlier in development. One R&D Leader described drug development as “the ultimate team sport”, and great teams need great leadership and a cohesive, winning attitude.
Big Pharma companies often headhunt from their Big Pharma peers. The corporate disciplines instilled in employees of larger organisations help to make them more aligned, and keep larger groups of people moving in the same direction. This understanding of how to operate in these large matrixed structures is deemed to be a key attribute. But when a radical rethink is needed, would it not be better to empower people who strive for change and care less about the politics involved? That said, these individuals must also possess the emotional intelligence and leadership skills to bring others with them.
Typically big Pharma has many relationships with smaller Biotech’s. So, why not make it part of career development to be seconded across for 2-3 years, in order to better understand the Biotech mind-set and approach, then bring back some of those practices and attitudes? Equally, why not invite the future Biotech stars in-house, and teach them about the processes and behaviours that make successful Executives in larger corporate structures? Or at least teach them how Big Pharma thinks?
Fundamentally this is a culture question, and that in turn becomes a leadership issue. It is contingent on eliminating old mind-sets and traditional thinking, deconstructing silo’s and fiefdom’s, and building cross-functional teams, led by those who can speak the language of multiple functions and can genuinely engage, empower and direct teams with sometimes very different outlooks and priorities - effectively acting as CEO to the molecule.
It seems prudent that whilst transforming R&D operations to accomplish these objectives, HR departments are working with the functions to understand the talent challenges of the future, and to build systems to identify and develop these molecule CEO’s of the future. In addition, the role of the Search community cannot be overlooked, as it plays a business critical role in identifying and evaluating talent populations for both technical and leadership capability. Their insight to the wider market and ability to look beyond the obvious can mean the difference between a good hire, and one that is great.
