Identifying leadership qualities for the future biopharma leaders
The common perception about leaders, what characteristics they need and the development of those traits needs to be challenged.
Looking at the incidence rate of individuals holding positions of high-office with poor leadership qualities, it is apparent that the driving force behind developing leaders is flawed.
This is the unchallenged, modern-day fashion that leadership can be trained in anyone.
That given the appropriate coaching support and resources, anyone can be a good leader.
There are two additional aspects at play:
Career development in biopharma requires increasing levels of people-management.
The identification of ‘future-leaders’ usually rests on their demonstration of competence in a separate, often unrelated discipline.
When these aspects are modelled out in an example, the issues are clear:
Take a large number of smart, driven people,
Bake in the understanding that to progress you must manage people,
To do this one must demonstrate leadership qualities,
Identify those of high potential (not on leadership qualities, but on a more easily measured metric, like project success),
Retro-fit leadership skills using a development program.
Although there are cases where this identifies excellent people who go onto become excellent leaders, there are many cases of people who have risen to senior leadership positions with inadequate leadership characteristics.
And the biggest red-flag for this approach is retrospectively pointing to a set of characteristics in people in positions of power and saying ‘that’s what you need to be a leader’. Instead we need to reframe our approach.
Instead of ‘leaders show bravery’, rephrase it to: ‘brave people tend to be leaders’. Focus on the trait that has led to a good leader.
As professionals, we’re trying to retro-fit idealised characteristics onto those who have shown potential in a different field. It is the view that by participating in education courses e.g. for leadership, individuals can externally demonstrate what are actually innate human traits.
So instead let us look for people for whom these traits are built-in.
Let us find those that are honest, brave, empathetic, great communicators, and only into them train the capabilities required to do the jobs that they hold.
Let us consider a senior manager who displays poor leadership qualities, not as a price to be paid for their effectiveness, but a system-failure that hasn’t identified the right person in the first place.
The question is no longer ‘How do we define leadership?’ or ‘How do we develop our leaders?’, but instead ‘How do we identify those with the innate qualities required for leadership success, and then teach them their job?’.
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