All my biotech CEOs/execs have struggled with this one thing: Team Efficiency and Speed.

How do I make my team go faster? How do I create urgency? Iteration speed is slow.

1. Extreme Ownership

You are the CEO. It’s entirely your responsibility to increase the output of your team. It’s #1 item in your job description. You’ve hired a bunch of A players; now you have to make them a team. Your CEO output = Their collective output.

2. It’s Not a Problem; it’s BAU.

It’s not that you woke up one day, you noticed some unexpected inefficiency issues within your team which you had to fix, and moved on.

Building a high-performing team is a forever work in progress. No team was a dream team from Day #1. No leader was a dream leader from Day #1.

3. Be Vulnerable, Open, and Curious.

Say to your team, Guys, I sometimes feel like we could be going faster but only you can help me see if this is true. [Define what “faster” or “more efficient” means here].

It’s either my unrealistic expectations (which will always be true to a good extent 🙂 or I’m not doing a good enough job to support you. What do you say?”

How can we, if we can, become more efficient as a team?

What could be slowing us down?

Do you have all the help and support you need?

How can I, or someone else in the team, support you more?

4. Ask open-ended questions.

Notice that all the above questions are open-ended coaching questions, i.e. they cannot be answered with a yes or no.

Don’t assume you know the reasons that are slowing your team down. You may have some ideas but you don’t have the full picture. They are the ones closer to the work, so invite them to wonder, be curious, and “meditate” on efficiency by asking the right questions.

5. Talk to everyone on the team one-on-one.

Before you talk to the whole team, spend a good time talking to people one-on-one. Not everyone will be as comfortable sharing their observations or concerns in an all-hands.

5a. Ask about their individual performance without being judgmental.

Focus on facts (what you can see) and avoid evaluations. You don’t have the full picture anyway.

5b. Solicit honest feedback.

Tell them that you’re working on becoming a better leader with the help of your coaches and mentors and that you’re learning alongside everyone else. 

If they need more support from you, ask, “What am I not doing to help you do your job more efficiently? Help me become a better manager!”

5c. Ask them about the whole team. 

How can we become a more efficient team? (See questions in #3 above)

5d. When they seem to have given you all the reasons, don’t move straight to solutions.

Ask the magic question: “What else?” “Is there anything else that you haven’t mentioned?” You have to dig deeper to find the real issues.

Remember that the most important job of the CEO/manager is information gathering. You’re a coach for them. Your commitment is to understand your people deeply. These 1-on-1s is the most powerful management tool and the best investment of your time.

6. Fear of Failure: Coach them out of it!

It always comes down to fear of failure in my experience…

You can’t expect your team to generate breakthroughs or iterate faster if you haven’t given them permission to “fail”.

A CEO said to me, “My team wants to celebrate the things that work!” Of course, they do! Everyone does!

But how can a biotech team truly innovate without being unreasonable and comfortable with”failing”?

This means that you, the leader, have to do colossal work to redefine failure in your culture. It’s conscious, deliberate and consistent work.

And you have to do even more work with team members who have little work experience or joined the company straight out of academia.

Imagine it’s your first gig in the industry. It’s a new world! Everyone around you is smart, talented and an expert in their field.

You want to prove yourself, you want to generate results, you want to impress—which is fine!

The problem is that this can force people to play safe, i.e. go after the “easy” hypothesis/experiment and chase what’s most likely to work.

The role of the leader here is critical! You can’t just say, “Hey guys we are true innovators here, I’m okay with you failing”, put the word “unreasonable” on the wall, and expect them to go and break the lab the next day.

You have to do a lot of work to breed innovators.👇

6a. Focus on learning, not just winning.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t get the desired data. What can we learn from this experiment? Why is it crucial to cross this off? What can we do next if this doesn’t work?

6b. Create a metric for unreasonable bets.

In all-hand meetings ask everyone to talk about an “unreasonable thing” they tried, no matter whether it worked or not. What did you learn? Talk about your own unreasonable bets and lead by example.

6c. Pay attention to their words.

If they only say, “I should do x. I know what I have to do”, then they may be not taking enough risks. Nudge them, “Ok… other than this, is there something else that you’d like to try, no matter how crazy or impossible it may sound?”

6d. Be mindful of what you praise.

If you unconsciously praise only what works, they’ll make sure to only do things that work! If you only want to hear “good news”, they’ll make sure you get good news!

6e. Ask the team to read Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Once you’ve all read it, discuss it and apply the principles.

This book will help you and the team move from a know-it-all (fixed mindset) to a learn-it-all (growth mindset).

7. Introduce a Google 20% type of rule.

The famous Google 20% rule was introduced in 2004 and allowed employees to dedicate 20% of their work time to pursue personal projects, fostering creativity and innovation within the company. This is how Gmail was born.

Whether the Google 20% rule still holds today is a debate, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, introducing a rule that allows people to spend some time “going wild” sends a clear message about the culture in your company.

8. Create a “shocking rule”.

In the early days of Facebook, when Mark Zuckerberg was trying to catch up with MySpace, speed was the #1 virtue he needed from his team, so he created a shocking rule: “Move fast and break things”.

Imagine you’re a software engineer obsessed with your “clean code” and you hear your CEO say: Break things! Well, what the rule says is… “Have you got something cool in your mind? Push it along and don’t think too much! Right now, we need speed.”

So the rule has to be a little bizarre/stretched making people go…”What???”… which means they won’t forget it. Obviously, you can’t break things in biotech but can you come up with a rule/message that can align and rally the team right now?

Here’s an example of a rule around strategy that the former CEO of Alnylam, John Maraganore,  used to rally his team in a critical time for the company.

“We discussed communicating a set of five-year goals at the upcoming January 2011 J.P. Morgan conference. I wanted to propose a new strategy called ‘Alnylam 5×15’, with a commitment to advance five RNAi therapeutic programs into clinical development by the end of 2015.

These programs would all be focused on liver-expressed, genetically validated disease targets (where we had achieved reliable delivery results in primates). In addition, we would focus on targets for which human POC could be realized as early as phase 1, based on biomarkers, and we’d create pivotal studies with endpoints meant to support regulatory approval and demonstrate value for payers. The team pushed back on this. With only one liver-targeting program in development at that time (ALN-TTR01), and no human POC data in hand, the team suggested that ‘2×15’ or ‘3×15’ might be a more manageable goal to promote publicly. I disagreed, saying that a reduced number of targets would not excite our stakeholders nor motivate our team. And, so, Alnylam 5×15 it was! Our research organization rallied behind the new strategy.”

9. Appreciate their pace and coach them into going faster.

You may know from experience that a certain task shouldn’t take someone more than a week to complete. You have also outlined the subtasks. Still, don’t say, “I think you can finish this in a week”.

Ask them, “How much time do you need to complete this?” Give them as much time as they need. When they’re done, you can ask, “Do you have any ideas about how you can do this even faster next time? What did you observe?”

I asked a CEO, “Imagine you are them for a moment. How are you feeling when the CEO says, you can finish this in a week”.

“I would feel pressured”, he replied. Well, rightfully so…

10. Delight your customer.

In biotech, you get this kind of interdependencies where, on one hand, the dry lab can’t do its work until the wet lab is done… And the wet lab can’t improve the next experiment until the dry lab has analysed the data of the previous experiment.

An interdisciplinary team is powerful but when you have this kind of interdependencies, speed can suffer. And speed is critical when you’re not big pharma but a small company with a limited runway.

Say to the team, the person you hand off your work to is your customer. How can you delight your customer? What is important to them? What are their requirements? Often best practices in one team may create problems in another team further down the line.

A team may have to compromise its standards for the next team or the common good. Remember the classic from Systems Theory: “to optimise the system, you have to sub-optimise the sub-systems.”

11. Invite them to step in your shoes.

Tell them what’s going on in your world as the CEO/leader. Your eyes may be fixated on the runway. You’re getting pressured by the board and investors. Your people will do anything to support you when you’re open and honest with them.

12. Give them more context about the business.

A company is a living organism. The corporate strategy and the business environment are constantly changing. It’s not enough to tell people “we have to go faster now”.

You have to give them context. What’s different now? Why are you asking me to stop doing x and start doing y all of a sudden? If you help them understand the situation, not only will they be more motivated to run faster but they’ll provide you with more insight and solutions.