“At the heart of strong leadership is the ability to command teams, to build community, to build teamwork, to build communication across executive committees, senior leadership committees, boards… It’s the ability to stabilise teams and the communication across teams, up to the board down to the senior leadership team and across the organisation.” — Jodie Morrison
Jodie Morrison is a Venture Partner at Atlas Venture and has been a CEO and Board Member of, I don’t know, how many biotech companies!
Jodie continues… “I’m always looking for good team players and people who have high EQ because ultimately you can find all the skills but bad EQ and the inability to integrate properly and communication across a team is to me, the biggest killer we run into in biotech companies is a breakdown in that communication, which I think often can be traced back to problems with EQ.”
Again… the “ability to stabilise teams”!
Here’s an example of this…
A biotech company is for most of its early life an R&D company. The scientific founders, the scientists, the R&D team, and later the CMO, the regulatory people, the clinical people…
These guys spend years pouring blood, sweat, and tears during the early research, pre-clinical and clinical stages. And they do care a lot; they see the company as their baby, and rightfully so.
And one day when the science and drug discovery hopefully succeed, it’s then time for the commercial people to run the show… and rightfully so! Without their help, the company can’t create/launch/market a product and reach the patients.
But it can be hard for the scientists to hand over their baby, which they have raised with so much love and care for 10+ years to these new strangers! They can be sceptical, they can be unwilling to let go of control or power if you wish… These are all legitimate human feelings!
The CEO here must be a master “team stabiliser”, and manage egos, listen to the concerns of everyone, resolve conflict, and help people trust each other and work well together.
And this happens with every transition; a biotech company goes through so many transitions, i.e. private to public, pre-clinical to clinical, clinical to commercial. Transitions are all about transparency, communication and stabilisation!
John Maraganore has said the same thing: “The biggest challenge in this business is not the science, it’s not the money… the biggest challenge is people”.
It’s all about stabilising and aligning people towards the accomplishment of a shared vision.
That’s your job. If you do this one thing well, you’re done.
And of course…. you have to raise a lot of $$$ so that you can have people to align!