What Does Your Leadership Have to Do with the Successful Translation of Science?

First, leadership is the enabler and protector of scientific progress. It is pertinent to any technology. The lack of leadership skills can hinder or even fell the most well-known, accomplished scientists among us, particularly when they enter the world of translating that science for the public good through a government or industry job that now requires dealing with and managing more people that goes beyond the command and control tolerated in a single lab. Indeed, in transitioning from academics to industry, appreciating that it is no longer just about your abilities is one of the most important things to master to become an outstanding industrial scientist.

"[Outstanding industrial scientists] appreciate that any weak link in the team will be their weak link and are comfortable with internal sharing and collaboration. In an academic lab, your competitor may be just down the hall. In a company, your competitors are outside the walls of the company. It no longer hinges on individual achievement but success of the whole. It also means that even when you give your personal best, if someone working on another key area does not, it can still impact your ability to achieve. This is quite different from the university environment where you are largely reliant on your own intellectual and professional ability. Your best work may not become reality if another group within the company does not meet its objective. That can be hard to stomach, so use your talent to inspire and help your company colleagues – it can only help you and the company achieve."

From: How to make the transition from academic research to biotechnology: twelve traits of an outstanding industrial scientist.

So, bringing science to market is not about an individual career but many people's careers and livelihoods, with leadership required at many levels. Most of us can appreciate these things, but it may take some reminding and practice. However, second and perhaps less apparent is how leadership impacts science's translation in even more fundamental, impersonal ways.

Skilled leadership helps a team or company pursue the right thing in the right way. Science and technology must be applied correctly and earnestly to succeed medically. Many therapies will fail in the clinic because of wishful thinking where an earnest commitment to finding the best fit for the technology is not adequately challenged, and the results accepted, ultimately manifesting as a lack of clinical effectiveness, sometimes with an imbalanced risk to reward. Some might argue that medical effectiveness can only be tested in humans. My colleagues and I used to call this the "Who knew?" syndrome, where critical preclinical questions are insufficiently explored, and self-critique is avoided to continue a program. This is a lack of leadership, not the conduct of science.

In many cases, if you commit to a fast-fail approach, you will know what should be tabled before it leads to layoffs or significant clinical trial expenses. Humans are the most complex and expensive way to study proof of concept, and low-powered, early clinical results often fool people. A leader has their eye on prioritizing the big questions surrounding the application of their technology. If something should stop them, they want to know it first and set that expectation within the team.

Great life science leaders know that the best results match what a team can create and what needs to happen in the patient. They understand that the ability to pursue a medically robust match will differ with each team's core competencies, the science of each technology, and the medical fit of each modality. So, they've built a team's core competence to fulfill a consistent, vision-based strategy that targets the best opportunities for them.

In my currently available PBC webinar, Leadership That Delivers, I discuss the benefits of strategically building competitive differentiation in your organization. Think of it this way: imagine you are on a long journey and decide to go up a mountain to reach your destination or take a detour. Some teams will have no choice but to take the detour, and some will get lost and run out of gas. You want to be the one that can go up the mountain if that is the most valuable route. That takes focus and planning, which requires confident, courageous leadership. Therefore, an earnest strategy based on a consistent vision is one of the essential components of life science leadership. It becomes vital to ensure you have the vehicle and operational effectiveness to take the best route.

One of the most challenging things you'll face if you haven't already with any new technology is deciding what to pursue, what not to pursue, and when. Raising a large amount of money should not lessen the responsibility to acquire the actionable knowledge you need to make these decisions as early as possible. Vision must come into focus, and there has to be a commitment to fulfilling that vision through a deliberate strategy that demonstrates the courage to land somewhere. Without it, your efforts are more likely to diffuse with your expert team's results increasingly less focused, supported by a false sense of security that if one thing doesn't work, another might. A hunt-and-peck strategy is for chickens. It isn't leveraging or hedging bets; it's leadership that needs work. It creates the danger of decreasing a sense of commitment to a path and, thus, productive output, be it actionable knowledge or tangible output. The expectation should be, "No junk food on the plate and no 'Kool-Aid' on the table." It takes leadership to keep the company on a healthy diet, to fast fail for the right reasons, and commit to remaining on the most valuable path, which often won't be the easiest (again, where you plan for the difficult by developing key core competencies.) Without courageous, committed leadership, it's more likely that none of this will happen; the application of technology will become unsteady under pressure, and the use of time and money will be less productive and of lower quality and value.

As the leader, you want to pursue the best fit for your technology, which means discovering when it will not do the job as well as an alternative approach. (We should always assume success in our competitors until proven otherwise, and that proof can come from internal work and others, watching out for bias.)

In addition to core issues of scientific translation, design and delivery considerations can present some tough decisions. The most astute choices are more likely to come from a leader who focuses on the ultimate objective, i.e., how it will impact the therapy's goals in the long run (and this is true even if you don't envision being involved in bringing it to market.) Without this focus, one risks short-cited decisions, sometimes unwittingly at the expense of long-term potential, adding years to a timeline or forcing a complete u-turn with a significant reduction in company value and competitive position. While your staff is focused on achieving shorter-term milestones, the company's leaders must keep an eye on the long-term prize and continue to remind everyone of the ultimate objective that is true to the vision to achieve the best, most valuable results.

Every strategy should be committed to finding the best fit for the time and place. However, parts of the strategy may have to change over time based on new internally and externally acquired knowledge. Even if it changes, working from a deliberate strategy is better than lacking one. Trust me, what your company does will be challenged repeatedly during your journey from concept to market. Without a deliberate strategy maintained by skilled leadership to steady the course, it will be more likely that a vision will become muddied and that the strategy will become unclear, leaving an expert team without an anchor and too much on their plate (some of it junk food). A company can easily veer off course earlier or later, harming the effective delivery of your therapies. Do not be surprised when such a company suffers a late-stage failure in the clinic, lays off staff, or changes "strategic" direction abruptly.

This past week, I read two stories that made my heart sink; one was about a once high-potential company laying off a third of its workforce and changing "key" priorities; the second was about the shuttering of a company (where I personally know the founder) now used by the reporter as an example of the "tough" choices faced in biotech. In both cases, the practices I've just touched on could have helped them in different ways. Luckily, company leaders willing to examine their leadership practices and act can better ensure they do not become yet another "business" case study on the risks of life science development.

Don't hesitate to join me for Leadership That Delivers today.

https://parenteaubc.ewebinar.com/webinar/leadership-that-delivers-12341

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