An insightful parallel between bosses and biology

The more I research how life sciences companies work, the more I see the parallels between businesses and biology. This week, as I crunched data for a new piece of research on leadership, another link emerged. It is both academically interesting and practically useful, so let me do my usual thing of rambling into the science on the way to something you can use.

There’s a huge amount of guff written about leadership. Whenever I see one of those ‘leadership is….’ memes on LinkedIn, I can be pretty certain that what is going to follow is going to be platitudinous drivel with no evidence behind it. Even in the more substantial academic literature, it’s hard to pin down what leadership is or to identify what great leadership is.

There are two reasons for that. First, we talk about leadership as if it were the same in any business. While I’m prepared to accept a few shared basics, the idea that leading Novartis is the same as leading McDonalds seems preposterous. Second, much writing focuses on personality and who leaders are. I’ve found leaders to be so different that I can’t accept that there is a ‘leader personality’. Reading books about leadership leaves one thinking that the whole field has fallen for the myth of the hero leader. I think that that’s just not correct.

My dissatisfaction with the leadership guff has pushed my work towards focusing on what leaders, and leadership teams, do in the exceptional context of the life sciences industry. There have been lots of useful findings and if you want the full story, let me nudge you towards ‘Leadership in the Life Sciences’ on Amazon and the accompanying video on YouTube.

A big, central finding was that, in our business, two of the commonly held models of leadership don’t really hold true. We tend not to have hero leaders like Steve Jobs. Truth is, our business and science are too difficult for anyone to manage in such an autocratic way. And nor does the opposite idea that our leaders are ‘servants’ hold up to empirical study. The complexity of the life sciences, the inherent uncertainty and the risks of getting it wrong mean that we do need decisive leaders.

By speaking to lots of industry leaders, I found that their leadership habits were best described as ‘decisive facilitators’. They find ways to draw sense from complexity and then act as the nucleation point for that sense to crystallise into a decision. That’s the big picture anyway. Of course, what’s really interesting is the cluster of capabilities they develop and employ to enable them to be ‘decisive facilitators’. I don’t have space here to describe all of them, but they include the capabilities to focus on the sources of uncertainty and reduce it, to encourage focus on corporate, not departmental, goals and to dovetail critical activities that live in different organisational silos.