Leadership “Experience”
This book supports the idea that ‘leadership’ is a phenomenon created through interdependent and distinct variables in the situation, the person, and the person’s ability to appropriately respond to the situation. Leadership is not the result of a ‘list of traits’ and getting a certain score in a psychometric test is no guarantee of leadership behavior, although biopharmaceutical executives may find that lists and tests can be useful tools in their own leadership development.
Without a practical framework of commitments, competencies, or conditions for biopharmaceutical executives to express their commitments and competencies, the exploration of ‘leadership’ becomes an abstract and elusive ideal not unlike a Castalian pursuit of Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game and renders the study of leadership an abstract and elite exercise.
The study conducted for this book also found singular ideas on ‘leadership’ problematic, and similar to Jaques’ study of leadership (Jaques and Clement, 1994), identified leadership experiences as dependent on variables beyond the executives themselves. In fact, many of the executives interviewed in this book have worked for chief executives who, by popular ‘personality’ standards, appeared to be angry, withdrawn, uncommunicative, antagonistic, and awkward – words that we would never find in a ‘list of leadership personality traits.’
Yet the chief executive officers who easily fall at the far end of the ‘charisma’ spectrum somehow rose to the upper echelons of organizations and were capable of developing productive working relationships with their subordinates. Of course, one may suggest that these CEOs’ successes rested on the ‘leadership aptitudes’ of their subordinate executives who had found a way to ‘draw out the best’ from their chief executives, but this again becomes another attempt to isolate ‘leadership’ into a personality or individual embodiment rather than a phenomenon of interdependent variables that includes the executives themselves.
In the biopharmaceutical industry, the leadership debate goes one step farther, to include subject-matter expertise as part of the equation, and asks who would make a ‘better’ leader – a scientist or a businessman?
This question has become relevant since biopharmaceutical organizations are increasingly ‘led’ by CEOs from a business background; these CEOs are now responsible for managing organizations whose viability directly depends on ‘the fruits of innovative labor’ – novel therapeutic products. The reality is that chief executives can severely injure the present viability and future competitiveness of their companies – whether they come from a business background or a scientific background – and to ask which group would make a better CEO would be to assume that a scientific CEO could not build business capacity or a business CEO could not build scientific capacity to best manage their companies. This simplistic reduction of biopharmaceutical leadership in turn distracts us from focusing on the most important question, which is: ‘How do we equip our biopharmaceutical executives at all levels of the organization to become effective managerial leaders?’
What is at stake is not only those who work in biopharmaceutical organizations, but the millions of patients whose lives depend on the products that these organizations produce.
– Excerpt from the Conclusion of Practical Leadership for Biopharmaceutical Executives
The biohealthcare executive in upper-middle management confronts leadership challenges unique to their industry: they manage highly specialized knowledge workers and innovators, compete at the speed of technology, work in a highly regulated environment where 'free speech' often does not apply due to patient safety and privacy concerns, and increasingly are leading virtual teams who may be located in different parts of the world.
This book is a guide that strips away the theory and meets head-on the practical leadership challenges these executives face on a daily basis, and provides these 'innovator leaders' with the tools to lead effectively in the face of technological complexity.
This book supports the idea that 'leadership' is a phenomenon created through interdependent and distinct variables in the situation, the person, and the person's ability to appropriately respond to the situation. Leadership is not the result of a 'list of traits' and getting a certain score in a psychometric test is no guarantee of leadership behavior, although biopharmaceutical executives may find that lists and tests can be useful tools in their own leadership development.
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