High Performance Scientific Teams
Great science stalls in the space between people.
Programs rarely die in the assay. They die in the go/no-go meeting nobody
will call, the matrix handoff nobody owns, and the bad data nobody wants
to surface. High-Performance Scientific Teams™ fixes how R&D teams
decide, disagree, and hold each other accountable, so the science moves
at the speed it deserves.
Vertical fixes for a horizontal problem.
When an R&D organization slows down, the reflex is to buy something vertical: a new platform, a new org chart, a new consultant. I’ve watched this from inside a genomics services company that scaled from $17M to over $100M, and from the outside as a consultant. I’ve been part of the vertical fix.
Those fixes change the boxes. They don’t change what happens when a chemist, a biologist, a clinician, and a CMC lead sit in the same room and disagree. That’s where timelines are won or lost, and it’s the one layer almost nobody develops on purpose.
— Stephen Manobianco, Founder, Bench to Business
Six team failures that look like science problems.
None of these show up on a Gantt chart. All of them show up in cycle time, burn rate, and the programs you keep funding a year too long.
Decision hang time
Go/no-go and stage-gate calls drift for weeks because nobody knows who actually decides, so everything escalates to the CSO.
Handoff friction
Discovery to development, development to clinical, clinical to CMC and commercial, each handoff re-litigates what the last team decided.
Matrix gridlock
Program leads own the timeline; functional heads own the people. When they disagree, the program waits.
Leader dependency
Brilliant scientific leaders become the answer to every question. The team waits for them, and the leader becomes the bottleneck
The candor deficit
Inconvenient data gets softened on its way up. Programs that should be killed keep their budget because nobody wants to say it first.
Growth and integration strain
After a raise, an acquisition, or a hiring surge, the informal ways of working that got you here stop scaling.
PROVEN IN LIFE SCIENCE LEADERSHIP TEAMS
High-Performance Scientific Teams™ is built with our
methodology partner, Guttman Development
Strategies, whose horizontal team alignment work
spans pharma, life science tools, and biotech. What
their clients’ leaders reported:
Life Technologies
Life Science Tools
Situation: Post-merger of Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems, four
divisions operating as four separate companies, with a shrinking R&D
budget to split between them.
R&D lesson: An aligned top team could allocate R&D dollars across
businesses through candid, depersonalized debate, no infighting, less top-down decision-making.
“The speed of decision-making and issue resolution is much faster.”
Mark Stevenson, then President & COO
GSK
Consumer Healthcare
Situation: A newly rebuilt, globally dispersed cross-functional leadership
team that needed to stop optimizing for functional wins.
R&D lesson: Enterprise thinking shows up in resourcing; one leader
gave up a superstar from his own function to close a gap elsewhere. Hard issues surfaced sooner.
“We’re much better at putting hard issues on the table.”
Marc Speichert, then Chief Digital Officer, Consumer Healthcare
Janssen Pharmaceuticals
R&D Medical Affairs
Situation: Asia-Pacific R&D and Medical Affairs leadership team,12
members in 8 countries, most with dual reporting lines into global
functions.
R&D lesson: Alignment broke through cultural barriers to candor. Team members began solving issues with peers instead of escalating to the
leader.
“…acting more like a team than a collection of people who report to me.”
Mark A. Bach, then Head of Asia Pacific Medical Sciences
Horizon Therapeutics
Rare Disease Biopharma
Situation: The business had more than doubled in two years inside a
newly formed matrix, work got done in what leaders called a “squiggly line.”
R&D lesson: The instinct was to fix the front line. The real lever was
leadership behavior and pushing decisions down, then cascading to 90+ matrix teams.
“…transformation had to start with the leadership team.”
Dean Patras, then VP Human Resources
Is your scientific team ready for the commercial world?
Determining whether your scientific team is prepared to transition into commercial roles is crucial for business success. Our program is designed to bridge the gap between bench expertise and business acumen, ensuring your team is equipped to handle customer-facing challenges effectively.
Our comprehensive assessment will help identify areas where your team can improve, focusing on enhancing their ability to engage with clients, manage accounts, and contribute to revenue growth. Let us guide your scientific team in becoming confident commercial professionals.
