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Life sciences is facing a leadership crisis. Here’s why adaptive leadership, emotional intelligence, and succession planning are non-negotiables for companies looking to drive business impact.
I’ve worked across healthcare, life sciences, and leadership development long enough to spot the pattern: our systems are still trying to solve 2025 problems with a 1995 mindset.
A McKinsey report found that 75% of leadership development programs fail to deliver meaningful business impact. Why? Because most aren’t designed for the context of today’s environment.
The pace of change in technology, global policy, workforce dynamics, and societal values has left too many leadership pipelines broken or underdeveloped. While L&D and HR teams are asked to fix this without the resources or executive support to do it right.
The result of this is a middle management crunch. One that’s eroding our culture, crippling retention, and putting the long-term viability of organizations at risk.
If you're in any leadership seat today, you’re navigating two worlds: the business world (profitability, accountability, performance) and the people world (engagement, well-being, culture).
When things like immigration raids, tariffs, wars, travel bans, and generational tension hit simultaneously, leaders who can’t adapt or worse, won’t become a liability.
I’ve seen organizations struggle to respond to geopolitical disruptions while still trying to hit quarterly targets and keep their teams intact. The leaders who made it through weren’t just strategic; they were emotionally intelligent, empathetic, and clear communicators who built trust and resilience in their teams.
HR and L&D professionals care deeply about developing people. That’s not the issue. The problem is that at the CEO and CFO level, we still lack consistent buy-in for scalable succession planning.
Many teams are asked to retain, recruit, create talent mobility, and enhance culture without additional support.
That’s why we’re seeing high turnover in the C-suite across life sciences. We’re burning out our current leaders and not developing the next wave.
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025, 80% of organizations still lack confidence in their leadership pipelines.
Employee churn is expensive, both financially and culturally. When we lose tenured leaders without a succession plan in place, we’re not just losing talent; we’re losing institutional wisdom, mentorship, and momentum.
Here’s one reason L&D gets cut first in tough times: we’ve historically reported outputs, not outcomes.
Enrollment numbers and course completion rates don’t tell the story executives need. A better approach, as exemplified by Merck’s CLO recently at a conference, is tying learning initiatives directly to strategic priorities—demonstrating how programs drive innovation, reduce costs, or improve retention.
Gartner backs this up: companies that align learning with business strategy are 2.8x more likely to report high workforce performance.
If you’re still tracking butts-in-seats, it’s time to move to business impact.
Right now, we have five generations working side-by-side. That’s unprecedented and deeply underleveraged.
Rather than harnessing generational diversity as a strength, too many organizations focus on the gaps. Deloitte research shows that only 6 per cent of survey respondents strongly agree that their leaders are equipped to lead such a workforce effectively.
Mentorship is an effective strategy for leveraging the strengths across multiple generations. At Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, for example, they retained retiring nurses as part-time mentors, pairing them with younger professionals to ensure knowledge transfer, leadership development, and a strong sense of community. It worked. Engagement and retention both improved.
I don’t like the word “manager” because it boxes people in. Leadership isn’t about managing people, it’s about influence, adaptability, and driving outcomes, whether you have direct reports or not.
What makes a modern leadership program effective?
Crucially, leaders also need coaching skills. We’re still not investing enough in leaders who know how to coach or be coached. That’s a huge gap.
We talk a lot about emotional intelligence, but very few organizations are embedding it into leadership KPIs or holding leaders accountable.
Younger generations aren’t just asking for empathy because they expect it. They expect leaders who listen, reflect, and engage in meaningful conversations. If your leaders still think feedback is a one-way street, you’ve got a retention problem brewing.
Emotional intelligence isn’t soft. It’s strategic. It helps leaders build inclusive cultures, adapt quickly, and drive real engagement.
If I had five minutes with you, here’s what I’d challenge you to prioritize in the next 12 months:
I’m encouraged by the influx of new thinking into our industry—leaders from transportation, retail, logistics, and beyond, bringing fresh perspectives into life sciences.
I didn’t come from L&D or HR myself. I came from business leadership. That perspective helps me bridge the gap between strategy and people. And I’m seeing more HR and L&D leaders stepping into that same space claiming their seat at the table, telling their stories, and setting the agenda.
To those leaders: keep going. Keep pushing. The future of work depends on it.
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