Executive Coaching in Pharma: What 25 Years in the Industry Taught Me

I used to stand in the security queue at Basel Airport on Sunday evenings and wonder if I still wanted the job.

Belt off, liquids out, laptop in the tray, talking half-heartedly on a pipeline call I'd started before I left the hotel.

I spent years working in and around pharma and healthcare before I became a coach. VP of Sales, management consulting, outsourcing work across Europe and Asia. I know what those organisations feel like from the inside: the quarterly reviews, the matrix of dotted lines where everyone is accountable and somehow no one is, the reorganisation that comes out of nowhere just as you've settled in.

So when pharma leaders come to me for coaching, we don't spend much time on context. I already know the world they're describing.

The reorganisation that's always coming

One of the defining features of senior leadership in pharma and life sciences is that the org chart is never quite final.

Companies merge. Pipelines get reprioritised. Commercial models get redesigned. The structure you joined is rarely the one you're working in two years later.

What this creates, over time, is a particular kind of leader. Someone who is very good at adapting, and very practised at not saying when they've had enough.

We develop an impressive tolerance for uncertainty. We get good at holding our counsel, adjusting quickly, projecting steadiness regardless of what's happening underneath. And we accumulate, over the years, a growing list of things we don't say out loud.

What I see most often

After 25 years in and around pharma, and coaching senior leaders across the industry, a few situations come up again and again.

The VP who has landed a high-visibility global role and needs to make an impact quickly with very little real onboarding support. The SVP in the middle of a reorganisation, managing the morale of a team that knows the structure is about to change. The senior leader who has been passed over for succession and is working out, usually at some point late at night, what that means for the next chapter. The executive who has been asked to relocate to global HQ and is weighing what that means for their family and for the career they've spent twenty years building.

None of these are failures. All of them are situations where having a proper thinking partner makes a material difference to the outcome.

Why industry background matters in a coach

I'll be straight about this.

Plenty of excellent executive coaches have no pharma background. They do good work. But when you're a VP at a top 20 pharma company and you have ninety minutes of coaching time, there is a cost to spending twenty of them explaining the matrix structure, the affiliate dynamics, or why the reorganisation is more complicated than the announcement made it sound.

When I work with pharma leaders, we skip that part. Not because I'm showing off. Because I've lived it.

One of my clients, a senior pharma exec, said at the end of our work together that I understood his world well enough that we could get straight to the actual thinking. He also compared my coaching style to Yoda, which I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about.

I'll take it.

What we end up working on

Executive coaching in pharma and life sciences tends to orbit a few consistent themes.

How to land in a high-visibility role and build credibility without losing yourself in the process. How to lead a team through a restructure when you're also uncertain how it's going to land. How to handle the succession situation without damaging relationships you'll need for the next twenty years. How to take on the relocation, or the expanded scope, without the personal cost becoming unsustainable.

Underneath most of those is a question that demanding industries make it very easy to park: who am I in this role, and what kind of leader do I WANT to be?

It's easy to defer that when the quarter is closing and the diary is full. The leaders who get the most out of coaching tend to be the ones who stop deferring it.

The conversation pharma leaders are most reluctant to have

At SVP or VP level in pharma, there are very few places to be properly honest.

Your team needs your steadiness. Your boss needs your pipeline. Your peers are your competition in ways the org chart doesn't mention. Your partner is brilliant and supportive, but they're not impartial, and they may have their own stake in the relocation decision.

So the real thinking happens somewhere else. On the long-haul to the US. In the hotel room the night before the leadership offsite. Over dinner in Basel after a decent glass of something, when the conversation goes somewhere it doesn't usually go.

Pharma leaders are, as a rule, extremely resilient. The industry selects for it.

But resilience and being fine are NOT the same thing. And a lot of us are much better at the first than we are at knowing the difference.

That's often where the coaching starts.

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💬 If you're a senior leader in pharma or life sciences and any of this resonates, I'm happy to have a conversation. My details are on this site.