One comment on “Essential Coaching for R&D Leaders – The Importance of the ‘Human Element’

  1. Nice call out to the kinds of skills so often sadly lacking in management and leadership–not just in Drug Dev R&D, but across a lot of business, I think.

    There’s the whole Catch-22 that people are recognized and promoted initially as individual performers for specific concrete skills (experimental design, knowledge, coding, accounting, whatever) and the reward eventually is…to be taken out of being an individual contributor role and put into the position of being a manager.

    Even in the academic scientific track where so often the number 1 goal is to become a professor with a lab on one’s own, the skills of managing a lab are often never taught by one’s mentor. Scientific, experimental skills yes. The soft skills you describe, not so much. And yet I agree they’re so important to get high performance from teams and groups.

    A few years ago I was introduced to the concepts of Emotional Intelligence and am continuing on what seems like an endless process of trying to learn these skills. The good thing is, like you say, most people can at least learn enough of them to be more effective and not actively bad.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s