We recently had a look at the future trends and developments in Pharma and learned that it’s looking good in terms of growth and potential. One of the main factors being novel therapies and constant adaptation to the changing industry landscape as well as patient needs. It got me thinking: that calls for a strong resilience in leadership in those companies. That’s going to be a challenge.

Why the need for resilient leaders?

Resilience is mainly the ability to adapt in the face of adverse conditions, including dealing with crisis and building lasting structures in the eye of the storm. This doesn’t only ask for extraordinary leadership abilities but also for fundamental understanding for the industry’s upcoming disruptions. Good leadership and strong resilience are therefore tightly connected to a knowledge of the pain points and the real consequences of industry disruption. Let’s look at an example.

Life Science companies are increasingly involved in processes that deal with data and artificial intelligence. A good resilience strategy knows where the dangers in the technologies at the core of these new processes are and keeps them in the loop. The really hard part about resilience is to keep an open mind even when things look hopeless or seem too complex to understand.

Changing product chains in Life Sciences

Life science companies are dealing with and will continue to deal with entirely different products and production chains than they used to. Industries come together, mergers create new value chains and cooperation calls for entirely different skill sets. The landscape of production may look quite different in shorter amounts of time and it needs resilient leaders to deal with these changes and still continue to grow and thrive.

Look out for the competition

And let’s be honest: resilience is necessary to stay ahead of the competition as well! Chances are they already understood what’s going on as well and it might come down to who has the best resilience strategy to profit the most from the ongoing disruption in Life Sciences. In the end – being in this risky industry – resilience becomes a key capability for organizations to prepare for, respond to and recover from business disruption. At any stage, meaning before the disruption, during it and afterwards.

Resilience requires constant work

We all know: if it was easy, everyone was doing it right. Are they? No they aren’t? It’s easy for any leader to fall into a fixed mindset in troubling situations, to turn their energy inward and to lose focus. Resilience is hard work! You need to invest the time and energy to keep up your strength and continue to work on your routines that help you be resilient. You will be rewarded in the end, as studies show, and be given greater clarity and a better ability to think fresh and out-of-the-box thinking – necessary to stay on top of the Life Science game.

Resilience requires a strong social support system and the ability to constructively confront your problems. Let’s get to work!

This and more here.