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Global megatrends are prompting companies to reinvent their business model quickly while addressing long-term needs. Without doing so, companies are at risk of no longer remaining viable.
The medtech industry is no exception - accelerating technological change, an evolving healthcare ecosystem and changing patient and customer behaviors are creating opportunities, and imperatives, for companies to reimagine how they can compete in the industry.
Because of these changing trends, the medtech industry can benefit from transformative leaders who manage company performance not just through their business decisions, but through their leadership behaviors. In our interactions with professionals within the industry, we were particularly inspired by women executives that exemplified PwC’s five differentiators of transformative leadership. This and the fact that women represent just 21% of executives at the world’s 100 biggest medical device companies, according to Medical Design & Outsourcing, moved us to explore what enables women to thrive in this industry.
We interviewed a handful of women executives to learn about their life trajectories and collective professional experience, which spans decades and continents. We asked them how they bring the five differentiators to life as they lead their teams and organizations to deliver patient outcomes.
1. Make sense of the world
Transformative leaders should understand their place in a market – and a world – that is moving beneath their feet, driving toward a strategic horizon they might not yet be able to see. As organizations, teams and individuals, they should make sense of a complex world and support others in doing the same. In medtech this may require looking outside the traditional playbook of incremental product improvements, narrow deals activity and unquestioned investment in sales and marketing. All of this in the context of a dynamic healthcare ecosystem that focuses on evolving needs of diverse patient communities.
In the multifaceted and ever-changing medtech environment, sense-making can be challenging for leaders, but likely necessary. The women leaders we spoke to kept close watch over their companies’ standing in the market — using reflection, prospection and humility to decide where they should be to offer meaningful and personalized value to the community. Identifying global megatrends, how these are likely to impact your market, and what decisions to make as a result, is key.
“In a world of imperfect information, you have to be willing to take a stand for your company’s vision.”
Achieving such multidimensional understanding likely requires diverse teams and perspective-gathering at speed and scale. That said, driving toward a unified purpose can be critical to making sense of the world — and charting a course for how to innovate amid uncertainty.
Like many leaders during the height of the pandemic, one executive had to devise a plan to keep employees safe while continuing to manufacture a product patients rely on. Humility was a key anchor point for her, “You don’t have to know everything if you admit it”, she said. She consulted a senior health and safety leader, who not only came up with a solution, but also realized they could provide personal protective equipment to local first responders by donating excess inventory. She recognized she needed others to make sense of the world and do what was beneficial for her employees and the healthcare community.
2. Set radical ambition
Transformative leaders are those who can identify a challenge or unmet need that their organization is uniquely positioned to address — marshalling the resources, technology or know-how to help make it a reality and drive innovation. They stretch their organizations to the limits of what is feasible, balancing audacity with practicality.
One medtech leader and her team recognized an opportunity to deliver a medication more effectively and more often, with less disruption for patients and clinicians. While the delivery of the drug was typically done intravenously once a month, her team found a way to deliver it subcutaneously on a weekly basis. The successful result reinforced the importance of taking time to consider seemingly far-fetched ideas because they may offer insight into new ways to meet unmet market needs.
“The question really is, are you meeting unmet needs by just going with the status quo?”
Another executive, who now runs a company, shared a story from when she was only a couple of months into her role and tasked with leading a financial turnaround.
She knew a successful turnaround required across-the-board internal cuts. She recalled addressing the entire company, including employees who’d been there for decades. She had to quickly establish trust to execute the tactics needed to enable the company's survival. “You don’t know me,” she said, “But I am going to ask you to trust me because we can either make painful cuts together or watch the company go down together.” Employees were willing to make sacrifices to help the company stay in business.
3. Achieve promised outcomes
Executives are expected to turn radical ambition into hoped-for results. One executive shared an experience leading the strategy for a major product launch. She and her colleagues knew they had a highly effective product and wanted to make it number one in the United States to match its success elsewhere. Some executives believed they could differentiate the product by attacking the safety of competing products. She believed the efficacy of their product was its greatest strength (along with proven safety) and stood her ground, insisting they emphasize that as they brought it to market. She recalled helpful advice she received from a C-suite colleague during that time that has stayed with her ever since: “You aren’t here to be loved,” the colleague told her. “You’re here to be respected.”
“If you say you’re going to do it, you need to do it. If that means you have to find different ways of making it happen, then that’s what you do.”
Attaining aggressive business goals is often a group effort, and transformative leaders get personally involved in the process. A leader we spoke to describe her approach to maintaining the financial strength of the company under a world crisis. She gave herself and her C-suite colleagues salary cuts and reduced pay for all employees, including limiting hourly workers to four days a week. “We had to remain a viable company,” she said — it was a radical approach to a novel problem, but it worked.
Both leaders had to change some minds in the C-suite — and at times questioned their own resolve but focusing on long-term success — along with the fundamental goal of improving and saving people’s lives — helped them persevere.
4. Act as a catalyst
There is a myriad of ways to act as a catalyst in any role or situation. Spurring innovation by building high-performing teams can be especially critical for transformative leaders in medtech. This dynamic industry demands people from many cultural heritages and functional backgrounds to join forces. The leaders we talked to have experience working cross-culturally and showed a deep appreciation for divergent thinking and social norms. This allowed them to be more inclusive, and interculturally aware, adapting their style to lead differently along the way.
The leaders emphasized the importance of teams in helping individuals thrive — starting with being their authentic selves, while also asking for and truly listening to feedback, ideas and input from team members. Transformative leadership requires leading in a way that others want to follow. One executive keeps a letter from a former employee whom she at one point saw as her possible successor. Ultimately, she encouraged him to take a job he was offered elsewhere because she thought he’d make a huge impact there. The letter writer said, “You are a leader in the truest sense.” He was inspired by her curiosity, humility and work ethic. “I know now what happiness at work feels like and will strive to give it to other people”, he wrote. This leader added, “I keep the letter so I can go back and look at it to remind myself I’ve got to be that because when I’m that, I’m really good.”
“We may have attributes that make us leaders, but that doesn’t mean we have followers. If you have both, you can bring people to a vision, and they will stay to execute the vision.”
Despite the need for transformative leaders to act as catalysts, PwC’s most recent Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey suggests that not all leaders encourage experimentation, debating ideas or questioning the status quo — critical actions for innovation and employee engagement, not to mention corporate reinvention. Across sectors, only 35% of respondents in this survey said their manager tolerates small-scale failures, and just 33% said their manager encourages dissent and debate.
5. Power the engines
Transformative leaders prioritize their own growth as well as that of their teams. They take care of themselves and their teams while helping others feel empowered to contribute. One leader does this by setting a high bar for her teams and expecting the same for herself. “I share constructive feedback with my team and expect the same from them,” she said. “I keep a constant dialogue going.”
Transformative leaders also make a point of building and maintaining trusted professional networks of former bosses, colleagues and/or business partners who are invested in their success, while making themselves available to others for the same purpose. As you grow, you should continue to nurture the support you receive from sponsors, mentors, and coaches – any of these individuals can play a pivotal role in your career and even in your personal sphere. “When you get to a higher level, it’s a lonely job. You’re always observed, expected to deliver. You forget you could feel more comfortable if you could speak to someone. I wish I had learned this sooner,” said one leader.
“I try to find that perfect balance between caring and demanding. Sometimes leaders who care too much lower the expectations for their teams. Or if they are too demanding, they don’t care enough, which can also be problematic.”
The leaders we spoke to agreed that learning and growing from mistakes is a better use of their time than trying to be perfect, focusing on strengths instead of worrying excessively about where they may fall short. They emphasized the need to conduct oneself in a way that shows they can deliver. “You have to stand out. If you are not standing out, you are in the dark”, one leader advised wishing she had exhibited that more often early on in her career.
How does transformative leadership resonate with you? What did you learn from these women’s insights and experience? How do you see the differentiators coming to life in your day-to-day? Please share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn.
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