Every senior role in pharma, biotech and medtech organisations carries pressure, and plenty of leaders assume the stress comes with the territory. Active Ingredients Blockbusters are where I bring together people with real experience to take on the big, difficult challenges shaping life sciences. For my first episode, I spoke with Anna Mosley, high-performance leadership coach and Founder of Eighty Growth Academy.

Anna started her career at L’Oréal before moving through commercial and global leadership roles, and she has trained our own team here at Fraser Dove International. She has helped me a great deal as a leader too, and her practical approach challenges the usual thinking on high performance, so I couldn’t think of a better person to open the series. Tune into the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music.

Anna’s biggest worry is that companies aren’t developing leaders fast enough to keep up with the change in their markets. For life sciences executives leading a trial readout, a launch or a reorganisation, that gap means learning on the job, under pressure. In this article, Anna answers five questions on high-performance leadership in her own words.

What Does a High-Performing Team Look Like?

A high-performing team is close enough to be open with each other, challenge each other and hold each other to account. Anna Mosley described it as “a team that is so incredibly well connected that they are vulnerable with each other. They openly challenge each other, they hold each other accountable. They are very clear in what… great looks like.”

She compares it to a Premier League football team. People in these teams share what is and isn’t working. “They are vulnerable in the light of reflecting on what’s not working. So they’re really good at sharing what their last learning was, to give someone else a shortcut,” she told me. They keep their processes under review too, asking what one small change would make the work better. Anna calls this the kaizen mentality, after the Japanese approach to continuous improvement used by Toyota.

None of it happens without the person at the top. Anna said these teams have “an epic leader that is modelling the behaviours of this team from the top down.”Jason Martin, a biotech technical operations leader who appeared on an earlier episode of the Active Ingredients podcast, set similar ground rules for his teams, built on trust, engagement, accountability and what he calls making stars.

In life sciences, a programme often depends on research, regulatory, manufacturing and commercial people working as one group, so a team that masks its mistakes can find them resurfacing later as a missed milestone or a failed inspection[NB4] . One step you can take: at your next team meeting, ask each person to share the last thing they learnt that could save a colleague time.

Does High Stress Mean High Performance?

Anna Mosley’s answer is no. In her view, the best leaders keep stress low even when pressure is high, and working at 80% most of the time is what lets you step up to 100% when it counts.

She learnt this through her own burnout. “All my life I’ve been quite high at what I call the stress-ometer… I’d always operated it like an eight out of ten, which, by the way, is not conducive to high performance,” she told me. After returning from maternity leave to a global leadership role, she was driving to work when she forgot where she was going and had to pull over. “That was my body’s version of a total breakdown.”

Her answer was a rule she now builds her business around: “80% is enough 99% of the time.” A first-class degree at Cambridge, she points out, needs 70%. The best chief executives (CEOs) she has met may be under heavy pressure, yet they “are able to stay calm and be able to make decisions based on facts, not emotion.”

A regulatory submission or a board review won’t get any less pressured, so the work is keeping your own stress down while you ride it out. One step you can take: prepare the 80% version of your next team update rather than the perfect one, and stop work at a set time the night before. One of Anna’s clients went in with fewer slides and more energy, and reported back: “I’ve never had such engagement with the team because I’ve gone in, for example, with five slides instead of 50.”

How Do You Adapt Your Style Without Being Inauthentic?

You treat adapting to each person as a form of respect. “Meeting people where they’re at is respectful, not manipulative,” Anna Mosley said. “You’re not pretending to be someone you’re not.”

Anna’s view is that most managers and leaders connect well with only about 25% of their team. She puts this down to few leaders being clear on the four personality styles that tests such as Myers-Briggs and Insights are built on. She wants leaders to spot those styles in their team without needing a report. “You notice and observe their pace, their energy, the language that they’re using, whether they are a people person or not… you learn to meet them where they’re at by adapting your communication, your approach,” she explained. She calls this being a chameleon leader.

She uses the UK television dating show Take Me Out to explain it. Each contestant keeps a light on while they’re interested and switches it off when they’re not. “Each of our team members has got a light on and it is your responsibility as leader to keep that light on,” she said. In a team meeting, that might mean a fun video for what Anna calls the yellow explorers, and more detail for the analysts.

Life sciences teams mix scientists, commercial leads and quality specialists, who rarely want information delivered the same way. One step you can take comes from Anna’s closing advice: before each one-to-one, “create two minutes to think about who am I about to speak to?”

Can You Build Psychological Safety Without Lowering the Bar?

You can, and Anna Mosley argues that clear standards and calling out poor performance fast are what make people feel safe. She defines psychological safety as an environment “safe enough for people to speak up and challenge, to make a mistake and not feel shame around it.”

Anna separates a nice leader from a kind one. The nice leader wants to be liked, so they avoid hard conversations and hold back feedback. Anna admits that used to be her. “The kind leader gets… far more respect because they lean into the difficult conversations. They call out underperformance fast,” she said. That kind leader “creates a much more psychologically safe environment because people know where they stand.” It also helps to rethink the conversation itself: “It’s not a difficult conversation. It’s just a conversation… to achieve alignment between you and the other person.”

Being clear on what great looks like, and calling out underperformance or toxic behaviour fast, are steps that “seem quite bold” but “actually make people feel safe and most importantly, drive high performance,” she told me.

In a regulated industry, whoever spots a problem in the data has to feel able to say so. Thomas Jaecklin, who has built teams across biotech and pharma for over two decades, saw this earlier in his career when running hospital simulations, where the most junior person in the room often found the fault but only spoke up if it felt safe. One step you can take: write down what great looks like for each role in your team and share it.

How Do You Stop Your Team Bringing You Every Problem?

Ask them to bring one problem, three possible solutions and one recommendation. Anna Mosley calls this the 1-3-1, and it’s one of the most popular tools she gives to the leaders she trains.

It helps you as well as your team. “It gets your team thinking like a leader. It gets them solution-focused rather than being stuck in the problem. It gives you, most importantly, more capacity to lead because your conversations with them are going to be super-efficient,” she said. You don’t have to accept the recommendation, but it gives the conversation a better starting point. Anna keeps it for the bigger problems, and the three options can be as plain as low, medium and high cost.

If someone arrives with a problem and no options, Anna’s advice is to switch into coaching mode and ask them to come back with three options and a recommendation. Dr R Ananthanarayanan, former CEO of Teva’s active pharmaceutical ingredients business, makes a similar point: before anyone looks for answers, keep asking questions until you know the real problem.

Anna also uses it on herself under pressure. “If I was about to go into a boardroom… and I’m feeling really stressed and overwhelmed, I would literally do the [1-3-1] on myself so that it would help me articulate my suggestion, my proposal,” she said. In life sciences, where big decisions often go to a board or investment committee, that clarity really counts. One step you can take: introduce the 1-3-1 at your next team meeting, for the problems that need your decision.

High-Performance Leadership: The Short Answers

1. A high-performing team is open with each other, challenges each other and holds each other to account.
2. High stress doesn’t mean high performance. Keep stress low when pressure is high, and work at 80% most of the time.
3. Adapting your style to each person is a form of respect.
4. Clear standards and fast feedback build psychological safety without lowering the bar.
5. Ask your team for one problem, three possible solutions and one recommendation.

Anna Mosley believes a company’s ability to scale comes down to its leadership capacity. For life sciences organisations, that makes finding leaders who already work this way as important as developing the ones they have.