You’ve read the leadership books. You’ve attended the webinars and workshops. You know that trust matters. You understand why psychological safety is important. So why isn’t your team performing?

This is something I hear often from life sciences leaders. They’ve built teams of smart people. They’ve tried creating the right culture. But something still feels off. Drug development timelines slip. People find themselves workng in silos (again). The energy just isn’t there.

I recently spoke with Thomas Jaecklin on the Active Ingredients podcast, and he gave me a fresh take on the problem I haven’t been able to shake.

The Problem

Most leaders treat team building like a to-do list. First, they work on trust. Then its communication. Tackling psychological safety. One thing at a time, in order.

This approach feels sensible. It feels like progress. But it rarely work.

Here’s why. In drug development, you’re bringing together people with completely different ways of thinking. Commercial strategists see the world differently from regulatory specialists. Safety experts think differently from scientists. Market access professionals have their own priorities entirely.

Thomas has built teams across biotech and pharma for over two decades. He’s hired more than 150 people in a single two-year stretch. He’s led European headquarters through IPO. And he’s learned that you can’t build a great team by perfecting one relationship while ignoring the others.

“I tried to rank the ingredients and explain how they are intertwined with each other,” Thomas told me. “But I think it’s an all of the above, at the same time, in an iterative process.”

The answer isn’t to do things in sequence, but everything at one, little by little.

The Solution

Step 1: Think Like You’re Building a Bicycle Wheel

Thomas gave me an image I can’t shake. Building a high-performing team, he said, is like building a bicycle wheel.

If you’ve ever watched someone build a wheel, you know they don’t attach one spoke and tension it perfectly before moving to the next. That mean the wheel isn’t balanced. Instead, they put all the spokes loosely in place first. Then they go around the wheel again and again, adding a little tension to each spoke with every pass.

For teams, this means you can’t focus only on trust while ignoring transparency. You can’t work on psychological safety while neglecting Respect. Every element needs to be present from the start, even if none of them are perfect yet.

“You can’t connect the hub to the rim and tension the first spoke to the desired tension, ignoring all the other spokes,” Thomas explained. “It’s an iterative process to go round and round and increase in a circular fashion.”

Start by putting all the spokes in place. Trust. Transparency. Psychological safety. Respect. And remember that your team members are people, not bots. None perfected. All present.

Step 2: Listen Before You Lead

Once the foundations are in place, the work becomes about listening. Thomas is clear that this isn’t optional.

In high-stakes environments, the person with the answer isn’t always the person in charge. Thomas observed this repeatedly during his time running medical simulations in pediatric intensive care. Teams would practice responding to a cardiac arrest using a mannequin. Everything was filmed.

What he noticed surprised him. “Very often it was the cleaning staff or an assistant nurse that had the key to the problem we needed to solve,” he said. A cable was disconnected. A piece of equipment was in the wrong place. The most junior person in the room often spotted what everyone else missed.

But they would only speak up if they felt safe doing so. And that safety had to be built before the crisis happened.

“If there is a speak-up environment in that high-stakes, high-stress situation where even the assistant nurse dares to speak up to the physician in chief, that is when you solve problems effectively,” Thomas explained. “You need every brain in order to be effective.”

The same applies in biotech and pharma. Your regulatory specialist might see a risk that your medical lead has missed. Your market access person might understand something about the competitive landscape that changes your whole approach. But they won’t share it unless you’ve created the conditions where speaking up feels safe.

Step 3: Play to Superpowers, Not Job Descriptions

Thomas takes a different approach to hiring than many leaders. When he interviews candidates, he’s less interested in whether they tick every box on the job description. He’s more interested in what drives them. What language do they use when they talk about their work? Why did they apply for this role?

“What kind of words they’re using to describe their drivers, to describe why they’re doing what they’re doing, gives much more in-depth information of whether they would actually be a good fit,” he told me.

His logic is simple. People are good at what they enjoy doing. They’re not good at what they don’t enjoy. So instead of forcing someone into tasks they’ll struggle with, play to their strengths and find other ways to fill the gaps.

“You’re good at what you like doing, and you’re not good at doing what you don’t like doing,” Thomas said. “We need to learn to play into people’s superpowers because every one of us has them.”

This is a shift away from treating people like interchangeable parts. It means designing roles around individuals rather than expecting individuals to fit perfectly into predefined roles.

The Evidence

When Thomas gets this right, something changes in his teams. He calls them “magic moments.”

These happen when people help colleagues without being asked. When someone solves a problem that isn’t technically their responsibility. When the team delivers results that surprise even themselves.

You can’t force magic moments. You can only create the conditions where they become possible. And those conditions come from building every element of team culture together, not one at a time.

“That’s when I think you get those magic results,” Thomas said.

Your Next Move

If your team isn’t performing the way you hoped, resist the urge to focus on just one thing. Instead, ask yourself:

1. Are all the spokes in place? Have you established the foundations of trust, transparency, psychological safety, and Respect? Even loosely?
2. Who isn’t speaking up? In your last team meeting, did you hear from everyone? If not, why not?
3. Are you playing to superpowers? Are your team members doing work they’re genuinely good at and enjoy? Or are you forcing a square peg in a round hole?

The answers will show you where to focus your next pass around the wheel.

Want to hear more from Thomas Jaecklin? Listen to the full podcast episode where Thomas unpacks other leadership skill sets including knowing when you’ve outgrown a role, why authoritarian leadership kills innovation, and how to lead Gen Z talent.