Your regulatory team is talking about submission timelines. For Medical Affairs, it’s all about clinical endpoints. Operations wants to quiz you on manufacturing capacity. Commercial is asking about market access. Everyone is working hard, but few are working in alignment.

This is the daily reality for life sciences leaders managing cross-functional teams. You have brilliant specialists. They know their specialisms inside out. But getting them to speak the same language and move in the same direction can sometimes feel impossible. Projects slow down. Strategic priorities can get lost in translation. Your best people end up working in parallel instead of pulling together.

The Problem

The challenge is not that your teams lack expertise.  In pharmaceutical, biotech and medtech organisations, you have some of the smartest people in the business.

The problem is that deep expertise creates its own language.  Each function has its own vocabulary, its own priorities, its own way of measuring success.

Most leaders respond by holding more meetings. They create alignment workshops, build governance structures and remind teams about the importance of collaboration. But this rarely works because it treats the symptom rather than the cause.

The real issue is not communication, but clarity. When specialists cannot see how their work connects to business outcomes, they default to what they know best, which is talking about the technical details, which often doesn’t help you make decisions, especially in cross-functional initiatives with stakeholders from different specialisms.

Aditi Singh Ulvskjold has spent over fifteen years navigating this challenge across pharmaceutical and medical device organisations. She has moved deliberately across the value chain, from research and development to clinical operations to pharmacovigilance to commercial leadership. At each stage, she learned a different technical language. And at each stage, she discovered that the specialists who succeed are not the ones who know the most technical detail. They are the ones who can translate their expertise into business impact.

Aditi recalls a pivotal piece of career advice she received from a mentor early in her journey. Words that she has stood by throughout her career.

“The world belongs to the connector and to the generalist,” she was told. “You need to have enough depth to be able to talk to people. You don’t need to know everything about everything… You need to be able to have the conversation with the specialist, but you have to be able to connect that information with the next specialist.”

The answer isn’t to become an expert in every function, but to develop clarity so sharp that you can cut through technical complexity and focus everyone on what matters.

The Solution

Step 1: Ask the Customer Impact Question First

When a specialist starts getting too technical, your instinct might be to lean in and try to grasp all the details. Instead, redirect the conversation immediately to customer impact.

Aditi uses a simple question to do this. “When somebody is talking to me from a technical perspective, I can talk to them and say, so tell me, how will this benefit our customers?” she explained. “When you are talking about this regulatory timeline… I always end up asking, so how fast will we be able to get this innovation to our customers? What would it mean to the business?”

This question forces the specialist to step out of their technical frame and into a business frame, shifting the conversation from process-based to outcome-based. All the while demonstrating to the specialist that you value their work not because it is technically impressive, but because it serves patients and drives the business forward.

The key is to ask this question early. If your regulatory lead starts talking about submission pathways, interrupt gently and ask how this affects time to market. If your medical team starts discussing trial design, ask what clinical endpoint will move the needle with prescribers. If your operations team is explaining manufacturing capacity, ask how this enables market expansion.

This is not about dismissing technical expertise. Rather, it is about anchoring every technical conversation in strategic context from the start.

Step 2: Unearth the Three Things That Drive Impact

Once you have redirected the conversation back the customer and business impact, the next step is to simplify. Specialists will want to tell you about ten different variables. Your job is to help them identify the three things that matter.

“I start unravelling it in a questioning way,” Aditi said. “I don’t need to know all the details of a submission. I just need to know… unearth for me what will drive the impact.”

When you ask a specialist to identify the three most important things, something happens in the conversation; they realise they do not need to explain every detail. They begin to prioritise. And they start to see their own work through your eyes, which is through the lens of business strategy.

“When you start having that conversation with a very specialised function or a specialised person, they also, in a way of reflecting, start thinking, oh, this is important,” Aditi explained. “I don’t need to talk about ten different things. I need to talk about these three things. And I need to focus on these three things to move the business forward.”

This approach works because it respects the specialist’s expertise while also asking them to translate it. Rather then telling them what matters, you are asking them to identify what matters within their area of expertise, and then to connect it to the broader business goal.

The specific three things will vary depending on the function. For regulatory, it might be submission timing, approval pathway, and competitive landscape. For medical, it might be clinical endpoint, safety profile, and evidence strength. For commercial, it might be target segment, prescriber behaviour, and reimbursement pathway. The exact list does not matter. What matters is that the specialist can articulate these three things clearly and connect them to business outcomes.

Step 3: Convert Strategic Clarity Into Simple Language

The final step is translation. Once the specialist has identified the three things that drive impact, you need to help them communicate this in language that everyone else can understand.

This is where strategic clarity becomes powerful. If you have clarity on where the business needs to go, you can take complex technical information and distil it into simple statements.

“You have to be having such strategic clarity that you’re able to ask those questions,” Aditi said. “You’re able to also convert that strategic clarity into something simple that a person in a very specialised function understands.”

This is not about creating a shared language, not dumbing down the work. When your regulatory lead can explain in two sentences why their submission timeline matters to the commercial launch, that is when cross-functional teams start to align.

The test is whether someone outside the specialist function can repeat back the key point in their own words. If we continue with the example of the regulatory lead explaining the importance of the submission timeline to commercial launch, your commercial lead should be able to explain why the regulatory timeline matters. That is proof you have achieved translation.

The Evidence

When this approach works, you see it in decision-making speed. Less back-and-fourth. Meetings become shorter. Projects move faster because everyone understands how their work connects to the outcome.

You also see it in how specialists communicate. They stop leading with technical details and start leading with business impact. They become better at prioritising their own work because they can see which activities drive the most value. And they become better collaborators because they can speak in language that other functions understand.

Most importantly, you see it in results. When teams are aligned around clear priorities, they execute faster. They spot problems earlier and make better trade-offs because they understand what the business needs to achieve.

Aditi applies this approach at every level. “When I look at it at scale, whether it is down to a single project, to an entire enterprise, I always say, why are we doing it? For whom are we doing it? Are we all aligned? Are our noses pointed in the same direction?” she explained. “I really spend a lot of time thinking and simplifying. What are the two three things we need to do in order to achieve this?”

Your Next Move

If your cross-functional teams are struggling to align, resist the urge to add more governance or hold more meetings. Instead, build strategic clarity through better questions.

Start by asking yourself:

1. In your next cross-functional meeting, can you ask the customer impact question first? Before anyone explains technical details, ask how this work benefits customers or drives the business forward. Notice what happens to the conversation.
2. Can each of your specialist teams articulate the three things that matter most? If you asked your regulatory, medical, operations, and commercial leads to name the three priorities that will move the needle, would they give you the same answer? If not, you have a clarity problem.
3. Can your specialists translate their work into language everyone understands? Test this by asking someone from one function to explain what another function is working on and why it matters. If they cannot do this, you need to work on translation.

The answers will show you where clarity is missing and where to focus your effort.

Aditi Singh Ulvskjold full conversation on the Active Ingredients podcast explores further topics including how to hire for potential rather than experience, why diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones, and how international career moves shape leadership capabilities