What the 2025 Data Is Telling Us About Leading in Life Sciences – and What That Means for 2026
“Conversations we’ve had with leaders this year tell us the ground has shifted. In the last 12 months alone, the way many organisations operate has changed dramatically. There’s been an impact on structures and process, priorities seem to be clear, and people are being relied on to hold it all together. Everyone is expected to lead. In many organisations, it’s a much more chaotic scenario. And the reality is, we’re expecting humans to operate in this complexity without being equipped, supported, or emotionally ready to do so.”
Ben Shoshan, Co-Founder, Open Water
Over the past year, we’ve been looking closely at leadership and organisational patterns emerging from the diagnostics we’ve delivered with life science leaders – across different organisations, geographies, and moments of change.
When we step back and look at the data as a whole, a clear picture begins to form.
Not one “big problem”, but a combination of pressures that consistently show up together.
Across organisations, leaders report grappling with the same underlying challenges:
→ Competing priorities that leave leaders feeling overloaded
→ Strategies that are clear on paper, but harder to land day to day in fast-changing environments
→ Cross-functional collaboration that takes more effort than it should, largely due to human friction
→ Slower or less confident decision-making caused by gaps in alignment and cohesion
→ A growing emotional load, particularly where commercial pressure is high and change fatigue has set in
None of this will surprise experienced leaders.
What is striking is how consistently these issues appear together.
One data point in particular stands out.
Teams working on mission-critical initiatives – including launches and major change initiatives – report spending up to 80 per cent of their time on tactical activity.
That leaves very little space for strategic thinking, prioritisation, or looking ahead. This is about focus, not effort or capability.
Leaders describe working in near-constant urgency. Everything feels important. Yet from a team perspective, very little feels clearly owned.
Over time, decision quality drops and alignment becomes harder to sustain.
Another significant source of strain comes from leaders being asked to deliver results while their organisations are in flux – from new leadership teams to restructures, post-merger integrations to first-time commercial launches. Sometimes all at once.
As structures and roles shift, decision rights aren’t always clear. Strategic signals differ across regions or functions.
The result is ambiguity and fatigue – not because people don’t care, but because shared clarity is difficult to maintain.
Our diagnostic interviews also revealed a recurring gap between strategic intent and lived behaviour.
Under pressure, accountability and ownership start to blur, micromanagement creeps in, and psychological safety quietly erodes.
Newly promoted leaders often struggle with the people side of leadership – not through lack of ability, but through lack of support.
Several leaders we spoke to described behaviours and cultures that simply haven’t caught up with the organisation’s ambition.
This isn’t a cultural side note. It creates risk, directly affecting speed, trust, and execution.
Cross-functional working adds another layer of complexity.
Commercial, medical, regulatory and operational teams often operate with partial views of the whole. That’s when tunnel vision can creep in and key voices can feel left out of decisions.
Leaders spend time translating between functions rather than focusing on the work itself.
When commercial pressure is high – first-time launches, competitive markets, regulatory complexity – all of this is amplified.
→ Prioritisation becomes harder
→ Alignment is more difficult to sustain
→ Communication becomes reactive
Leaders tell us it’s not about workload.
It’s about how decisions are made, how information flows, and how cohesion and clarity are created when the stakes are high.
Taken together, the data doesn’t point to a lack of leadership talent.
It points to a human operating gap.
Leaders are navigating complexity, ambiguity and emotional pressure inside systems that weren’t designed for this level of pace or uncertainty.
The intent is there – and the capability is there.
What’s often missing are the behavioural foundations that allow leaders and teams to operate well under sustained pressure.
This is where human friction comes in – not as open conflict, but as small inefficiencies such as:
→ Misalignment
→ Slower decisions
→ Blurred ownership
→ Avoidable tension between teams
Left unaddressed, that friction quietly becomes a source of risk.
If these patterns continue, success in 2026 won’t come from asking leaders to carry more.
It will come from removing the friction that makes leadership harder than it needs to be.
The leaders who thrive will be strategic thinkers with commercial and technical savvy.
They’ll also be skilled human operators – able to create clarity, alignment and trust inside systems squeezed by pressure, ambiguity and constant change.
That capability needs to be built deliberately and with intention by de-risking the human friction that slows decisions and erodes trust in critical moments.
For most life science organisations, the problem isn’t that leaders are hiding their heads in the sand.
Human friction is already present in the system – the question is whether it is actively addressed or quietly allowed to compound into a success-limiting risk.
And this is not work leaders should be expected to do alone.
Reducing human friction, strengthening leadership capability, and closing the human operating gap require focused attention, specialist expertise, and an objective view of how people actually behave under pressure.
In complex environments, assuming it will resolve itself – or that it can be fixed simply by setting expectations or announcing the roll out of new behaviours – is itself a risk.
Specialists in the human side of change, we partner with leading life science organisations to deliver deep change and cultural transformation.