Rethinking How Biopharma Organizations Build Leaders

Leslye Kemp, Senior Manager, Leadership Development, Incyte

Leslye Kemp, Senior Manager, Leadership Development, Incyte

Leslye Kemp is a Senior Manager of Leadership Development at Incyte Corporation, where she integrates behavioral science into building programs to strengthen leadership capability within the oncology franchise. She holds a Doctor of Nursing Practice and Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Science in Nursing from Vanderbilt University, and a Master of Arts in English—a foundation she credits with teaching her to read systems and find patterns across disciplines. Her clinical background as an oncology nurse practitioner, combined with commercial roles at AstraZeneca and Merck, informs an approach to leadership development that draws on motivational interviewing, the transtheoretical model and the science of behavior change. She is completing an MBA at the University of Warwick on a Change Maker Scholarship and is piloting a digital health platform at the intersection of oncology and women’s health. She writes about leadership development, behavior change and the underexplored overlap between clinical science and organizational practice.

The Leadership Capabilities Shaping Biopharma Today

We’ve all seen smart, capable people step into leadership roles and struggle—not from lack of expertise, but because the qualities that fuel individual success often hinder leadership. Expertise is individual; leadership is relational.

That tension is particularly acute in the biopharmaceutical industry. People advancing into leadership are exceptional performers who are scientifically fluent, commercially astute and highly driven. Those qualities earn them the role, but they don’t prepare them for it. By the time they step into leadership, their teams already expect them to coach, develop and retain talent while delivering commercially in complex therapeutic areas.

In this environment, three capabilities separate leaders who thrive from those who plateau. The first is emotional regulation grounded in curiosity. When a leader is genuinely curious about what’s driving someone’s behavior rather than reactive to the behavior itself, something shifts. One can’t be fully reactive and fully interested at the same time. Curiosity creates the pause regulation requires and fosters adaptability.

The second is developmental presence: The ability to see people specifically rather than generically, lean into their strengths and create conditions for growth rather than directing toward predetermined outcomes. The best leaders ask more than they tell and elicit leadership qualities in others. For high performers, this is more difficult than it seems because their instinct is to solve, direct and demonstrate.

The third is systems awareness, which is understanding that a team doesn’t exist in isolation, and that leading well means leading within a larger organizational context, being able to analyze the landscape to position the people they lead within it.

In an industry where talent retention and commercial execution are existential priorities, these aren’t soft skills. They’re commercial capabilities.

Linking Leadership Development to Strategy and Growth

Start with business strategy before content: What does the organization need its leaders to be able to do differently in three, six, twelve months—and what does that require? A competency framework without strategic grounding is a catalog, and a development program without a clear theory of behavior change is an event calendar.

"The leaders who shaped my own development were the ones who resisted giving answers in favor of asking better questions—not because they didn’t have answers, but because they understood that their answers weren’t the point."

From there, I work within a 70-20-10 framework—about 70 percent of leadership through on-the-job experience, 20 percent through coaching and peer learning, and 10 percent through formal instruction. Formal programs shouldn’t be destinations; they should be catalysts for individual growth.

Coaching and Mentoring as Drivers of High-Impact Leadership

People don’t change when they are directed to. They change when something internal is activated. In my clinical background, I trained extensively in motivational interviewing, a behavior change methodology built on the premise that a directive statement often triggers resistance, while an evocative question activates motivation and agency. The same principles that make a clinician effective in behavior change conversations make a leader effective in coaching conversations. Program design that ignores this reality produces compliance instead of growth.

Coaching belongs at the center of leadership development architecture for precisely this reason. The leaders who shaped my own development were the ones who resisted giving answers in favor of asking better questions—not because they didn’t have answers, but because they understood that their answers weren’t the point. They created a safe space for me to uncover my own answers and develop through the process. That’s the orientation worth building into at every level: genuine curiosity about what’s limiting people, and the skill to work with that rather than around it.

Assessing the Long-Term Value of Leadership Development Initiatives

Completion rates and satisfaction scores may be evidence of engagement, but they aren’t evidence of development. I favor Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, but the practical challenge is moving from reaction and learning to behavior change and results. That requires longitudinal commitment most training functions don’t receive. Building measurement infrastructure before launch is the only way to know if a program is effective.

Many organizations aren’t measuring behavior change because they aren’t sure they want to know the results. Measurement creates accountability not only for the program, but for managers and senior leaders whose behaviors either reinforce or undermine development. Curiosity applies here, too: The organizations that measure well are the ones genuinely interested in whether anything changed—not simply in justifying their investment.

Building Leadership Pipelines That Endure

Start with the business strategy and values, work backward to the capabilities required and then ask the harder question: Do we have a genuine theory of how leadership develops in this organization or do we have a training calendar?

Build the infrastructure that makes development possible rather than incidental—a clear competency architecture, a coaching culture embedded in daily work and a measurement system honest enough to reveal what’s working.

But the most important thing an organization can do is cultivate curiosity in its leaders, its development programs and in how it thinks about talent. Curious elicit rather than direct, developing teams capable of adapting to an environment that isn’t slowing down for anyone.