Positioning an R&D Pharma VP for Enterprise Leadership
Executive Coaching Case Study
Context:
In the pharmaceutical industry, senior R&D leaders face a distinctive leadership challenge. Scientific credibility and operational excellence — the qualities that drive early career success — can paradoxically become a ceiling at the VP level. Leaders who have earned their authority through deep expertise must learn to operate differently: influencing strategically, communicating with executive brevity, and building the kind of organizational relationships that extend their impact beyond their own function.
The client was a Vice President leading a specialist scientific function within a large, matrixed global pharmaceutical company. She was widely respected for her transformational leadership of her team and her deep scientific credibility. Despite this strong track record, she had not yet achieved the organizational visibility and influence commensurate with her potential and level.
Key challenges:
Executive presence and communication: In senior leadership forums, the client had a tendency to lead with a high level of operational detail and contextual framing before arriving at her core message. This pattern, while reflecting genuine thoroughness, meant her enterprise-level strategic thinking was often not immediately visible to executive peers and stakeholders. The challenge was one of confidence rather than capability.
Stakeholder relationships: Key relationships with senior peers and cross-functional leaders were functional rather than trust-based. The client had not yet invested in the informal stakeholder network that drives influence in complex, matrixed organizations. Engaging stakeholders before formal forums rather than within them was an underdeveloped practice.
Perception gaps: Interview feedback revealed a meaningful difference between how the client experienced her own leadership contributions and how those contributions landed with others. Her iterative, context-rich thinking style was often received as operational rather than strategic, obscuring the enterprise-level thinking that was genuinely present.
Navigating upward complexity: Her direct reporting relationship involved a manager who communicated indirectly and rarely stated expectations explicitly, creating ambiguity about what was required to progress. Managing this relationship with clarity and confidence was a significant source of stress.
The client entered coaching to process this feedback honestly, to understand the patterns underlying it, and to develop a more deliberate and impactful approach to leadership at the senior executive level.
The Client’s Coach
The client partnered with Margaret Dean, whose combination of broad and deep experience in complex organizational systems, analytical rigor, and expertise in developmental coaching made her a strong match for this engagement.
Margaret drew on multiple methodologies, including the Immunity to Change framework and somatic techniques. Her coaching emphasized:
A safe space for honest processing: The client was able to sit with difficult feedback before moving to action. This slowed the move to taking action and enabled deeper insight.
Distinguishing skill from confidence: A critical early reframe was recognizing that the client's communication challenges were not a capability deficit but a confidence and permission gap. She had not yet fully claimed her right to operate as a senior enterprise leader rather than as the functional expert in the room.
From feedback to strategy: Margaret supported the client in converting stakeholder perceptions into specific, targeted behavioral experiments — small, deliberate shifts that could be tested in real leadership situations and refined based on what worked.
Body and behavior: Somatic coaching techniques, including mirroring during role-play, were among the most impactful coaching moments. Helping the client notice and regulate her presence in high-stakes moments supported deeper behavioral change than reflective work alone.
Engagement Process
The engagement followed a structured but flexible process, anchored by rigorous stakeholder insight and ongoing experimentation
1) Assessment
Psychometric and 360 data — including Hogan HPI, HDS, and MVPI assessments and a 360-degree Leadership Potential report — provided a detailed picture of the client's personality profile, leadership derailers under stress, and motivational drivers
Key findings from psychometric assessment included exceptional learning orientation, strong intellectual curiosity, and deeply altruistic motivation. The data also identified emotional reactivity under pressure, a tendency toward caution and risk-aversion that could inhibit visible decisiveness
2) Tripartite goal-setting
A three-way session involving the client, her coach, and her direct manager established shared development goals, created explicit accountability, and opened a more direct channel for ongoing feedback — reducing the ambiguity that had been a source of stress
3) Stakeholder Interviews
Margaret conducted structured interviews with a selected group of the client's stakeholders — including her direct manager, cross-functional peers, and colleagues at different levels of the organization — and synthesized them into themes before sharing them with the client.
The interviews revealed a consistent and nuanced picture:
Stakeholders affirmed the client's scientific credibility and her genuine commitment to the organization's mission. Her leadership of her own team was seen as transformational.
In senior cross-functional forums, however, her contributions were experienced as operationally framed rather than strategically led. She was perceived as surfacing detail and context before the strategic point, making it harder for executive audiences to immediately grasp her enterprise-level thinking.
Several stakeholders suggested that with more structured pre-meeting alignment, her ideas would land more powerfully.
Peers noted that she already possessed genuine enterprise-level thinking — but that this was not consistently visible in the rooms where it most needed to be.
4. Feedback Processing and Reflection
Rather than moving immediately to action planning, Margaret created space for the client to sit fully with the stakeholder feedback — exploring her emotional responses, examining where the feedback felt true, where it felt unfair, and what patterns it might be pointing to beneath the surface.
This phase surfaced important material. The client recognized a habitual pattern of front-loading context and explanation — a behavior rooted in a belief that thorough framing was necessary for credibility. She began to examine the assumptions underneath this: What did she fear might happen if she led with a direct point of view? What beliefs about executive audiences, about being taken seriously, about the risks of brevity, were sustaining a communication pattern that was no longer serving her?
This work laid the foundation for the Immunity to Change exploration that followed — identifying not just what the client wanted to do differently, but also the hidden commitments and assumptions that were making it harder to change than she expected.
5. Behavior Experiments and Action Planning
Drawing from the assessment and reflection work, the client and Margaret co-designed a set of targeted behavioral experiments to be tested in real leadership situations:
Leading with the point: Practicing the discipline of stating her strategic perspective first in senior forums, before providing supporting context — a direct inversion of her habitual pattern.
Stakeholder pre-alignment: Initiating one-on-one conversations with key stakeholders before formal meetings to share her thinking, invite input, and build the informal relationships that give ideas better traction.
Somatic practice: The client used role-play to rehearse high-stakes communication moments, with attention to physical presence, pace, and the embodied quality of executive confidence. Mirroring techniques during role-play proved particularly impactful in helping the client experience — and then internalize — a different way of occupying the room
6. Follow-up and Integration
Progress was reviewed regularly throughout the engagement. Early successes were reinforced and used to build momentum. Strategies were refined as the organizational context evolved. New behaviors were gradually integrated into the client's daily leadership habits rather than remaining isolated experiments.
A notable moment came when the client arrived at a session having already applied her learning unprompted — recounting a talent conversation with her manager in which she had led differently, with greater directness and less defensive framing. This self-initiated transfer of learning marked a significant shift from following coaching guidance to taking ownership of the development.
Key Shifts:
Several shifts stood out as particularly significant during the engagement:
Reframing the challenge: The recognition that her communication pattern reflected a confidence and permission gap — not a skills deficit — was fundamentally liberating. It shifted the coaching work from technique to identity: the question became not "how do I communicate better?" but "what would it mean to fully inhabit my role as a senior enterprise leader?"
The somatic breakthrough: During role-play of a high-stakes leadership forum, somatic mirroring — working directly with the client's physical presence and energy — produced a more immediate shift than reflective conversation alone. The client experienced, in her body, what a different quality of leadership presence felt like.
Early stakeholder wins: A proactive outreach to a previously distant senior peer — an invitation to partner more actively — shifted the dynamic of that relationship meaningfully. The positive response reinforced that deliberate relationship investment produces results and built confidence for further experimentation.
Taking the initiative: The moment the client arrived at a session having already acted on her development goals without being prompted marked a turning point — evidence that the learning had become genuinely internalized rather than externally driven.
Client Outcomes
The coaching generated measurable, sustainable improvements:
Enhanced executive presence: The client developed a more confident, direct, and strategically visible way of showing up in senior forums — leading with perspective rather than context, and being experienced as a more decisive and influential voice.
Expanded organizational influence: Through deliberate stakeholder pre-alignment and relationship investment, the client extended her reach beyond her function, building the informal network that supports enterprise-level impact.
Stronger key relationships: Relationships that had been functional became more collaborative and trust-based. The previously ambiguous dynamic with her direct manager became more direct and mutually accountable through the tripartite goal-setting process.
Lasting behavioral change: Reflection practices, pre-alignment habits, and somatic awareness became part of the client's ongoing leadership approach — not interventions she applied consciously, but ways of leading she had made her own.
The client's growth extended beyond organizational impact. The self-awareness, capacity for honest reflection, and willingness to experiment that she developed through the engagement became part of how she navigates relationships and challenges more broadly.
What This Case Study Shows
This case illustrates a pattern common to expert-driven leaders in complex, science-based organizations. Deep expertise, rigorous thinking, and strong operational delivery — the qualities that build early career success — do not automatically translate into senior executive influence. For leaders at this level, the gap between strong performance and broader organizational impact is often bridged not by doing more, but by leading differently.
The work with this client demonstrates the value of combining multi-source stakeholder insight with developmental coaching that goes beneath behavioral change to the beliefs and assumptions that sustain it. By helping the client understand not just what to do differently but why her existing patterns helped her to succeed in the past but held her back from stepping into the next level of her leadership identity — the coaching enabled change that was both meaningful and lasting.
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