The pharma industry is in trouble. We celebrate new mechanisms of action, precision medicine, AI, biomarkers, real-world evidence, and increasingly sophisticated launch strategies. But another trend inside many pharma companies deserves far more attention: We are losing experienced people—and too often replacing experience with compliance. There, I said what too many people are afraid to say.
I stay in touch with a lot of industry insiders with a ton of experience, but there’s a troubling trend. Slowly, they are either being forced out (ageism) or, if they are out of work, they can’t get hired. IN an industry that needs experienced people, it’s puzzling, but when you talk to some hiring managers, you soon realize that they never should have been promoted.
Part of the reason this is happening is that too many people are afraid to speak up in this bad job market for fear of losing their jobs. But when you are afraid to challenge assumptions, your whole team, as well as your company, are losing.
I’ve received so many great comments via LinkedIn about my posts. Too many are from people with years of experience looking for work. Frankly, if I were a hiring manager, I would look to these people for help and guidance. But today, hiring is driven by too many personal assumptions and the fear that someone hired may be smarter than them.
Experience Is Expensive. Inexperience Can Be Far More Expensive.
Pharma companies have understandable reasons to reduce experienced headcount. Veteran employees are expensive. They often sit higher in salary bands. Restructuring can eliminate layers of management. Companies want flatter organizations, greater agility, new capabilities, and people comfortable working differently.
Don’t get me wrong, some turnover is healthy. But there is a major difference between eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy and eliminating institutional judgment. Someone who has spent 20 or 25 years in pharma has probably watched products succeed that everyone expected to fail—and watched supposedly bulletproof launches collapse.
They have seen:
- Forecasts built around assumptions that never materialized.
- Advisory boards that told management what management wanted to hear.
- Market research that looked great in PowerPoint but failed in the real world.
- KOL strategies confused with KOL relationship building.
- Sales organizations deployed before access was established.
- Medical teams brought into strategy too late.
- Launch metrics designed to demonstrate activity instead of impact.
- Leaders fall in love with their own strategy.
And when those people leave, companies don’t simply lose employees. They lose organizational memory.
The Rise of the Corporate “Yes” Person
The larger issue is what organizations sometimes look for when they make that replacement. Pharma companies need people who are willing to challenge assumptions. Some organizations reward people who excel at managing upward. There is a distinction.
The employee who walks into senior leadership and says, “I don’t think this is going to work and here’s why…” causes organizational friction. The employee who walks into senior leadership and says, “This is a great idea. We can make it happen,” provides organizational comfort. Guess which employee tends to look easier to promote? Over time, companies can unwittingly teach their employees a destructive lesson. Being right is less important than being agreeable.
Once that lesson is learned, smart people will adapt their behavior accordingly. They will stop questioning unrealistic forecasts. They will stop challenging weak launch assumptions. They will stop telling you that physicians aren’t responding to your message. They will stop saying the MSL strategy you hired them to run isn’t working. They will stop questioning whether another reorganization is really going to fix anything. Before you know it, your meetings are full of smart people trying to figure out what the most senior person in the room wants to hear. That is not alignment; that’s failure masquerading as consensus.
Pharma Particularly Cannot Afford This
This challenge is present in many sectors, but the stakes are different in pharma. Drug launches are complex. A drug can have amazing clinical data and still fail commercially. Access matters. Medical strategy matters. Evidence generation matters. Patient identification matters. Positioning against competitors matters. Physician prescribing behavior matters. Execution in the field matters. Timing to market matters. Decisions must be made despite incomplete information. Experience becomes a tremendous asset in these types of situations.
As people gain experience, they develop a hard-to-measure skill: pattern recognition. They have seen remakes of this movie many times before. They can spot when a forecast is unrealistic. They know when a KOL is truly enthusiastic about your drug or just being nice. They see when head office thinks something that everyone in the field knows is false. They realize that just because five different dashboards show green, it doesn’t mean that the launch is healthy.
Most importantly, experienced employees are often more likely to say: “Something isn’t right here.” That sentence could be worth millions to a pharma company. However, it is only worth something if management is willing to listen.
The MSL Organization Is a Perfect Example
Think about Medical Science Liaisons. An effective MSL is not just pushing science. Awesome MSLs gain nuanced insights into scientific sharing, physician behavior, needs, new prescribing trends, competitive pressures, stated positions versus actual beliefs.
Building that skill set takes years. But too often companies view senior MSLs as easily replaceable headcount. Then the leadership team wonders why there is so much “movement” in the field but very little actionable intelligence. The same is true in commercial, market access, clinical development, regulatory affairs, HEOR, marketing, and sales. Roles can be replaced in a month. 20 years of expertise cannot be replaced in 30 days.
Dashboards Cannot Replace Courage
Pharma has a measurement problem. KPIs. Dashboards. CRM activity. Reach. Frequency. Engagement. SOV. Digital interactions. Insight counts. We need measurement. Without it, how do you know what you are doing works? But numbers can also give a false sense of control.
A dashboard can tell leadership what happened based on the variables someone decided to track. An empowered employee can tell leadership much more valuable information: “We’re measuring the wrong thing.” This is exactly the type of statement organizations should embrace. Yet by attacking the metric, you attack the strategy. Attacking the strategy is attacking leadership. So instead we learn to game the metric instead of asking if the metric is useful. Every number turns green. Until it’s too late and the revenue number is red.
Leadership Should Be Worried About Quiet Meetings
Leadership teams fret over dysfunctional teams where everybody bickers. I’d fret just as much over teams where nobody does. If you lay an important piece of strategic thinking in front of a group of senior leaders and everyone instantly agrees – leadership should not necessarily feel good about itself. Leadership should feel curious. Where is the voice of dissent? What assumptions are we making that may be incorrect? What does the field see that HQ doesn’t? What would need to be true for this strategy to fall flat on its face? Who in this room disagrees with me wholeheartedly?
The strongest leader is not the one who can get everyone to agree. It is the leader who creates a culture where dissent is safe enough to help make the decision better.
Stop Calling Constructive Dissent “Resistance”
Veteran employees can earn unflattering reputations. “Negative.” “Old school.” “Not agile.” “Resistant to change.” Sometimes those labels are deserved. Experience can become inflexibility, and longevity should never be rewarded with a free pass. But companies need to differentiate between someone who opposes change simply because it’s change and someone who questions a decision because they’ve seen the error in the plan before. Those are two very different actions. One is stubbornness. One might be experience. If every individual who challenges leadership ends up leaving the organization while every single person who blindly backs leadership receives a promotion, the company should expect independent thought to soon vanish from their culture. Culture mimics what leadership values.
Pharma Doesn’t Need More Agreement
It needs less hubris. It needs seasoned voices on the other side of executives who are comfortable hearing: “I don’t think you’re right.” And leaders humble enough to listen and say: “Explain why.” That is innovation. Not another strategic priority. Not another alignment meeting. Not another corporate value. Not another metric dashboard. Innovation challenges what an organization thinks is true today.
So before organizations fire (or retire) another layer of seasoned workers for efficiency’s sake, they should ask themselves: What experience is walking out the door with that employee? And before they rush to replace that worker with someone younger and more “flexible” or “team-oriented” or “aligned,” leadership should ask: Are we bringing in people who will make our decisions better, or people who will simply agree with them? Because a choir sounds wonderful. The meetings are pleasant. The presentations are concise. And the dashboards are green. Nobody challenges leadership. Until shareholders do.
