How Leaders Can Foster Proactive and Reactive Change

In a video interview with Pharma Commerce, Gaurav Gupta, managing director and head of R&D at Kotter, discusses the regulatory pressures and rising R&D costs impacting the pharmaceutical industry as it looks toward 2025. Gupta highlighted that many regulatory challenges, such as drug pricing pressures from the Inflation Reduction Act, will persist in the coming years. Additionally, he pointed out the growing integration of real-world evidence into clinical trials and the need for regulators to keep pace with emerging technologies like AI. Gupta believes that these trends will continue to shape the industry without major new disruptions expected in the short term.

He also comments on the steps pharmaceutical leaders should take to better prepare their teams and organizations for supply chain disruptions; specific technical and "soft" skills that will be critical for pharmaceutical leaders and frontline employees to thrive in the evolving industry landscape, and how this can help when it comes to proactivity in handling talent shortages.

A transcript of Gupta’s conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: How can leaders create an organization that is able to respond proactively and reactively to change?

Gupta: As leaders look at their organizations and ask the question of, how do you create an organization that is more capable of changing, and that is able to respond both proactively but also reactively to change, because we often don't know what those changes are going to be, I think there are three things leaders should be thinking about. They should be thinking about systems, so which systems in the organization right now are obstacles to change?

For example, is our planning process identifying the assumptions that we're building our plans upon, so that when those assumptions change, we're able to adjust our plans? Or, are we not being explicit about those assumptions, making it harder for us to pivot our plans? There's a management approach that I think can be evaluated from how change friendly it is. That’s sort of the systems and management approach component.

The second part is culturally—things like experimentation. Do we encourage people to speak up with new ideas? There’s a cultural component to adaptability. The third part, which we talked about earlier, are the skills. How do we develop those skills in the organization, not just for leaders, but across the organization, so that people are more able to change when it's required? I think that focusing on those three—systems, culture, skills—helps create organizations that are more agile and adaptable, and no matter what the changes end up being, are able to respond quickly and appropriately.