In today’s complex technical environment, continuously evolving regulatory landscape and mix of outsourced and internal activities, collaboration is a fundamental skill for a successful leader. Collaboration is another of the six important skills a head of a statistical programming function needs to have to drive change within their function.

What does collaboration mean, though? Is it more than meeting shared objectives together? And how do you acquire a collaborative mindset?

These are questions Louise Webber (previously Merck KGaA, now GSK) and Paul Bukowiec (Takeda) answer in our newest PHUSE podcast show in the series “The Undeniable Truth About 6 Skills Statistical Programming Heads Have that No One Is Telling You”. Watch Collaboration; moderated by Gayathri Kolandaivelu (J&J), and learn from the expertise of Louise and Paul.

Watch Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiveIWPfd7Q

When we talk about collaboration, we often mix up being transparent with being collaborative. Collaboration is way more than being transparent in what we are doing. It is about truly listening and not just waiting for your turn to talk. If you only listen to your partner to find the best moment to bring your own point across, you are not collaborative. You need to practise empathy for each other to understand each other’s objectives. This will help to find a win-win situation for the both of you. A lot of this comes with patience for each other and also for yourself.

Collaboration requires a lot of openness and mutual respect. One needs to respect different styles of working. It often also requires helping each other when it comes to deliveries and planning, and working through solutions together.

When you watch Louise and Paul talking about collaboration, you will learn about very tangible examples during the drug development process; a process which involves many different stakeholders and partners. Within a pharma company, there are many people and functions involved in the clinical data flow. The technical aspects of the patient data flow alone requires significant collaboration. But, as Paul states, this is beyond being purely technical due to the procedural challenges in successfully delivering a drug to the market.

In our complex pharmaceutical environment, we cannot deliver alone, and we often depend on internal and external providers to work together. Louise shares examples about trustful and collaborative relationships between pharma companies and contract research organisations (CROs) and why you sometimes need to slow down and take a step back. A good collaboration also requires leaving emotions out of the relationship. Giving and receiving open and honest feedback often leads to feeling defensive. As a leader with a collaborative mindset, you learn to take a step back and adapt. You learn to understand what you can control and what you cannot. Most importantly, you learn how to react to that and to clarify expectations.

What about you? Are you working in a collaborative environment and would like to learn more about this topic?

At PHUSE, we live and breathe collaboration. We could not deliver any event or any Working Group delivery without practicing collaboration in everything we do. If you want to learn more, there is an excellent article written by Francesca Gino, published in the Harvard Business Review – “Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration”. You might want to watch TED talks by Lorna Davis or Jim Tamm. If you prefer to read a book, we recommend Thea Singer Spitzer’s The Power of Collaboration.

Our PHUSE Education team is continuously collaborating to find educational material like these to help our community to dive deeper for these important job skills.