Instead of taking on more responsibility, leading at scale means developing leadership across the whole team.
Customer Journey Series: Susan
This article is part of a customer journey series following “Susan,” a biotech sales executive navigating rapid organizational growth, leadership pressure, acquisitions, and team scaling.
Each post explores a real coaching conversation or leadership challenge from that journey.
This is the fourth post in the series.
After Susan’s team hit crazy numbers for Q3 and Q4, her CEO announced that the company had been acquired.
This was great news, and now she understood the source of her boss’s stress over the last year. He was grateful for her work, praised her leadership and her team, and promised to keep her on.
At this point, the pressure didn’t stop. It changed.
Now she had to navigate performing well while staying on top of politics and bringing more people into the loop.
She planned a big territory strategy presentation for the CEO.
As she started planning for the meeting, I asked: “What is the goal of this meeting?”
Susan said, “If I do this right, we come away from this meeting as one team, working peer-to-peer to support each other’s success.”
She wanted to develop a team mindset where the sales reps of both companies integrate as one team and stop seeing each other as competitors.
She invited all the salespeople to participate in preparation.
To demonstrate good will and team spirit, she invited her dotted line manager and his people to the meeting preparation process, so everyone felt included and could contribute.
During the two weeks, they had to synthesize a lot of information about the new company, what the goals were, and figure out together how to apply it.
To handle more sales reps in the room, she encouraged more peer-to-peer communication and support.
I said: “People remember what you repeat. What is the one message you want them to walk away with?”
She was very clear: “We are one team, a team of peers, and we need to have each other’s backs.” That became the mantra she returned to throughout the preparation process and during the meeting itself.
During the presentation, she gave the mic to each rep and invited others to speak. Again, she encouraged them all to execute as a team of peers.
The CEO got the mic after the presentation and he was pleased.
By defining them as one team, giving them common strategic goals, inviting everyone in and looking for everyone’s contributions, she helped everyone feel heard and important. They stopped looking at each other as competitors and started figuring out how they could help each other.
Instead of taking more responsibility herself, she worked to develop leadership across the whole team.
Continue the Journey
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