Employees rarely leave companies for one reason alone. In this column, Kaye/Bassman’s Michael Pietrack shares a framework that helps leaders identify when their team members are thinking about heading for the exit—and how to address it.
Welcome to Leadership Lab, a column dedicated to biopharma executives aiming to enhance their leadership skills and advance their careers. Every other month, Michael Pietrack, the practice lead for Kaye/Bassman’s pharma and biotech recruiting team and host of “The Pharmaverse Podcast,” shares a valuable leadership insight.
In biopharma, people are every bit as valuable as the science. You can have the most promising pipeline in the industry, but without the right leaders, scientists and field professionals to bring it to life, progress stalls. That’s why turnover hurts so much. Losing a key person at the wrong moment can disrupt the delicate balance of a high-performing team. This article shares how you can spot the signs early enough to do something about it.
Identifying the Signs: The CLAMPS Framework
Most employees don’t leave on a whim. They wrestle with the decision for months. If leaders are paying attention, they can usually spot the signs of restlessness before a resignation letter hits their desk. A helpful way to frame those signals is through the CLAMPS framework. The acronym stands for challenge, location, advancement, money, people and security. Each of these six factors plays into a professional’s decision to stay or go, and each can be proactively addressed by leaders who are serious about retention.
1. Challenge: employees need to be engaged but not overwhelmed
High performers thrive on being stretched, yet they’re also the ones who can do their jobs on autopilot once things get too predictable. When someone who used to light up with enthusiasm suddenly disengages, it may not be laziness. More often, it’s a sign that they’re bored. In biopharma, this can be particularly dangerous because the work is inherently complex, and if you can’t keep your sharpest people mentally engaged, competitors surely will.
The fix is straightforward: Keep them challenged. As an executive recruiter in the biopharma world, I’ve seen that the No. 1 reason candidates want to stay where they are is because they’re in the middle of a project they really care about. If you’re sensing that one of your star performers may be feeling a lack of challenge, find out what ignites their interests, and get them on a special project that stokes their passion.
The best leaders are balanced when challenging employees. You want to keep your top performers challenged without burning them out. Though many companies have downsized their workforce, the workload hasn’t changed, so there are fewer people to perform what needs to get done. The resulting burnout some experience is real, and it often shows up in the same disengagement signals as boredom. The difference is that instead of seeking stimulation, these employees are quietly drowning under the weight of unrealistic expectations.
Executives must be able to discern the difference. Is your star performer restless because they aren’t being stretched or exhausted because they’re being stretched too thin? In either case, your responsibility is to remove obstacles, redistribute workload and provide resources so your people can stay energized rather than depleted.
2. Location: employees have preferences for where they do their work
Location may seem like a smaller factor, but it’s grown increasingly important as many companies call their workforces back to the office. Some star employees were hired during the pandemic and allowed to work remotely. How do they fit into new policies about days on-site? Likewise, with recent downsizings, some field-based employees are now covering two territories.
As an executive, you’re wise to have an attentive ear to grumblings about the burden of travel days or commuting fatigue, since these are often precursors to job searches. However, the solution isn’t always granting unlimited flexibility or making the role completely remote. The best leaders create a thoughtful balance that sends a strong signal that they care about not just output but the person producing it. For example, a biotech leader might designate two in-office anchor days each week for key team meetings, cross-functional touchpoints or mentoring, then allow flexibility on the remaining days so employees can manage personal demands or travel recovery.
3. Advancement: employees want career development
Advancement is a key metric for job satisfaction. When professionals stop seeing a progressive future for themselves inside an organization, they inevitably start imagining such a future elsewhere. But when companies are downsizing, it limits career-advancing roles for their top performers.
Savvy leaders realize that not all advancement is vertical, meaning it doesn’t always involve promotions and upward title changes. Horizontal growth can provide great job satisfaction.
Savvy leaders realize that not all advancement is vertical, meaning it doesn’t always involve promotions and upward title changes. Horizontal growth can provide great job satisfaction. So, if you start to sense that a top performer has hit a glass ceiling, provide opportunities that broaden their skills. Perhaps you can allow them to lead an important initiative where they would gain visibility with senior leadership. This helps ambitious employees feel like they’re advancing.
4. Money: employees see compensation as a reflection of their value
The signs are subtle at first: questions about bonus structures, curiosity about equity awards, side comments about recruiters reaching out with big offers. In a competitive talent market like biopharma where certain skill sets are in scarce supply, money does matter, even if it’s not usually the only reason people leave.
Keep in mind that merit increases and cost-of-living adjustments don’t typically keep pace with market value. A five-year employee who has received annual 4% merit increases may be 10% underpaid compared to what free agents are getting on the open market. The best leaders constantly benchmark pay with external recruiters. More importantly, they fight for the needed adjustments to show employees that they don’t need to leave to feel valued. To retain top talent, talk openly about what you’re doing to try to increase compensation, and act long before it becomes a retention emergency.
5. People: employees want positive interactions with co-workers
People issues are one of the biggest precursors to a job change. Employees join companies for the science, the mission and the vision, but they stay or leave because of the people. A strained relationship with a manager, recurring conflicts with peers or simply a culture that no longer feels collaborative can push even loyal staff out the door. The clues can be easy to miss: withdrawal from team discussions, a sharper tone in meetings or avoidance of certain colleagues.
In a high-pressure industry like biopharma, executives must invest time in their employees.
In a high-pressure industry like biopharma, executives must invest time in their employees. Frequent one-on-one meetings are a key way to find out what the people issues are and how to fix them. This can take a lot of time with bigger teams, but it’s worth it. When people dynamics work well, they become a reason to stay. When they don’t, they’re the fastest way to lose good talent.
6. Security: employees appreciate transparency in the midst of uncertainty
Biopharma is inherently uncertain. A trial can fail overnight. A regulatory body can issue a surprise ruling. An acquisition can flip an organization on its head. Employees who begin asking pointed questions about rumors, hesitating to commit to long-term projects or worrying aloud about the future are often weighing whether they need to protect themselves by leaving.
You don’t need to promise perfect stability, as your staff members don’t expect every risk to be eliminated. They expect to be told the truth. Offer transparency. If you don’t, when they see holes in their company’s stability story, they’ll fill those gaps with negative assumptions. Communicate candidly about both the challenges and the opportunities ahead. Your employees will feel respected and informed, and they’ll be more likely to stay, even when the waters get choppy.
Creating an Environment Where Employees Want To Stay
Put together, these six factors form a simple truth: People rarely leave for one reason alone. More often, they exit due to a combination of these factors. For example, someone might experience a lack of challenge, paired with a frustrating commute, layered on top of a nagging people issue. But just as these pressures compound to push people out, you can address them one by one to create a pull in the opposite direction.
Retention, in the end, is not about chaining people to a desk. It’s about creating an environment where they choose to stay. For biopharma executives, that means paying close attention to the signals of disengagement, asking the right questions before it’s too late and acting decisively to address concerns. When top employees feel challenged, supported, fairly compensated, connected to their colleagues and secure in their future, they don’t just stay, they thrive. And when your people thrive, your pipeline, your patients and ultimately your business thrive as well.
