With leaner teams and tighter budgets, senior leaders can face tremendous strain as they juggle increased workloads and leadership responsibilities. In this column, Kaye/Bassman’s Michael Pietrack discusses how pressure builds and what can ease it.
Welcome to Leadership Lab, a column for biopharma executives navigating the real-world pressures of leadership. Every other month, Michael Pietrick draws on his work in executive search at Kaye/Bassman International and conversations from “The Pharmaverse Podcast” to explore relevant leadership topics.
Many leadership challenges in biopharma aren’t caused by bad decisions or weak leaders, but by systems that put more weight on senior leaders than they were designed to bear.
To illustrate, a bridge is designed with a clear purpose and a defined capacity. Engineers calculate how much weight it can carry, how traffic should flow and where stress will be absorbed. Under normal conditions, the bridge performs invisibly. Cars pass over it every day without incident. Problems begin when lanes close unexpectedly, and the same volume of traffic is forced through fewer supports. The bridge does not fail immediately. Instead, strain concentrates in places never meant to bear it.
That is increasingly the position senior biopharma leaders find themselves in today.
Too Much Strain Topples Structures
Across the industry, downsizings have become a recurring reality rather than a singular event. Teams are leaner, budgets are tighter, yet expectations have not meaningfully adjusted. When roles are eliminated, the work does not disappear. Much of it moves upward, landing on senior leaders who are already accountable for strategy, performance and culture. Like a bridge still carrying traffic despite closed lanes, leadership structures appear intact. Work continues to move. Outcomes are still expected.
What is harder to see is where the pressure is building.
When leaders are stretched beyond their intended scope, focus becomes the first casualty. Senior leaders are hired and promoted to think strategically, set direction and make critical decisions. When their time is consumed by operational gaps, administrative tasks or responsibilities outside their core role, their attention fragments. Strategic thinking is crowded out by the urgency of tasks that used to be delegated. The bridge still stands, but the load is no longer balanced across its structure.
The strain begins well before execution. In my conversations with senior leaders across biopharma, a common pattern emerges. By the time work reaches teams, the bridge is already carrying more than it was designed to hold. Calendars fill reactively. Priorities blur. Decisions are made closer and closer to deadlines. By the time work reaches teams, the bridge is already carrying more than it was designed to hold.
Imbalance introduces risk that organizations often underestimate. Hairline fractures show up, appearing as slower decisions, shortened conversations and reduced presence with teams. Leaders become reactive rather than deliberate. Time once reserved for planning, one-on-one coaching and careful alignment is spent managing overflow. In time, the bridge carries weight it was never engineered to hold.
Communication is often the first visible casualty. Leaders find themselves repeating the same message across meetings, calls and Zooms, often to different audiences and with diminishing impact. Attention drifts. Cameras go dark. Context is lost. What begins as overcommunication slowly becomes miscommunication, not because the message is wrong, but because the structure supporting it is strained.
Burnout can occur, and at the senior level, it follows a quieter pattern than it does elsewhere in the organization. Executives rarely disengage loudly. They continue showing up, continue delivering and continue absorbing pressure. From the outside, everything looks functional. Internally, emotional and cognitive margins narrow. Judgment becomes harder. Patience shortens. Like a bridge under constant strain, the system holds until it quietly cannot, and then the damage accelerates quickly.
So, what’s the fix?
Easing the Pressure by Distributing the Load
Senior leaders do not have to absorb this strain alone. Strategic use of external partners, whether consultants, interim support or specialized advisors, can temporarily redistribute load and restore balance without committing to permanent headcount.
When outside support is not available or not in the budget, leaders often default to carrying more themselves rather than risk burdening others. However, the bridge is safer when the load is distributed. Asking everyone to carry a little more, with clarity and support, is very different from asking a few people to carry everything. What drives attrition is not modest increases in effort, but sustained imbalance and the perception that weight is being absorbed unfairly.
Leaders can begin redistributing the load by first making the invisible visible, not just to themselves, but to the system around them. In many organizations, strain does not build because leaders refuse to delegate. It builds because decision weight, urgency and accountability quietly migrate upward without anyone stepping back to redesign how work flows.
From there, leaders can clarify what truly requires their involvement and what others can own with clear expectations and support. The goal is not to push work down but to protect focus and keep decisions moving at the right level. In practice, this means giving teams context, setting clear decision boundaries and staying visibly supportive as work shifts. It also means creating space for teams and managers to speak up when they are absorbing too much. When done well, this feels less like shifting work and more like strengthening how the organization operates.
Senior leaders are often praised for resilience, stamina and their willingness to step in when systems strain. But bridges are not meant to rely on heroics. They are meant to rely on design. When leaders have become load-bearing structures rather than strategic guides, the leaders themselves—and, if needed, those they report to—must act before the damage becomes visible companywide.
The goal is not to eliminate pressure, but to distribute it wisely so the bridge continues to carry traffic safely instead of silently absorbing weight it was never built to hold.
