Adastrum is a London executive search and leadership advisory firm. We appoint chief executives, chief operating and commercial officers, and technology and transformation leadership into life sciences, biotech, medtech and healthcare businesses.
This is a sector where change has to be delivered inside a regulatory perimeter, on timelines nobody controls, and where the cost of the wrong appointment is counted in more than money.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentWe are retained by boards, chief executives, investors and chief people officers to appoint the executive leadership of a life sciences or healthcare business. Retained means we are engaged to solve a defined problem rather than to fill a vacancy: we map the whole relevant market, approach leaders confidentially, assess them against the problem, and stay involved through the offer and the first hundred days.
The businesses that retain us are usually at a hinge point. A discovery pipeline that has to industrialise. A product that has cleared approval and now has to sell. A care provider whose digital estate can no longer support the service model. Before we open a search we agree what the appointment actually has to change, because in this sector a well-qualified leader pointed at the wrong problem costs a great deal more than a delay.
Briefs in this sector arrive wrapped in science, regulation or clinical language. Underneath, they reduce to a small number of leadership problems.
We are retained to appoint permanent and interim executive leadership, including
Our work is the executive leadership that runs and transforms a life sciences or healthcare business. We do not place clinicians, nurses, scientists, researchers or other practitioner roles, we do not work below director level, and we are not a contingent agency. If that is what you need, we will gladly point you to someone better placed to help.
Five stages, run the same way on every mandate, with the diligence a regulated environment requires built into each one.
Stage 1
We establish what the appointment has to change, what the regulatory and clinical constraints genuinely permit, and what the organisation will let a new leader do. We will challenge a specification that asks for a scientist, a commercial operator and a transformation leader in one person, because that brief is common and it is how a search quietly runs for nine months.
Stage 2
We map the relevant market comprehensively: leaders inside life sciences and healthcare, and those in adjacent regulated industries whose experience transfers. We approach each personally and confidentially. Where deep therapeutic or clinical knowledge genuinely is the constraint rather than a preference, we say so and we narrow the map accordingly.
Stage 3
Assessment is a subject-matter conversation between peers, not a scripted competency exercise. In a regulated business we weight one thing heavily: how a candidate behaves when the honest answer is unwelcome. Each shortlisted candidate receives a written assessment covering track record, behaviour under pressure and the risks attached to appointing them.
Stage 4
We present three to five candidates with our recommendation, the trade-offs between them, and what we would do if it were our decision. We are explicit about the trade a board is usually making here, which is between scientific credibility and commercial pace, and about which of the two this particular business can least afford to be short of.
Stage 5
We manage the offer and stay close to the leader and the sponsor through the first hundred days. In this sector the first real test is usually a decision where the compliant answer and the fast answer differ, and how a new leader handles it sets the tone for everything after.
A strong CV from a well-known pharmaceutical, biotech or care business is a safe-looking choice in a board pack. It tells you what someone has been part of. It does not tell you how they will lead when a trial reads badly, a regulator asks a question nobody prepared for, or a launch timeline slips through no fault of the team.
Working with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, we assess how a leader operates when the room is calm and what they reach for when it is not. Those defaults are developable rather than fixed, which is the useful part: a leader who can see their own can regulate it. In a regulated environment, where the pressure to give the reassuring answer is constant, that behavioural read matters more rather than less.
We place across sectors on purpose. The pattern recognition that changes an outcome usually travels better from outside an industry than from within it, because people inside a sector have often arrived at the same answers as one another.
A leader who has already taken a business from single product to platform, or already run technology at pace under real regulatory accountability, carries that judgement whatever industry earned it. We map inside and outside the sector and let the problem decide. Where therapeutic depth or clinical credibility is genuinely the constraint, we will tell you, and we will not put forward someone who cannot hold the room on the science.
Adastrum brings twenty years of appointing senior leaders into complex organisations, a behavioural assessment method developed with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, and our Meta Team programme, which has worked with leadership teams at organisations including Nasdaq, Novartis, HSBC, Unilever and EQT.
No. We appoint the executive leadership that runs and transforms a business: chief executives, chief operating and commercial officers, chief technology and information officers, and transformation directors. We do not place practising clinicians, nurses, laboratory scientists or research staff.
Before your next senior appointment, one question is worth sitting with. Are you about to hire someone who knows what good looks like in this sector, or someone who has actually built it?
If that is a conversation worth having, it is exactly the one we welcome.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentObservations from twenty years of appointing leaders into complex organisations: what separates an appointment that compounds from one that quietly comes apart, why succession plans drift towards the most visible candidate, and what a board ought to ask before it signs off the brief.
The Collaborator is the schema you appoint to make a divided organisation move as one. It is also the one most likely to keep seeking agreement long after the moment for agreement has gone. The most dangerous phrase in a senior team is not “I disagree.” It is “let’s get everyone aligned first.” I watched a leader run a good business into a wasted quarter on that phrase, and almost nobody in the room could see it happ
The most expensive senior appointment I have watched fail had the best roadmap I have ever seen. I mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely impressive piece of thinking. Every workstream mapped, every dependency identified, governance and sequencing and risk all accounted for. The board saw it in month three and applauded. He was still refining it in month fourteen, when they let him go.
The Commander is the schema you appoint in a crisis. It is also the one you have to watch once the crisis has passed. There is a phrase you hear in big organisations when nothing is moving. "It's just how things get done here." Say it out loud and it sounds like culture. Listen properly and it is something sharper. It means someone at the top is commanding, and everyone below has quietly learned to wait.
The board thought they had found the perfect CEO. Two successful exits. A scaled multinational division. References that read like a character witness: decisive, commercially sharp, a natural leader. In the interview he was confident, fluent, convincing on growth and culture and transformation. The appointment was unanimous. Twelve months later the same board was negotiating his exit. Revenue targets had been missed.
There’s one question almost every HR-led interview process insists on. “Tell me about a time you failed.” At junior level, it sometimes earns its keep. At C-suite, it’s a junk question. And it’s almost always the wrong thing to ask in the room. I’ll explain why I won’t ask it. And then I’ll tell you what I ask instead.
Most succession planning assumes someone is ready to step up. But what happens when the obvious successor is the one who leaves? A look at why heir apparent plans fail, the real cost of an unplanned leadership transition, and how boards build genuine continuity.
