Building Teams With Heart With Paul Janssen

In this episode of the Active Ingredients podcast, host Thomas Dove interviews Paul Janssen, Regional Vice President and General Manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at Advanz Pharma.

Paul's career shows how principled leadership under pressure can reshape pharmaceutical organisations. From turnarounds to scaling challenges, his journey highlights the power of listening, building trust through presence, and creating entrepreneurial cultures that put patients first.

The conversation dives into how leaders stay clear in crisis, build teams with heart, and develop talent using frameworks that value learnability as much as experience. Paul shares stories from military leadership to million-euro mistakes, demonstrating how vulnerability and accountability fuel psychological safety and innovation.

Key Takeaways

• Learn how the three L's framework guides crisis leadership through listening to every level of the organisation, leading with clear direction, and letting teams execute with trust once alignment is achieved.
• Gain insights into building companies with heart by establishing patient-centric cultures where teams achieve exceptional market share through responsiveness and genuine commitment to improving lives.
• Discover why calm presence matters more than perfect solutions when leading through regulatory challenges or market disruptions that threaten patient access and team morale across multiple markets.
• Understand how patient immersion creates entrepreneurial fire by visiting patients in their homes and witnessing first hand the daily impact of therapies on quality of life and treatment burden.
• Explore the five-element hiring framework Paul uses to build high-performing teams by assessing winning attitude, impact, learnability, adaptability, and judgment rather than prioritising industry experience.
• Take away strategies for creating psychological safety where team members can make mistakes, admit errors early, and maintain entrepreneurial courage without fear of punishment when acting in good faith.

• Apply principles for talent development over experience hiring, understanding that learnability and adaptability predict long-term success more accurately than therapeutic area expertise or established relationships.

Snippets

• "Listening is a very important element to be a successful leader."
• "In the beginning, I wasn't selling because I didn't know that you have to listen and not talk. That was a big learning for me at the time."
• "You need to be very calm….You need to be pulling people together, and you need to tell them this is the situation."

Timestamps & Topics

• 00:37:12 - Three Active Ingredients: Listening, leading, and letting teams execute with trust
• 00:42:28 - Entry into Pharma: Consulting experience that revealed product safety issues and sparked industry passion
• 00:54:08 - Leading in the Fire: Military leadership lessons applied to pharmaceutical crisis management
• 01:04:02 - Building with Heart: Patient-centred startup philosophy that drove 50% market share growth
• 01:12:04 - Million Euro Mistakes: Creating cultures where teams report errors early without fear
• 01:15:30 - Hiring for Talent: Five-element framework prioritising learnability over industry experience
• 01:24:01 - Future of Life Sciences: AI integration, digital therapeutics, and human-centred leadership evolution

Resources

• Follow Paul Janssen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-janssen-ma-mba-msc/
• Follow Thomas Dove on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lifesciencesexecutivesearch/

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