Episode 43

Curiosity, Relationships and Being a CEO
An Interview with Lara Sullivan, M.D.

In this episode, we speak Lara Sullivan, the CEO of Pyxis Oncology, and a friend of Michael's of many years.  Lara has served as CEO since 2019 after roles at Pfizer, McKinsey & Co. and in private equity.  No slacker, she also has both MD and MBA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.  In this episode, we discuss the role of curiosity in career success, how mentoring works differently from the way people assume, and the role of relationships in "de-risking" career moves.  We also learn how studying Comp Lit in college can be a highly useful preparation for the world of business.  And we'll discuss how what looks like a straight-line progression on the outside can feel very different on the inside.  Lara has a uniquely amazing set of skills and experiences, but many of the lessons she's learned along the way are relevant to nearly anyone.   A great conversation with an inspirational CEO.  Not to be missed! 

Dr. Lara S. Sullivan is the Chief Executive Officer of Pyxis Oncology. Prior to joining Pyxis, Lara was Founding President of SpringWorks Therapeutics (NASDAQ: SWTX), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company spun-out from Pfizer. While at Pfizer, Lara led strategy, competitive intelligence and portfolio operations for the company’s early-stage R&D pipeline. Prior to joining Pfizer, Lara was an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, where she specialized in biopharmaceutical R&D productivity and efficiency. Lara also served as a principal at Paul Capital Partners, where she led due diligence for healthcare investments, and earlier in her career worked in healthcare equity research and healthcare municipal finance at Credit Suisse First Boston. Lara holds an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, an M.B.A. from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University.

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Episode Transcript

Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher

Episode 43: Curiosity, Relationships and Being a CEO - An Interview with Lara Sullivan, M.D.

Michael Melcher: Lara Sullivan, it's been a while. Thank you for joining me on the Career Stewardship Podcast.

Lara Sullivan: Great to speak with you today, Michael. Excited to be here.

Curiosity and career choices

Michael: We met many years ago. You are now CEO of Pyxis Oncology, a position you've had since December 2019. I knew a lot about your background before, that you went to both business school and medical school, not for the faint-hearted, but I also discovered that you were a Comp Lit major as an undergrad at Cornell. So I'm curious, was being a CEO something you saw for yourself back when you were deconstructing things?

Lara: I never imagined being a CEO. For me, the liberal arts provided the perfect backdrop for exploring my interest.  My career has always been driven by: am I learning something new, and am I having fun? Those questions have taken me into different directions, as opposed to starting with a specific career objective, and then thinking I was going to fill in the blanks from here to there to get to that objective. That was never how I thought about it.  Maybe there's a signal of that kind of curiosity from my liberal arts major back in the day.

The thing you can't anticipate about being CEO

Michael:  You spent many years working in various types of business jobs. And then at one point you were called upon and accepted the role of CEO of this rapidly growing company. We hear this acronym CEO all the time, and people have this image of a CEO that I think is a little bit of a fantasy.  My question to you is: what does it really mean to run a company? Are you actually running a company when you're a CEO? Prior to taking on the job, what did you predict it would be like to be CEO?  What about the role did you anticipate and what did you not anticipate?

Lara: No matter what you think about it, or predict about it, you just can't know what it's going to be like until you're actually in the seat. People said things to me all the time, like, "You're going to be so busy, it's going to be so lonely, you're going to have all this responsibility on your shoulders." I was trying to understand what that meant because I think we've all felt those things in other parts of our careers too, and in our lives. Why would that be different in this role versus how it would have shown up in other roles or in other facets of life?

The biggest difference that I couldn't fully anticipate until I assumed the seat was that feeling of complete and utter responsibility for everything that's going on.  Because the buck does ultimately stop with you as CEO. Even for things that you don't know are going on, it's under your watch. You've selected the people who are managing those things. If they go awry, it's on you.  It's ultimately all on you.

This more acute sense of collective and total responsibility was just something I just couldn't anticipate. And at the same time, not having the ability to execute on all those dimensions, because you can't.  It's not your job to execute on everything. It's your job to hire great people who can execute. You're balancing that feeling of responsibility with that feeling of hands-off delegation. There are two conflicting dynamics that exist at once.

What I did anticipate was this sense of excitement and enthusiasm and trust from others who put me into this seat or supported me in this seat, whether it was the board members who hired me or the team members who have signed up to be on this journey. That sense of responsibility and trust that other people are placing in me, that's something I thought I would feel coming into it and it's something I do feel.

The leader's role in the leadership team

Michael: When we think about being a leader, we imagine accountability. We imagine authority. You might be in the public eye. You have a public company, so you're also in the eye of the financial press and shareholders. You bring up something important, which is that when you're a leader, it's also part of the equation that people want you to be a leader.

They want you to be successful and they want to line up to help make you successful. Then your responsibility is to be worthy of that and do what is required, but it very much sounds like a team process. I don't think that's how people often think about being a CEO or being a leader. I think they think about it as one man or one woman as opposed to more of a collective effort in which you happen to have this role and title, but you're not the whole thing.

Lara: The way you characterize that is exactly right. My view of leadership has gotten a lot more nuanced in this seat for the reasons you described.

I talked to some of my team about this the other day. In a rapidly growing company, we need to have highly experienced and knowledgeable functional leaders who are great at leadership but also who know their function.  They have the knowledge. They know what to build, whether it be finance or medical or research or whatnot. Of all the people on the leadership team, in my role, I'm actually the only one where functional expertise is not required in the role. My value-add to the organization is the bigger picture, the strategy, the vision, creating the resources, creating the blueprint to go forward for my functional leaders, my direct reports who are leading these functions to drive and execute that plan.

Again, it's another way of thinking about where you contribute to this whole dynamic. In order to get to the CEO position, you have to have been a functional expert of some topic at some point along the way. But as CEO you're letting that go and showing up in a completely different way. You realize it is like the conductor in front of the orchestra. You're trying to bring out the best of the strings section or the wind section, getting them to play in concert.

You might be recognizing the strings section and the wind section have different skills and maybe different personalities. What works for the strings isn't necessarily going to work for the wind section.  There are more nuanced way of thinking about your own contribution to the team as a CEO, as opposed to the model or stereotype of the CEO as someone who knows a lot of stuff, and who is just going to share answers, and the organization is going to follow.  That's not really how it works. The answers, I think, tend to come from the organization, and it's my job to elucidate them in the context of the strategy and the vision that we're setting and that collectively we're all going after together.

What is the real expertise of the CEO? 

Michael: I think it's generally true that you can't be a CEO or a top leader by thinking of yourself as the expert who knows everything the things about a particular subject.  Further, if you look at medicine, biotech, technology, and many other fields, even if you were a domain expert 5 or 10 years ago, the pace of innovation is so rapid that it seems unlikely that you would be the same expert today unless you spent all your time doing that. You might have certain muscle memory for what it means to get up to speed and really master something. That might allow you to understand people better, but it seems like you have to choose your lane. If you're going to be a leader of people and teams, that is going to be your new domain expertise as opposed to being the world's expert on X, Y, or Z.

Lara: Right. In biotech, there are different flavors or phenotypes of CEOs that you see running emerging growth companies like Pyxis, and some of them end up in that C-suite from their technical domain knowledge. That's actually a very viable model. But to your point, when they're in that role, it's often hard for them to keep pace compared to, say, their direct reports who are functionally dedicated and going to all the scientific conferences and so forth.

In that model of CEO, the scientifically trained CEO would build out a leadership team of different skills and capabilities than I would because that person would need to balance their technical or scientific domain knowledge with other skills on their leadership team.  In contrast for me, since I don't have that technical knowledge, I'm making sure I have enough of that technical knowledge on my leadership team.

You need to think about of the totality of skills and knowledge that you need on the leadership team, which is the CEO plus their direct reports. It's not about optimizing in one particular role, or saying that one particular role has a specific recipe of skills and knowledge. It's all relative to everybody else who's on the team, so the entirety of the unit solves for all of those things. You might see the scientific knowledge in the CEO in one leadership team, but you might see it in the Chief Medical Officer or the Chief Scientific Officer in another leadership team. You might see BD skills in the CEO in one leadership team, but you see it as the Chief Business Officer in another. All those models are viable, and they all work, provided the system is getting solved for.

Michael:  What an orchestra is going to do is dependent on what they're playing and what they're trying to accomplish. If you're playing Beethoven, it's one thing. If it's Mahler, it's another. If it's a solo for the oboe in Peter and the Wolf, that's a different thing as well.

Leading in the pandemic – 3 principles

Michael:  We have been through this weird, somewhat dramatic, and just unusual and interesting two-year period.  Many of us are now accustomed to the virtual work world. We're in the process of sorting out what has actually worked and what hasn't worked so well. Yesterday's truth is today's exploded myth. You became CEO about three months before the pandemic started. We're talking about creating great teams and how a high-functioning team is more than just hiring talented people. It's something beyond that. But first, what was the impact of the pandemic on your company and your team's work, and the requirement that a lot of people would have to work virtually and remotely?

Lara: Yes, it was such a crazy time. I can't recall any other incident where we all had the same global experience, simultaneously.  Even when there are wars and natural disasters, they tend to be localized in terms of their impact. This was the entirety of the world going through this at the same time. In my little quarter of it, I had just unpacked my very last box, the week before the pandemic hit. I was new to the company, new to the town having just moved on to Boston, and was just starting to get my bearings.

Then this happened. I remember thinking, "Wow, there's no playbook for this. This is going to have to be approached with feeling, sensing, intuition, going back to basic principles."

We established very early that our approach to COVID would solve for three components. I said it this way, internally, very deliberately. Number one was safety, period. Number two was wellness, and number three was impact to the company and the business.  I told everyone it was that order.

In those early days, we didn't know what we were dealing with. COVID was terrifying.  We had scientists who had to keep going into the lab to keep the experiments going, while the other three-quarters of the company had business roles or operating roles and didn't have to go in. It was important that the scientists understood that we were committed to their safety as human beings first. That came first, before the experiments and before what was done in the lab.

I think that really helped us in those early days.  My worry was to avoid having two tiers of colleagues: one group that would have to fight the virus in the air and go in every day, and another group that could be protected at home. How did you manage that maybe one group wished it was part of the other, and that both had to adapt to the conditions that each were operating in?

Having established those principles of safety, wellness, and then business impact helped the folks that were going in feel very well cared for because they were. We did all the things we could to support them, such as paying for Ubers so people didn't have to get exposed to public transportation. We tried to create a bubble for them to feel safe within while they were doing the work that was keeping the company going. Then those of us at home were doing what we could to maintain connectedness with them through virtual happy hours and Zoom events and celebrations and things like that.

Making virtual and real team connections

Lara: I was surprised to see a few months into it how well Zoom kept us connected. I've had this sensation multiple times that when I have actually met people in person whom I had first met on Zoom, there was only a 30-second transition, and the Zoom relationship translated very quickly as soon as I met them in person. It's not like a Polycom phone call where it's just a voice. You've seen their faces, you've seen their expressions. When you actually, finally meet them, there's a 30-second transition, like, "Oh, that's who you are. Okay. Now we're rocking and rolling."

Focusing on the principles of safety and having people feel well cared for allowed us to go pretty much until Omicron without incident.  We had one episode at the very beginning when nobody knew it was COVID, like in February 2020, and then we didn't have another one until Omicron. We really were able to keep everybody safe through these protocols that were established with that mindset. We're all pretty proud of that.

Michael: I think most people would agree with how you set it out; safety, wellness, impact on the company. I do think that wellness is the one that we now see clearly.  At the beginning, the wellness idea might have been merged with safety and now we understand that it is different.

Relationships, de-risking decisions, and career success  

Michael: As I mentioned to you, I'm writing a book about relationships. When someone looks at your background, they probably see a lot of domain knowledge and expertise. You went to medical school, you got an MBA, both from the University of Pennsylvania. You worked for McKinsey, you worked in private equity, you worked at Pfizer. That's a lot of knowledge there, but we also know how important relationships are to career success. There is research that shows that the higher up you go on the ladder, the more time you spend on relationships. Can you comment on how you see this?

Lara: It might sound funny, but I don't really think of myself as a knowledge-driven person per se. Even with the experiences that you cited from my resume, there was so much diversity in the type of work I did within jobs. I feel like my career has been stitched together from diverse experiences that have been driven by relationships.  These are people I've known and who have pulled me into the next interesting thing. 

Being in those environments with a lot of domain knowledge was intoxicating because I learned so much. I think I moved maybe diagonally within them as opposed to vertically. That was driven by relationships. For example, my jumping-off point from management consulting to Pfizer came from my client relationships. Clients that I had worked with for many, many years who were at Pfizer after Pfizer acquired Wyeth called me up and said, "Hey, there's a great role here. Why don't you come over and work with us?"

It was the first career decision I ever made I didn't have second thoughts about. I knew it was the right choice, and the reason I knew it was the right choice was because I knew all the people there. I felt like transitioning into a new role in a new environment was "safe" because I had all these relationships to catch me and help me. That was 2011, and it felt like the greatest job ever.

The best job ever

Lara:  I literally used to walk to work at Pfizer and think I had the best job ever because I was sitting in the middle of this incredible R&D engine – it was then the world's largest pharma, now it's number two.  It was a huge, huge, massive R&D innovation engine. I felt, "I'm right in the middle of it with all these people whom I've known for years who can help with my growth and development, and I'm having an impact." It was just great.

Everything from that point all the way to getting to the CEO role 10 years later was all driven by relationships with people who opened up opportunities. When I was exploring the role at Pyxis, one of my top filters for evaluating different opportunities was related to the board. Was it a board with a track record of trusting management as opposed to a board that drives the company?

Because there is a style in private venture capital of venture firms that are on boards, and they are driving the business – in that model the CEO is an employee as opposed to a real manager or leader. I had that in mind and my relationships helped me identify the segments in the venture world where investors behaved to empower management and which ones behaved in a way where management was an employee.  I'm not saying one is right or wrong. I was just saying the one that appealed to me was the one where management had autonomy.

So that really helped me to home in on Pyxis as the right opportunity. I wouldn't have even known to have that as a question when looking at CEO roles if I hadn't gotten that advice from mentors and people who were invested in me who had been in the biotech venture world before. I didn't know that there were different philosophies around how venture capital manages management teams.

How would I know that when working in Pfizer? You would never know that. Really critical career insights that helped me make those key decisions came from the relationships of people who were invested in me.

Can you pay back mentors?

Lara:  One of the things I learned came from asking one of my mentors, "How can I pay you back?  I can't give you something in exchange for all the value you've given me." His response was always, "You don't have to.  You pay it forward to somebody else." And that's how it goes. Somebody helped him, so he then turns out around and helps me. I turn around and build a relationship with somebody else who's rising and help them. Usually those kinds of mentorship relationships are not exact quid pro quos. They're just not.

With mentorship, the way you express your gratitude for the help you've been given is providing it to others. This has been a really, really helpful model for me. Twenty years ago, if somebody mentioned mentorship to me, I wouldn't have thought of it that way. I wouldn't have understood those nuances.  But that's been my experience.

Michael:  I want to unpack a few things in what you've shared with us. First, what you just said about reciprocity. I feel there's reciprocity, but it's not exact and it doesn't have to be, and you can look at the equation as what is my relationship with this other person? Or you can look at the equation of what is my relationship generally with the world? That is the "paying it forward".

If I'm with a mentor, I'll try to be a good conversationalist, show appreciation, and listen to them, but you're right, I'm probably not going to be able to help them in the exact way they're helping me.  But I might be able to help somebody else I don't even know yet at a key moment at some future time. It liberates you to be able to make the best of those mentoring relationships rather than thinking, "Oh, what should I do to help this person right now?" Well, you probably can't do anything other than being a good listener and writing a polite note and appreciating them.

Career growth can be diagonal

Michael:  You made another comment early, "It was the first time I didn't have second thoughts about my career," and I think that is so useful for people to know. A lot of people have second thoughts all the time. Career decisions are not necessarily easy decisions to make. I feel if you have a good decision-making process, you can be comfortable with the decisions, whether they go well or go poorly, but it's not an obvious thing, even in the most prestigious-sounding job.

Another thing you said is that from the outside, it might look as if you had a very particular vertical track, but on the inside, you were actually doing a lot of different types of things.  My career's like that too. I could say I've been an executive coach and working in leadership for 20 years, but I've done 10,000 different things in that period. That's probably why I stuck to it because it's not just the same old, same old.

What presents to the outside as the same thing can cover a much more interesting, as you say, diagonal growth pattern.

I also love what you said that relationships can basically de-risk your decisions because they can catch you when you fall. You can't anticipate everything about some new position, but you can put yourself in a position of learning from others and really letting them help you. I think that is so powerful because whenever we get to some new period of life, we can't figure it out all ahead of time. A characteristic of all of the jobs we have right now is that you're not going to know what it's like until we get there.

What I would tell my younger self

Michael:  Okay, my final question I always like to ask, if you were to revisit yourself at a younger age, say when you were in your late teens or early twenties, what advice would you give to young Lara?

Lara: When I think back to decisions that I made at the very start of my career, let's call it graduating college, first job, and what I thought made for a good career then versus now, I guess what I would tell myself is to be open to not being the cookie cutter. In other words, we talked earlier about the diagonal in all these different experiences. I think when I was graduating college and going into the workforce, I had no appreciation that that's what it was like in the real world.

You see these job postings in university career offices like, "Go be an investment banking analyst for two years, go be a consultant for two years, go to a corporate leadership, job rotational training."  They're very circumscribed or at least they were back then. I remember thinking I had to pick one of those and try to figure out, "Okay, which one was I?" At the time, I picked the banking analyst.  Why would a Comp Lit major be a banking analyst, but hey, again, it's liberal arts and it was great because it exposed me to all kinds of stuff, but I just didn't know the breadth of possibilities back then.

I would probably encourage myself to be more open-minded, more exploratory around careers. I suspect the younger generation in this era is more attuned to that maybe than my era was because I feel like, with the evolution of technology and media and things like that, lots of new jobs that get created all the time. Younger people are probably less fixed on the traditional roles, whereas when I was in college, I think it was, "Are you going to law school? Are you going to med school? Are you going to be a banker?"

It was defined, and I think I would tell myself to be more open to that. Even when I went to med school in my mid-twenties, I didn't have a model going into med school, I didn't know anybody who was an MD or a PhD working in pharma. The MDs that I knew all practiced medicine, the PhDs that I knew did research. It was until I went to Penn and was in the MD-MBA program that I saw all these other careers that MDs and PhDs could do. I was in my late twenties by then.

That was a late recognition or understanding of the huge variety of things that we can do in our lives, and my impulse around decision-making has often been driven by, as I said at the beginning, is it challenging? Am I learning something? Is it fun? Am I enjoying myself? I'm proud that that's been consistent through my life in making career decisions, but maybe the application of it could have been more broad and in even more unexpected ways earlier. That's probably the counsel I would give myself.

Staying real

Michael: Thank you for taking time from your schedule. You're a busy, busy, busy woman, but I appreciate it and our listeners will appreciate it. I just want to say that as I was getting ready for this interview I was thinking, "I'm going to talk to a CEO, I better have my act together."  And then we started talking, and I was like, "Oh, it's Lara, okay."

[laughter]

Lara: Exactly. In fact, it’s funny you say that because I actually think about this a lot.  I want people to think of me as Lara, not the CEO, and it's funny what happens.  Right around the time we went public, I walked into a meeting and I felt the team straighten up in their chairs, and they hadn't done that before, and I'm like, "Oh, this is different." [laughs]

Michael: Well, if you ever need some Lara realness, just give me a call and I'll show up.  Thank you so much, Lara Sullivan.

Lara: It was great to talk to you, Michael. Thank you.