Most of the work here is supposed to fail. Almost nobody manages people accordingly.

The Triangle is a research economy, and research has a motivational structure that almost no leadership material accounts for.

This region holds one of the highest concentrations of doctoral degrees in the country. Research Triangle Park is the largest research park of its kind in the United States, home to hundreds of life sciences and technology companies, and the region is the birthplace of the contract research industry, with most of the world’s largest CROs operating here. North Carolina’s life sciences sector employs tens of thousands of people across hundreds of companies, the large majority of them concentrated in this region. Around that sit three major research universities, Duke Health as one of the largest employers in the state, UNC Health and WakeMed, plus state government, since Raleigh is the capital.

Now consider what this work actually looks like from inside. A compound takes many years to move from early research toward a patient, and the overwhelming majority never arrive at all. A trial can run for years and return a negative result, which is a legitimate scientific outcome and feels like nothing to the person who spent those years on it. That is not dysfunction. Failure is the designed and expected output of a research pipeline, and the successes are rare by construction.

Which creates a real problem for how people are led. If motivation is tied to results, most of this workforce will go long stretches with nothing to be motivated by, and some will spend an entire career without touching a program that reached the finish line. Worse, when a success finally does arrive, the people who did the early groundwork have often moved to other teams or other companies, so the recognition lands on whoever happened to be holding it at the end.

So leadership here has to attach to the quality of the work rather than the outcome of it. Recognizing rigor, judgment, and the way someone handled a result that did not go their way is not a consolation prize in a research organization. It is the only form of recognition available often enough to sustain anyone, and the leaders who understand that keep people through the years when the science is not cooperating.

Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and has keynoted state association conferences in eleven states, including LeadingAge Illinois and health care associations in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado.

Raleigh employers working on long horizons.

Healthcare is where Chris operates, and it shares its timeline problem with most of this region.

Raleigh events Chris speaks at.

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