At VP+ levels, your highlight reel is working against you
I was three interviews into a VP-level search when I realized all three candidates were telling me the exact same story.
Not literally the same—one was about turning around a failing clinical program, another about restructuring a commercial team, the third about navigating a budget crisis. But the structure was identical: “We were failing, I identified the problem, I implemented the solution, we succeeded.”
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Here’s what made me uncomfortable: I believed every word they said. And I still wasn’t going to hire any of them.
The Problem Nobody Sees
Biotech executives spend hours crafting their “war stories”—those career-defining moments that prove they can handle pressure, make tough calls, deliver results. They workshop these stories with coaches. They practice the STAR method. They make sure every detail lands.
What they don’t realize is that at the executive level, a perfectly packaged success story is a red flag.
Because here’s what I’m actually listening for when you tell me about that turnaround, that restructure, that crisis you navigated: I want to hear the part where you weren’t sure what to do.
Three Ways to Tell the Same Story
Let me show you what I mean. Here’s the same “turnaround story” told three different ways:
Version 1 (What Most Candidates Say): “When I took over the oncology division, we were six months behind schedule on our Phase II trial. I quickly realized the issue was communication breakdown between clinical ops and the study sites. I implemented weekly alignment calls and a new data tracking system. We got back on schedule and hit our enrollment targets three weeks early.”
Version 2 (Better, But Still Not There): “When I inherited the oncology division, we were hemorrhaging time on our Phase II. I spent the first month just listening—talking to site coordinators, sitting in on monitoring visits, reviewing the protocol with fresh eyes. What I found wasn’t what I expected. The ‘communication breakdown’ everyone blamed was actually a protocol design issue that was creating impossible site burden.”
Version 3 (What Actually Gets You Hired): “When I took over the oncology division, we were six months behind on Phase II enrollment. Everyone told me it was a communication problem. And for the first three weeks, I made it worse—I added more meetings, more oversight, more reporting requirements. The sites hated me. Then a coordinator I’d worked with years ago called me directly and said, ‘I need you to stop helping.’ That’s when I realized I was solving the wrong problem. The real issue was buried in the protocol design, and fixing it meant going back to the steering committee and admitting we’d built something that didn’t work in the real world. That conversation nearly killed my credibility, but it saved the study.”
What the Difference Reveals
The first version tells me you can execute. The second tells me you can diagnose problems. The third tells me how you actually think when nothing is obvious.
At the VP and C-suite level, execution is table stakes. I assume you can implement solutions. What I don’t know yet is:
- How do you behave when your first instinct is wrong?
- What does it take for you to change your mind?
- How do you handle the gap between what you’re supposed to know and what you actually know?
- Who has permission to tell you hard truths?
These aren’t questions I can ask directly. You’ll just give me the “right” answer. So I listen to how you tell stories about times you won—and I pay very close attention to whether you ever mention times you almost lost.
The Counterintuitive Truth
The candidates who get hired aren’t the ones with perfect track records. They’re the ones who can talk about their imperfect judgment without sounding defensive.
Here’s what this actually looks like in a biotech interview:
Weak: “Despite significant challenges, we successfully restructured the R&D organization and delivered the pipeline on time.”
Strong: “I restructured the R&D organization around what I thought was the core bottleneck—decision speed. Six months in, I realized I’d optimized for the wrong thing. We were making faster decisions about the wrong projects. It took another restructure and some uncomfortable conversations to admit that to the board.”
The second version is scary to say out loud. It sounds like you’re admitting incompetence.
But what it actually signals is that you operate in reality. That you can see what’s actually happening instead of what you wish was happening. That you’re the kind of person who figures it out even when the playbook doesn’t work.
At the executive level, that’s worth infinitely more than a highlight reel.
What This Means for Your Next Interview
The next time you’re preparing a “success story,” try this:
- Find the moment of uncertainty. Where in this story were you genuinely unsure of the right move?
- Name what you got wrong first. What did you initially misdiagnose? What assumption turned out to be false?
- Show the adjustment. How did you figure out what was actually true? Who helped you see it?
- Then talk about the outcome.
Your war stories shouldn’t make you sound infallible. They should make you sound like someone who can find their way through genuine complexity.
Because that’s the job we’re actually hiring you to do.
What stories are you telling about yourself? The ones that make you sound impressive, or the ones that make you sound real?