#004: Your 2025 Leadership Hack

Your best year yet. Read on to find everything you need for a ground-breaking 2025.

Leadership Lens: Time-Boxing Hacks

Your to-do list doesn’t belong on a scrap of paper; it belongs on your calendar.

Strategic leaders often stumble because their plans don’t make it into their schedules. Operational leaders succeed by anchoring their priorities in time. What’s the lesson? Strategy needs Goals, and Goals need Grip. They only work if they live on your calendar.

Here’s the hack:

• Lock in key events and workshops now: Map out your team’s touchpoints, workshops, and major events for 2025. Don’t wait until the last minute.

• Anchor goals to time: Translate every objective into a time-boxed activity. If it doesn’t have a slot in the diary, it’s not a plan; it’s a wish.

• Build in ‘you’ time: Block out time to reflect, iterate and plan. A half-day every quarter is the absolute minimum. This isn’t just time for you; it’s an investment in your team. When you lead better, they perform better. Make it happen.

  

When you block time for important stuff, you give your plans grip.

At The Pharma Coach, we see this often. Teams that succeed dream big AND they time-box the steps to make those dreams real.

Reflection Challenge

Before your next team meeting, ask yourself:

• What’s the one thing I want us to achieve together in 2025?

• Have I put the building blocks for that success into our calendar?

Start small. Start now. Your calendar is your team’s map to success.

Strategy in Action: The Letter from the Future

Put 30 mins in your diary now to do this before the end of the year.

A powerful exercise to align your team’s vision with action.

Here’s the idea: write a letter to your team dated December 2025. In it, describe the goals you’ve achieved as though they’ve already happened.

For example:

Dear Team,
What an incredible year it’s been! In 2025, we exceeded our patient impact goals, streamlined our decision-making, and fostered a culture of collaboration. Our Q2 launch was flawless because we planned early, and the team’s dedication to excellence shone through. The workshops we held were some of the most productive we’ve ever run….

This technique is more than a motivational trick; it’s rooted in psychology. By vividly imagining future achievements, you create mental pathways that guide your actions today. As the saying goes, "The brain is like an unruly elephant; this process helps it walk the path you choose."

Try it with your team:

1. Write down your goals for 2025.

2. Translate those goals into a narrative, written in the past tense, as if you’ve already achieved them.

3. Share this vision with your team to build alignment and excitement.

Put 30 mins in your diary now to do this before the end of the year. Send it to your team as a letter for the future. Ask them to add to it and send it back.

Practical Takeaway: Team Planning Checklist

Here’s your 2025 readiness list:

1. Annual Calendar: Block out key meetings, workshops, and events now.

2. Time-Box Goals: Review your objectives and ensure each has a slot on the calendar.

3. Future Vision Exercise: Use the Letter from the Future technique to galvanise your team.

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Collaborators' Corner: Implementing Strategy

A strategy not acted on is doomed to fail. In this week’s Collaborators’ Corner, our friends at CMI dive into the do’s and don’ts of strategy implementation.

Key Insight: Strategy must be done, and be done right. Plan effectively; align people and processes; review and readjust.

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Secret Diary of a VP

I always thought I had the "strategic" part of my leadership nailed. Big-picture focus, driving vision, letting others manage the details. But looking back, 2023 was the year I almost derailed my own career.

It crept up on me. I stopped making time for strategy meetings, assuming I didn’t need to get bogged down in the day-to-day. I told myself I was too busy to plan. Instead, I got swept into the whirlwind of ad boards, urgent emails, and firefighting over commercial strategy.

Here’s the truth: I wasn’t leading anymore. I was reacting.

Then I started noticing a pattern. Colleagues I’d dismissed as “too operational” were getting promoted. They were running better launches, building tighter cross-functional alignment, and delivering the kinds of wins I wanted to own. Meanwhile, I was stuck. No big successes, no progress. Just busy.

The tipping point came during a critical market strategy discussion for a flagship oncology product…