Five 10-minute curated insights in a private podcast to help you face CEO pressures. Then, each Wednesday, The Leadership Letter delivers one piece of clear, honest thinking from someone who has spent 20 years in the seat you're sitting in. Practical enough to use. Human enough to matter.
How credibility compounds
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Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 10 MINUTES | 6 MAY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I was sitting in a boardroom in Sydney with a deck I believed in, a team I was proud of and a company I knew would matter. Drop Bio Health was building something genuinely pioneering, a biological testing platform that could give people a real window into how their body was ageing and critical insight years before a chronic disease could be diagnosed. The science was solid. The vision was clear. The problem we were solving was real. But we were early. The clinical validation was in progress, not complete. The longitudinal data that would prove our core thesis hadn't had time to accumulate. And the investors sitting across the table knew it. I made my case, as I had hundreds of times before. I talked about the market, the team, the roadmap, the potential. What I couldn't do, what no amount of preparation could fix, was point to the numbers that would have landed the argument. That investor and few like them didn't join us. That experience sits with me still. Not because it was a failure of vision or strategy. But because it taught me something I've spent years since watching other leaders learn the hard way. Without evidence, you don't have an argument. You have an opinion. Evidence is the argument.Every leader I've worked with understands this in principle. In practice, many operate in a kind of permanent promissory mode. They talk about what the numbers will show once the next quarter finalises, the next product ships or the next market matures. Sometimes that's legitimate. Build phases are real. There are industries, like healthcare, biotech and deep tech, where evidence takes years to generate and the burden of proof is genuinely high. I've lived that. It's not an excuse. It's a structural reality that changes how you lead. But there's a version of the promissory mode that isn't structural. It's habitual. And it's one of the most quietly corrosive patterns I see in otherwise capable leaders. And people have a refined sense for the difference.
See you next Wednesday, Phil Hayes-St Clair |
The Leadership Letter with Phil Hayes-St Clair
Five 10-minute curated insights in a private podcast to help you face CEO pressures. Then, each Wednesday, The Leadership Letter delivers one piece of clear, honest thinking from someone who has spent 20 years in the seat you're sitting in. Practical enough to use. Human enough to matter.
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 8 MINUTES | 10 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM The room had been going for forty minutes and nobody was listening anymore. I was there as an observer. The CEO ran a biotechnology company that had two therapies slated for market, and almost none of the pieces sat under one roof. Development in one place. Manufacturing in another. Distribution somewhere else again, inside a partner organisation with its own culture, its own incentives,...
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 9 MINUTES | 3 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM It doesn’t take long to see ‘us’ and ‘them’ cultures in organisations. It shows up in militaries, emergency services, break rooms and executive team meetings, and it operates whether it’s intended or not. I felt it soon after enlisting in the Army and again in my corporate jobs. I started paying closer attention to it recently. As the worst of COVID passed and the teams I work with began...
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 6 MINUTES | 27 MAY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I was the newest arrival to my infantry section. A section is one of three teams in a platoon, and on my first field exercise my section commander was delivering his orders to us. Military orders are delivered in a specific format designed for clarity and depending on the exercise or operation, they can range from lengthy and intricate to relatively straightforward. In that moment I was...