What makes a board excellent: Dr Linda McGoldrick on integrity, culture and board leadership

On the latest episode of Beyond the Purpose, Dr Linda McGoldrick, a global healthcare and life sciences leader with more than three decades as a CEO, board director and strategic advisor, set out what separates a good board from an excellent one. It’s a useful lens for anyone sitting on a board, building one or backing a company that will depend on one.

Asked how she decides which organisations to work with, Linda says it comes down to culture. She looks at the leadership, the attitude to excellence and maturity, and whether a board prioritises relationships and respect and makes room for different ideas to find solutions. She has had two experiences she describes as horrific and says you learn more from the challenging ones than from the successful ones. For her, it boiled down to less than high integrity and self-serving behaviour, which meant a board was not greater than the sum of its parts. Boards that fall short of excellent can still be good, she says, but they won’t reach the superior process that finds solutions and supports management.

Her signals for a high-performing organisation are consistent. She looks for strategic CEOs and a culture of respect and rigour, where people understand the detail of the business as well as how they will get there, and where there is the ability to influence. She also values multicultural boards and recalls one with eight nationalities around the table.

Linda is equally direct about knowing when to leave. She has chosen not to renew board terms when she felt she had done what she was brought in to do, handing the baton on as needs change. The difficulty, she says, comes when people stay too long and hold back development, and it is a hard question to answer honestly. The same principle applied when she was building her own company, where she walked away from potential clients whose approach didn’t resonate with her.

Storytelling runs through much of the conversation. Linda is interested in people’s stories, from the most to the least successful, and describes each one as a point in time on a path that is never static. On AI, she says everyone is racing to understand the implications, but that understanding the breadth and depth of people’s emotional and psychological maturity is a differentiator she doesn’t believe can be replaced.

On access to capital, Linda is frank. The last 20 years in life sciences have been brutal. There was a time when an unproven preclinical molecule could be funded almost overnight, and those days are long gone. She sees some progress, with more mutual risk taking from investors, and believes family offices and high-net-worth individuals investing strategically have changed the course of many companies that would otherwise never have been funded.

Her advice to founders is to think big. There is a lot of capital looking for good companies, management and leadership, and it isn’t limited to seed funding. She recommends asking everyone in your world who they know, going in with an offering rather than an ask and leaving no stone unturned. Many self-made millionaires are single-purpose investors, often backing areas shaped by their own experience, such as rare diseases. That takes homework, patience and a story you can keep telling when 19 out of 20 investors say no, because it only takes one. Resilience and persistence, she says, are the two qualities she can’t think of a success story without.

One of the hosts also raises one of the most common requests BioX receives: people looking for their first board seat and says joining the wrong board is probably worse than having none. Linda agrees that the first is the hardest and says hers came when industry approached her while she was a full-time executive.

Listen to the full conversation with Dr Linda McGoldrick on episode three of Beyond the Purpose, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

To learn more about how BioX helps organisations secure the leaders who drive performance across the full drug development life cycle, visit BioX.