Dr Leon Rozen

I have been in and around Medical Affairs for thirty years. When I started, the function was largely operational and the compliance check on the commercial team, the people who said no. Medical and commercial operated in an adversarial relationship. That was simply how it was structured.

I was fortunate early on to work with a commercial leader who saw it differently. She brought me in as a partner rather than a counterweight, and that experience shaped how I understood what the relationship between Medical Affairs and the rest of the business could look like when it was working properly.

The Pattern

Over the years I watched Medical Affairs change. The function became more strategic, more self-aware, more ambitious about its role. The language shifted: from compliance function to bridge, from bridge to third pillar, from third pillar to strategic partner. The aspiration was real and the capability was there to back it up.

But the influence wasn't following. And I kept seeing that gap between what Medical Affairs was bringing to the table and how much weight it was actually carrying when decisions were being made.

Because I believe that leadership is fundamentally about developing people, I invested in understanding why. I trained as a practitioner in emotional intelligence, behavioural profiling, neurolinguistic programming, and high performance coaching. I used these tools in my own work and taught them within Medical Affairs teams.

They were valuable. But they did not explain the pattern I was seeing. Even when individual capability was strong and the tools were being applied well, the gap persisted. That told me the problem was not in the individual. It was in the structure of how Medical Affairs input was being received and weighted by the executive system.

That is what led me here to the question of whether the problem was something we were doing, or something structural. And the more I examined it, the clearer it became that it was structural.

What this work is

This work is the product of that examination. It is structured and evidence-based. It is conducted at executive level and in full confidence. It does not start from the assumption that the individual needs fixing. It starts from the question of whether the system is processing their contribution the way it should be.

The goal is not to teach people to perform authority they do not have. It is to identify where genuine expertise is being discounted for structural reasons, and to do something precise about it.