When a crisis demands leadership beyond your role

"This is your moment to shine."

My boss said this sixteen months into my first global role, just as a regulatory shutdown at an external manufacturing partner put around two thirds of the portfolio's global sales at risk.

I was furious.

Country teams needed answers for doctors and health authorities. Employees were wondering what a prolonged interruption could mean for patients, the portfolio and their jobs. Our team was working around the clock to mitigate the risks.

How could this be anyone's moment to shine?

It took me time to understand that he was not asking me to prove how good I was. He was asking something much harder of me: to stop defining my contribution by the boundaries of my role.

When doing your job well is no longer enough

Until then, much of my career had been built on an approach that had served me well: enter a difficult situation, understand what is happening and find a way forward.

In the first days of the crisis, that instinct mattered. I went deep into the manufacturing, quality, regulatory and medical implications. Understanding the detail helped me translate a complex problem for different audiences when certainty was in short supply.

But the organisation did not simply need a better commercial response.

It needed the right expertise connected, senior leaders close to the reality, difficult positions challenged without blame, and a shared purpose held while the pressure continued to rise.

None of this was in my job description.

I had been doing my job well. What I had not yet understood was that a bigger responsibility sometimes means no longer waiting to be told where to lead.

The boundaries we draw ourselves

My boss was based in Singapore. We met in person only a few times a year, and a monthly thirty-minute call left little room for in-depth conversation. At times I read that distance as a lack of support. When I challenged him, he told me the business was working well and he trusted me to run it.

I could have seen it differently. The same distance also gave me freedom to innovate and do more.

I had been similarly careful with senior country leaders, reluctant to take more of their time than my remit seemed to justify. I thought of that as respect for their priorities.

Looking back, I was also making assumptions about where my contribution should stop.

The organisation had not drawn every boundary for me, some of them I had drawn myself.

Reading the pressure behind the reaction

About three weeks into the crisis, I was preparing to board a Saturday evening flight from Singapore to London when a strongly worded escalation arrived from the General Manager of a major European market.

The crisis was still unresolved. His team was facing doctors without the medicines they expected. He was accountable to health authorities, employees and patients.

I could have reacted to the tone, defended the work already under way or treated his response as unreasonable.

Instead, I saw the pressure behind it.

His anger was information.

I had less than half an hour before boarding. I informed my boss, connected with the regional leader and made sure they understood the situation before I became unreachable.

That evening changed how I think about communication in a crisis. Early communication stops conflict before it starts and keeps decisions moving.

People needed honesty about what we knew, what we did not know and what would happen next. Reassurance without action would have been empty. But action without communication allowed fear and frustration to grow.

Leading through others

The leadership stance in a crisis was not to withdraw from the details. It was to understand enough of them to ask credible questions, see how the pieces connected and know when somebody else needed to speak.

A quality test that takes two days cannot be compressed into twenty-four hours because a commercial leader wants a faster answer, but a genuine constraint can still be questioned.

Is there another route? What else is possible? What would need to be true?

Manufacturing, quality, safety, regulatory, medical, finance, communications and commercial teams all held different parts of the answer. My role was now to connect them, well beyond the boundaries I had first drawn around it.

When we held global webcasts, I did not need to present every answer. We brought forward the people with the expertise to explain each part.

Giving them visible authority made the response stronger and gave people more confidence in what they were hearing.

Supply was eventually restored faster than the early scenarios had predicted, while patient safety remained non-negotiable.

The bigger change came later

Some weeks into the crisis, the Pharma President asked for an update in a senior video conference.

This time I did not answer only within the boundaries of the question. I looked beyond the crisis and asked for support to explore line extensions and business development opportunities in the therapy area.

The request was approved. For people who had worked with these medicines for years, it restored something the crisis had taken away.

A view of the future.

I would not have asked three months earlier.

The crisis did not give me a bigger title. It changed the size of the responsibility I was willing to take.

I understand my boss's words differently now. Shining meant seeing enough of the whole to ask the questions others were not asking, bringing the right people together and leading beyond my role.I see the same pattern now in the leaders I advise.

Often the issue is not what they can do.

The role has grown, but the boundaries around how they lead have not grown with it.

What is this moment asking of you that is not written clearly in your job description?