Earlier this month, we partnered with Women In Bio – Greater Montreal to bring together three accomplished leaders for a conversation on what strong governance looks like in practice.
The event, Governance That Drives Value: Board Leadership Across the Life Sciences Ecosystem, moved well beyond theory. Moderator Aida Sijamic Wahid of the Rotman School of Management pressed three experienced leaders, Elizabeth Nanak (CEO, GlycoNet), Stephanie Brown (Principal and Founder, SCB Lifesciences Consulting), and Véronique Bougie (COO, Anasens), for the kind of concrete, hard-won advice that rarely makes it into a governance handbook.
Here is what stood out.
There Is No Single Path Onto a Board
Asked how someone builds a path toward a life sciences board seat, the panel was clear that a C-suite title is not a prerequisite. Instead, they pointed to breadth of leadership experience, a clear sense of what a candidate wants to contribute, and genuine preparation.
Instead treat a first board search like a job search in its own right: build a board bio, have it critiqued by mentors or trusted recruiters, and get the message crisp before starting to network with CEOs and board chairs.
Committees came up as one of the most practical, and most overlooked, ways to build that readiness. Chairing or co-chairing a project team, even something like a partnered product launch alongside a counterpart at another organization, builds the same skills the boardroom demands: aligning a group, working through disagreement, and driving a decision to closure.
Some organizations place early-career staff on training or leadership committees specifically so they learn how a committee runs, how minutes are kept, and how decisions get made, before taking on more responsibility. Committees also let someone see governance from a different angle depending on their strengths, whether that's operations, commercialization, or another part of the organization, building exactly the well-rounded perspective a board looks for. Sitting on committees is often where the deep operational learning happens, so that by the time someone reaches board level, they already understand the business well enough not to need to dive into operational detail once they're there.
Another option: look for a cause or sector you're genuinely drawn to. Non-profit boards tend to offer a more accessible starting point for first-time directors.
Calibrating Trust in the Boardroom
For new CEOs facing a board for the first time, the panel's advice was consistent: stay open-minded, treat critique as being about the company rather than a personal judgment, and invest early in the relationship with the board chair. That relationship matters most in the early days: understanding why the board looks the way it does, what came before, and what is specifically expected of a new CEO from day one sets the tone for everything that follows. Directors, the panel stressed, should be seen as allies working toward the same outcome, not adversaries to be managed.
That trust runs both ways, and it depends heavily on how information flows to the board. One panelist offered a practical communication tip drawn from personal experience: resist the urge to bury the board in dense detail. Early in a first board relationship, it's tempting to over-prepare, arriving with exhaustive, densely packed slides meant to cover every possible question. The better approach is the opposite: lead with the highlights, and let directors' own questions determine how deep the conversation needs to go. That shift, delivering the top-line picture and trusting the board to ask where they want more, both respects the board's limited meeting time and produces sharper, more targeted discussion.
The same idea came up from the director's side of the table. Even experienced board members can misjudge how deep to go, particularly when they've been recruited for a specific area of expertise. One panelist recalled a moment early in her board career when she leaned hard into detailed, functional-level feedback, believing it was what the chair had asked for, only to find it wasn't the kind of input the CEO needed or wanted. Her takeaway was about calibration on both sides of the table: a CEO should give the board enough context to ask good questions, and directors, in turn, should stay focused on strategy and direction rather than operational detail, leaving execution to the team that owns it.
Getting that balance right, on both sides, is less about a fixed formula and more something each new board director-CEO relationship has to work out together.
Keep Learning, Even Outside Your Lane
The panel also touched on a challenge many directors will recognize: the pull to focus only on the area you were recruited for, whether that is finance, law, or science, at the expense of the bigger picture. Their advice was to treat continuous learning as part of the job, particularly on fast-moving topics like AI and cybersecurity, so directors can contribute meaningfully beyond their original mandate.
Principal and Founder, SCB Lifesciences Consulting LLC
„Try to get the broadest exposure across functions, across roles, so that you are prepared with some base knowledge... but it's an ongoing learning process, and don't ever think that you're finished learning“
Stephanie Brown
The event was hosted as part of the Executive Committee Board Governance (ECBG) program, a Women In Bio - Greater Montreal initiative that has trained more than 75 life sciences leaders since 2022.
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