Executive Coaching — Pharmaceutical Leaders

You already have
what it takes.
Let’s make sure
you know it.

I work with pharmaceutical managers and leaders who are technically outstanding, and who are finding that leadership asks something different of them. Something nobody quite prepared them for.

Helen Millar — Executive Coach
Does this sound familiar?

You were brilliant at the job
that got you promoted.

You’re not the wrong fit for the role. You just haven’t yet found your version of leadership.

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Helen Millar
About Helen

I spent 28 years inside the industry you work in.

I know what it’s like to sit in the room my clients are sitting in. I’ve done this work from the participant’s side. I know what it’s like to come back to an organisation that hasn’t changed while you have.

My career took me from medical sales representative to Associate Director at Bristol-Myers Squibb, across oncology, haematology, immunoscience, neuroscience, and market access. Then to Senior Business Unit Lead at Chugai Pharma, leading the UK and Ireland Oncology business. I’ve led cross-functional teams, navigated European-level politics, and managed the kind of stakeholders my clients are now managing themselves.

Which means when you tell me about a difficult conversation with your regional VP, I don’t need you to explain the context. We start further along.

ICF Coaching Diploma EMCC Member ICF ACC (in progress) BSc Management, Trinity College Dublin 28 Years — Pharmaceutical Industry
Read more about Helen
How I Work

Structured around what’s
actually in front of you.

Not a fixed curriculum. Not a programme designed for someone else and applied to you. Every engagement starts with where you are — and builds from there.

Individual Coaching

One-to-one, over three to six months.

We work together on Zoom, at a pace and depth that fits around the demands of a senior role in a fast-moving industry. Sessions follow a similar shape: we start with what’s in front of you, and find what’s underneath it. The insight tends to travel — one conversation changes how you show up in the next ten.

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Corporate Cohorts

For companies investing in several leaders at once.

If you’re in HR or Learning & Development and thinking about how to develop a cohort of managers or high potentials, I’d welcome a conversation. I work with companies to design something bespoke — combining one-to-one coaching with group work, so leaders develop individually and learn from each other’s experience.

Get in touch
The difference

Most executive coaches are excellent.
Very few have done your job.

“Clients don’t spend the first twenty minutes of every session bringing me up to speed. We start further along.”

A generalist coach can help you think through a conflict with a stakeholder. What they can’t do is already know what that stakeholder’s agenda probably is, why the conflict is likely to be about territory rather than substance, and what the political landscape of a pharmaceutical company means for how it should be handled.

That knowledge takes years to accumulate inside the industry. I have twenty-eight of them.

More about my background
The Work

What changes, and how.

These are real engagements, with identifying details changed to protect confidentiality. They give you a sense of the kind of work we do together — and what becomes possible.

Case Study — Country Manager, Pharmaceutical

She was seriously considering handing the role back.

She’d been promoted after years of outstanding commercial performance. Within six months she was exhausted in a way she couldn’t quite name. She’d started to wonder whether she was the wrong fit — or whether leadership itself was just not for her.

What I noticed quite quickly was that she was measuring herself against a version of leadership that didn’t really exist. Some composite of the best qualities of every senior person she’d ever admired. She was failing an impossible standard she’d set herself.

We spent a lot of time on what her version of leadership actually looked like. Where she had real impact. By the end she wasn’t just staying in the role — she was shaping it. She restructured how her team operated, built a direct relationship with her regional VP that she’d previously avoided, and started being sought out internally as someone worth listening to.

“She told me at our last session that she finally felt like herself at work. That’s the one I come back to.”

Read all case studies

The best leaders never stop developing. They just do it before someone tells them they need to.

Coaching isn’t remedial. It’s what serious professionals do when they’re committed to performing at the level they’re capable of — not just the level they’ve already reached.

The leaders I work with aren’t struggling. They’re ready for what’s next.

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What clients say

In their own words.

Named testimonials will appear here after launch.
The first step

A conversation to find out
if this is the right fit.

The discovery call is thirty minutes on Zoom. No obligation, no pitch. It’s a conversation to establish whether what I do is right for where you are — and I’m as invested in getting that answer right as you are.

Book a Free Discovery Call

Free · 30 minutes · Zoom · No obligation