This is an episode of The Passionate Workforce Podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here and grab the bestselling book on Amazon. These conversations are also available on YouTube.
The easy part of leadership is the part with a “right” answer. But most of the job isn’t that! It’s the decisions where the facts, the opinions, and the emotions all pull in different directions, where you’re making the best call you can on limited information, and people are watching to see what you do next.
Nick Capman sat down with Sterling Chung, Chief Regulatory and Quality Officer at Aurion Biotech, to talk about exactly that: how leaders handle tough conversations and stay grounded when there’s no clean answer to reach for.
Sterling has spent his career coming up through regulatory and quality from the ground level, across companies large and small, through major submissions and the kind of pivots that change a company’s direction. His take on where leadership actually gets tested is simple. The good times are easy. The tough times are where you find out what leadership is really about.
Key insights from the discussion
The higher you go, the fewer clear answers there are. Coming up through an organization, you think the answers are obvious. Then you reach positions where a single decision you once saw as a straightforward regulatory or quality call turns out to carry a dozen competing factors. The skill that replaces certainty is judgment: taking in the information, weighing what’s best for the organization, and making the best educated guess you can, often on limited facts. You won’t be right every time! Sterling borrows from baseball here. A player who bats .300 is admired because hitting a third of the time safely is enough to be great. Leadership works the same way. You average out good decisions over time, and you keep stepping up to make the next one.
Leadership humbles you, and servant leadership is the model worth chasing. Sterling describes being humbled over the years by what leadership actually demands. The leaders he admires are the ones who think first about who they’re serving, whether that’s an individual, the organization, patients, or physicians. One realization stands out: you have far more customers than you think. It’s easy when you’re a junior person answering only to the person above you. It gets harder, and more meaningful, when you’re answering to the whole organization and to the patients at the end of the chain.
Trust is character times competence. Nick offered a formula he’s borrowed for years: trust equals character multiplied by competence. You need both. Good character without competence won’t earn the trust of the people who report to you, and competence without character won’t either. Get both right and you’re pointed in the direction of actually leading people somewhere.
Prepare for hard conversations by bringing facts and then listening. When Sterling can prepare for an emotionally charged conversation, his approach is to weigh what’s best for the company against what makes sense for the individual, and look for the overlap, even though the two interests aren’t often aligned. The preparation itself comes down to arriving with the facts of why the conversation is happening and being ready to talk it through rationally, paired with genuine empathy for the other person’s situation. Then comes the part people underrate: listening. You’re usually dealing with smart people who can see the situation clearly. Often they don’t need an answer. They need to be heard. And when their feedback surfaces something worth adjusting, make the micro-adjustment and acknowledge the part they got right.
When a hard conversation arrives faster than you can prepare, anchor to two things. Roughly a quarter to half the time, these conversations erupt before you’re ready. In that case Sterling narrows to two questions. What is the goal of this conversation, and what needs to come out of it? And how did this situation actually come about? Since you won’t have all the facts in the moment, much of the work is simply listening for why something grew bigger than it should have.
Accountability is what people remember, and it’s where growth comes from. Both Nick and Sterling kept returning to this. Owning a mistake, saying “I got this wrong, let’s fix it together,” is what lets an organization and its people relate to you. The humbleness underneath it matters more than the apology itself, because we’re fallible by design, and only by truly owning a mistake can anyone improve on it. The alternative, leading from “I’m the boss and I’ll tell you how it is,” produces no growth in any direction.
Transparency protects you from the stories people invent. Nick’s argument for transparency is blunt: if you don’t tell people what’s going on, they’ll write their own version in their heads, and nine times out of ten the version they invent is worse than the reality. And accountability alone isn’t enough. As he put it, the truth only sets you free when it comes with hope. “I made a mistake” needs to be followed by “and here’s how we’re going to fix it.” Without the second half, you’ve given people a problem and no path out of it.
If people can’t see progress, they feel trapped. Sterling’s phrase for a stalled situation is purgatory. Employees feel stuck in it when they sense their leader won’t grow alongside them. His own animating mindset, held since he was young, is to never stop growing. He may not start a race fastest, but he intends to go the longest distance having learned, because the lessons compound. The truest leaders he meets are often the humblest people in the room, the ones still saying there’s so much more to learn.
Vulnerability does the listener a service, not just you. Nick connected this to Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, including her widely viewed TED talk and her book Dare to Lead. When a leader is open about their own struggles, it tells the people listening two things: that you’re human like them, and that it’s normal to be working through hard things. The opposite, projecting a life where everything is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong, leaves people thinking they’re the only ones falling short. Withholding your humanity doesn’t just shortchange you. It shortchanges them.
Distill facts down to tables to take the emotion out. This was one of the most practical ideas in the conversation. Sterling credits a colleague, Andrew Torres, with the principle that facts can be distilled into tables. When a decision is crowded with inputs and feelings, agree first on the structure, the rows and columns, the X and the Y, the goal everyone is working toward. Once everyone accepts that the data set is the data set, you can read what it actually says without the emotion. Much of what makes a decision feel charged is that the right and wrong of it isn’t clear to anyone. A shared table makes it clear. Sterling applies this in data-heavy CMC and quality work, and also in softer, more variable areas like clinical, where the primary endpoint is the conclusion of the story and the secondary endpoints are the supporting cast. Laying the studies out in a table lets a team ask, honestly, whether the secondary endpoint someone feels strongly about actually supports the arc, or just stands alone.
Communicate to be understood. In Nick’s household, the family runs on three values: no lying, no disrespect, and communicating to be understood. The third is the leadership lesson. It’s often not what you say but how you say it, and the ability to communicate so that you’re actually understood is half the battle. Sterling closed the episode on the same note: even within a shared language, people misunderstand each other constantly, and part of a leader’s job is overcoming those barriers by having the frank conversations rather than avoiding them.
Nobody is purely good or purely evil, so do the work to understand people. Both men landed on the same idea from different directions. Real people aren’t heroes or villains. Calling someone crazy, an idiot, or evil is usually a way of declining to understand them. The harder, more useful move is to remember that the difficult person is also somebody’s parent, child, sibling, or friend, and to spend the extra energy figuring out where they’re coming from. It produces understanding and outcomes you’d otherwise never reach.
The decisions that affect people’s livelihoods are the heaviest, and Sterling is honest that he still wrestles with them. An across-the-board cut by percentage is, in a strange way, the easy version, because it’s arbitrary and applied evenly. The genuinely hard call is the individual one, where something isn’t working for the person or the organization. Sterling’s hard-won view is that the most honest thing is sometimes to part ways frankly and transparently, without assigning blame, because everyone owns it: you hired them for a reason and saw potential, and in this situation it simply isn’t working. Often the person isn’t happy either, and parting can turn out to be what’s best for them.
Extreme ownership is a prison that turns out to be freedom. Nick referenced Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership and the idea that everything is your fault. It sounds confining and ends up being liberating. Applied to people who don’t work out, the logic is that you either hired them that way or trained them that way, so the responsibility lands with you more often than not.
Half of how someone remembers you is how you handled the final moments. This was Nick’s most striking lesson, and a recent one. He’d been handling departures badly, he says, because lawyers tell you to keep quiet to protect against litigation, which made separations cold, as if the years and the relationship had never happened. He decided to stop following that advice when it comes to letting people go, to stay open and supportive even at some risk, because closing people off carries its own risk to relationships and reputation. He tied it to Maya Angelou’s line that people remember how you made them feel, with a twist he found surprising: how people remember you comes down to the best thing you ever did for them and the last thing you did for them. In a separation, that last thing is half the memory. So Nick’s organization implemented a program to help departing employees find their next position. Don’t just tell someone you feel bad. Prove, to whatever extent you can, that you care what happens to them after they leave.
Silence is a leadership tool. Sterling’s practice is running, something he never liked and took up for health and stress reasons coming out of college. He runs without headphones, without a watch, without a phone, on purpose, because the mesh of body and mind in that quiet is where he works through the hard problems. Nick has been reaching for silence too, recently, driving without the radio, sitting in front of a fish tank for twenty minutes doing nothing, as an antidote to constant overstimulation. Both framed it as intentional. You can’t escape to a wellness retreat every week, but you can take twenty or thirty minutes to be quiet with yourself, empty the mental trash, and reset. Sterling added a nice observation: the way you find a lost object once you stop looking for it, answers tend to surface from the edges of your mind once you stop straining for them and give yourself the quiet to let them come.
One thing to bring back to your team
Pick the conversation you’ve been avoiding, and have it this week.
Sterling’s closing point is that the longer you put off the tough conversation, the faster things get misunderstood. Most of what makes those conversations feel impossible is the absence of two things: facts about why the conversation is happening, and the willingness to actually listen once it does. Bring the first. Practice the second.
And ask yourself the harder question underneath the whole episode. When someone leaves your team, whether by their choice or yours, what’s the last thing you do for them? Because that, as much as anything, is what they’ll carry.
For leaders looking to take this further, Nick Capman’s book The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement expands on creating high-trust cultures where ideas and people can thrive.
Drawing from practical strategies, real-world examples, and proven methods, Nick provides actionable insights for leaders at every level. Whether you’re refining your leadership style, implementing engagement initiatives, or preparing your team for the future, this Amazon #1 bestseller equips you with the tools to transform your organization from the inside out.
If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, it’s an invaluable resource for any leader serious about maximizing employee engagement and creating a workplace where passion and performance are inextricably linked. Grab your copy on Amazon.
The FDA Group helps life science organizations rapidly access the industry's best consultants, contractors, and candidates.
Need expert help planning and executing compliance projects or connecting with a quality and compliance professional? Get in touch with us. If we haven’t worked together yet, watch our explainer video below or head to our company introduction page to see if we could help you execute your projects now or in the future.
