Leadership Behind the Scenes: A Backstage Approach to Effective Medical Writing

Abstract

As medical writers, you’ve undoubtedly experienced the need for leadership in your writing projects. Have you been conflicted as to how to best establish leadership despite having no clear authority over team members? How can we motivate teams to accomplish medical writing goals and help deliver quality documents? How can we do this in a proactive, efficient, and streamlined way? Behind the scenes, we steer discussions, coordinate reviews, manage timelines, facilitate consensus, and harmonize global teams, all while writing the document at hand. Leadership is an integral part of our medical writing lives.

Imagine the following scenario: Debbie sits at her desk, a partially finished document on her monitor. Fingers on her keyboard, she hesitates, but not for loss for words. She knows how to write the report but faces a quandary that affects all medical writers: she is missing some team comments yet is tasked with meeting the timelines. The last conference call did not resolve as much as hoped and left her with no clear direction. Additionally, the data have been updated again. In this familiar scenario, leadership and efficiency are needed, and sometimes the best option is … YOU.