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When the People Model Starts Slowing the Science Down

Insight article

In my experience, the right question is not “When should HR come in?” but “When does the current people model stop working for the business?” From an investor’s seat, the people model is either part of the scale story or part of the risk discount.

Founders tend to feel this as lost time, weaker hiring and slower execution. Boards and investors tend to see it as people risk, fragile operations and lower confidence that the company can scale safely. In practice, they are often reacting to the same thing: the organisation has quietly outgrown the people model that worked at the earlier stage.

This is particularly visible in biotech and life sciences. Here, HR decisions affect scientific continuity, regulatory credibility, day-to-day operations and investor confidence in a very direct way. Under UK governance expectations, boards are increasingly expected to consider workforce, culture and internal controls as part of their oversight of long-term value and risk. Sector work from McKinsey and the BIA points in the same direction, pointing to leadership depth and specialist talent as material constraints on growth in UK biotech.

Early HR choices as commercial leverage

I find it more useful to think about early people decisions as commercial leverage rather than “HR timing”. The people model you choose – who you hire, how you organise, how decisions are made – affects speed, resilience, delegation, retention and investor confidence long before anyone hires a People Director.

Much of the research I work with points in this direction, even though individual studies naturally vary. A meta-analysis in the Journal of Business Venturing found that HR-enhancing practices are positively related to SME performance, with stronger effects in younger firms, high-tech sectors and more regulated labour markets. Review work on HRM in smaller firms also suggests that smaller organisations regularly rely on highly contextual, informal approaches to people management, but that growth tends to increase the need for better defined roles, better line management and more explicit systems.

In biotech specifically, McKinsey has argued that the UK’s research strength is not enough on its own. Companies also need experienced leadership in finance, clinical development, regulatory affairs, market access and commercialisation if they want to scale internationally. In practice, that means the people model is part of the commercial story, not an afterthought.

Founder drag as a scaling issue

What founders often describe to me as “I’m the bottleneck” is usually a sign that the existing model has reached its limit. What felt lean and efficient at eight people can quietly become an operating cost at twenty-five.

The SME HRM literature helps explain why. Smaller organisations often grow around the founder, with informal decision-making, close personal knowledge, and many unwritten understandings. That can be entirely rational in the early stages. As headcount and complexity increase, however, the same informality tends to strain line managers, create ambiguity and pull more and more issues back to the founder or a very small leadership group.

In practical terms, founder dependence is not only a well-being concern. It is also a signal about governance, resilience and succession. For boards and investors, the core issue is whether the business can continue to make sound decisions and retain critical knowledge if too much rests with a single person.

Key-person risk that is felt, not just modelled

Key-person risk in early-stage firms is often obvious when you map it, but less obvious in the moment. It can feel efficient for one person to carry a great deal of knowledge, until illness, departure, or exhaustion exposes how fragile the model really is.

Research on early joiners and founding teams suggests that early hires can have an outsized impact on firm performance, survival, and growth. That fits with what many of us see in practice in science-based businesses, where a small number of people often hold disproportionate amounts of technical, regulatory, or commercial knowledge.

In practice, I see this play out in familiar ways. A scientific founder holds most of the programme’s history. A regulatory lead carries critical context largely in their head. A finance lead understands how everything actually works, but very little is documented. None of that feels pressing until there is a health issue, a resignation, a major family event or a dispute.

Boards and investors tend to experience the same pattern of continuity and execution risk. When they ask, “Who else can carry this if X disappears for three months?” and the honest answer is “no one”, it is hard for them to treat the organisation as genuinely scalable.

Hiring quality, ramp-up and leadership bench

Weak hiring discipline is another way the current people model can slow a business down without anyone quite naming it. The meta-analysis evidence suggests that HR-enhancing practices are correlated with performance in SMEs, and that the effect is stronger in younger and high-tech firms. In day-to-day terms, that often shows up as a slower ramp-up for new hires, more re-work, and more senior time spent patching gaps.

In biotech and life sciences, the stakes are usually higher. Specialist roles in regulatory, clinical, quality or market access are expensive and hard to fill. McKinsey’s UK biotech work points to the shortage of experienced CMOs, CFOs and market-access/regulatory experts as a constraint on growth. The BIA’s skills work reinforces this point from a sector standpoint, arguing for a broader talent pool and stronger leadership development to sustain the UK’s bioscience position.

From an investor perspective, leadership depth is part of the valuation story. A strong proposition, combined with a thin or overstretched leadership bench, is usually a harder sell, particularly when the business is trying to scale in a regulated, specialist environment.

Culture, workforce risk and governance

Many early-stage organisations set expectations through the founder’s behaviour and day-to-day conversations rather than formal policies. That can work well in a small, cohesive team. The difficulty is that informal approaches are hard to explain and defend once a situation becomes contentious.

Under the 2024 UK Corporate Governance Code, boards are expected to consider how purpose, values, strategy, culture and internal controls fit together, and to monitor how culture is being embedded. The FRC’s work on culture stresses that it is not a soft add-on, but part of how risk and behaviour are overseen across the organisation. Even where the Code does not formally apply, many investors and boards are now deploying similar questions in their own oversight.

Review work on governance in smaller firms suggests that they usually rely heavily on informal governance mechanisms – trust, direct oversight and personal relationships – but that these mechanisms have limits as firms grow and face more external stakeholders. That does not mean every start-up needs big-company governance machinery overnight. It does imply that as complexity rises, boards will reasonably look for some connection between culture, people decisions and basic controls.

From a duty-of-care perspective, I find it helpful to frame this as a fairness and integrity question, not just a compliance one. Employees, regulators and investors are more likely to trust a biotech organisation that can show how its values, people decisions and controls fit together in a coherent, transparent way. The right approach will always depend on the specific facts and legal advice, but the direction of travel in UK expectations is clear.

Bringing it back to the boardroom

For biotech boards and investors, the practical question is rarely “Do we believe in HR?” It is “Do we believe this organisation’s people model will still work when we double headcount, add another site, enter a new indication or bring on a major partner?”

In my work with clients, I often see the same early warning signs:

  • decisions piling back onto the founder or a small group of senior scientists;
  • key information held in people’s heads rather than systems;
  • important roles filled in a hurry, without clear expectations or proper onboarding;
  • culture is mostly described using anecdotes rather than observable behaviours.

None of these automatically mean “You must hire HR now”. They do suggest it is worth asking whether the current model can carry the next stage of growth without creating avoidable risk, strain or unfairness.

So the question is less about when HR formally arrives, and more about when the current people model has stopped helping and started to put delivery, continuity or trust under strain. For most biotech boards, that is a governance and ethics conversation as much as an operational one. A people model that supports the science, looks after people fairly and can be explained credibly in a board paper, diligence process or tribunal bundle is usually a safer foundation than one that relies on goodwill and heroic effort alone.

References

  • Bain & Company (n.d.) Founder’s mentality. Available at: https://www.bain.com/insights/topics/founders-mentality/ (Accessed: 27 April 2026).
  • BioIndustry Association (n.d.) Skills strategy and sector commentary. Available at: https://www.bioindustry.org/ (Accessed: 27 April 2026).
  • Financial Reporting Council (2024) The UK Corporate Governance Code. Available at: https://www.frc.org.uk/library/standards-codes-policy/corporate-governance/uk-corporate-governance-code/ (Accessed: 27 April 2026).
  • Financial Reporting Council (n.d.) Guidance and commentary on organisational culture. Available at: https://www.frc.org.uk/ (Accessed: 27 April 2026).
  • Harney, B. and Alkhalaf, H. (2020) A quarter-century review of HRM in small and medium-sized enterprises: Capturing what we know, exploring where we need to go, Human Resource Management Review. Further bibliographic verification recommended before formal publication.
  • Jebali, D. and Meschitti, V. (2021) HRM as a catalyst for innovation in start-ups, Employee Relations, 43(2), pp. 555–570. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-03-2020-0140 (Accessed: 27 April 2026).
  • McKinsey & Company (2021) The UK biotech sector: The path to global leadership. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-uk-biotech-sector-the-path-to-global-leadership (Accessed: 27 April 2026).
  • Rauch, A. and Hatak, I. (2016) A meta-analysis of different HR-enhancing practices and performance of small and medium sized firms, Journal of Business Venturing, 31(5), pp. 485–504. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2016.05.005 (Accessed: 27 April 2026).

This article reflects my professional experience and draws on published research and governance materials. It is not legal advice. The right approach in any given situation will depend on the specific facts, your organisation’s context and, where appropriate, tailored legal advice.