Key takeaways

• The performance connection: Great commercial leaders know that culture drives behavior and that behavior creates performance.
• Beyond the resume: Job skills get candidates in the door. Behavioral skills (discipline, resilience and mindset) make them thrive. The right mix depends on the role.
• From failure to focus: When things go wrong, elite teams move forward fast. The best commercial teams shift the question from “Who’s at fault?” to “Now what?”
• Meetings that matter: Replace status updates with shared awareness and actionable asks—and remember, “pass” is a valid answer.
• Outcome aware and purpose driven: Focusing on purpose while driving results makes all the difference.

Bryan Selby, former head of U.S. Commercial at Travere Therapeutics, spent years navigating the high-pressure world of emerging biopharma launches. After being the first commercial hire a Travere, he learned that success hinges not just on talent, but on the disciplined choices leaders make daily. Grounded in his belief that extraordinary organizational growth begins with extraordinary personal growth, Selby shares how commercial leaders establish systems that prioritize elite behavior and resilience over default habits.

He sat down with ZS Principal Adam D’Luzansky to discuss how commercial leaders can strategically hire and build commercial teams equipped to thrive under pressure.

Adam D’Luzansky: Perhaps the most obvious responsibility of a commercial leader is to accomplish the forecast, but your philosophy starts with culture. Tell me more about that.

Bryan Selby: Every person, every team, every company all want results. We all want to achieve and exceed our goals. It’s the savvy leader who asks, “What is at the root of success?” I would argue that the root cause of all success (and failure) is culture. If you get it right, nothing can stop you. But if you get it wrong, nothing can help you.

Culture drives human behavior, and human behavior creates performance. Importantly, there is a reciprocal relationship between culture and behavior. “The way I think around here is the way we think around here.” “The way we behave around here is the way I behave around here.” So great leaders focus on creating a culture that drives human behavior that in turn leads to exceptional performance.

I believe commercial leaders have a dual mandate: beat the forecast and cultivate human performance. Commercial leaders can be tempted to primarily focus on the forecast because that is what is most visible to the board, investors and CEO. But the truly effective commercial leader understands that beating the forecast is only accomplished by driving elite human performance, which starts with culture.

Companies grow at the pace of people. The best commercial leaders get the best from their people, which in turn leads to optimal commercial performance—beating the forecast.

AD: When you’re hiring for commercial roles, especially ones critical to launch success, how do you assess for elite behaviors, like ambition, discipline, coachability, versus simply prioritizing the depth of their past experience?

BS: First, elite talent takes elite effort to find. You must treat hiring as a strategic investment, not a side task. Hiring the right people is the lifeblood of a successful team.

I begin every interview by framing it as a two-way investment thesis. After presenting the company’s investment thesis—our strategy, our products, our culture—I ask the candidate: “What’s the investment thesis for you?”

Their answer reveals whether they emphasize job skills, the ante to the game, or behavioral skills, the secret to real job success. Job skills like market planning, IC development, forecasting and access contracting are required but not sufficient for high performance. Behavior skills like purpose, resilience, discipline and decision-making separate elite performers from good candidates.

AD: Since emerging pharma teams must scale quickly, commercial leaders often face tension between filling critical roles quickly and waiting to land the best talent possible. How do you manage that trade-off, and does the way you weigh behavior versus job skills vary by role?

BS: Yes, for me, the index changes based on the role, even though behavioral skills are critical across the board.

As an example, for a VP of sales, I would prioritize behavior—roughly 70% behavioral to 30% job skills. That leader’s job is to drive human performance: to encourage discretionary effort and make people proud to represent the company.

For technical roles like analytics or market access, I would reverse the index—about 30% behavioral to 70% job skills. They need deep technical expertise and functional mastery. Yet even here, behavioral strength, especially coachability, matters. The best forecaster leaves a tough meeting where their forecast is challenged and finds a way to grow and improve.

AD: Leaders face a tension between the desire to be seen as an expert and the need to be humble, curious and coachable. How did you and your leaders encourage each other to be humble?

BS: From the very beginning of the company, we stressed the need for humble leadership; we did not have all the answers. I love the way Stephen Covey put it when he said, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Sometimes, leaders really need to resist the default reaction of “I know what we need to do here” and just listen. That humility was part of our cultural code.

It becomes especially crucial when the team is losing. When things are going well, it’s easy to stay true to your values. But when you’re at 90% to goal, the instinct is to switch to “dictator mode” and start telling people what to do. Instead, work to show trust, allowing teams to collectively develop the answers and then buy-in to a uniformed approach.

In modeling humility, I would sometimes say from the stage, “I’m saying this out loud so that I hear it.” It reminded everyone, including me, that growth is ongoing and that humility applies equally at every level.

AD: As the first commercial hire of a company that has traveled a winding path over the past decade, you’ve led through some great success and some difficult times, like clinical trial setbacks and COVID. How do you manage fear and failure on a commercial team?

BS: Fear evolves. Early on, it’s about surviving: Will we actually make it as a company? Later, it’s about thriving: Are we reaching our full potential?

In dealing with both success and setbacks, one of the most powerful tools I use is the formula: E + R = O. “Event,” plus “response,” equals “outcome.” We don’t control events in our lives, but we can control our response to the event. We earn outcomes in life based on our response to different events. This is most helpful when failure occurs. An elite leader’s job is to guide the team toward the right response.

One of the ways a team can deliver the best response is to ask the question: “Now what?” If we focus less on how we “got here” and more on how we “get from here,” we are more likely to earn an outcome worthy of an elite team.

AD: My first guest in this series, Todd Wood, noted that agility without systems leads to chaos. How did you structure your staff meetings to ensure meaningful coordination instead of simply status updates?

BS: Staff meetings can be an important part of team mechanics but can sometimes be viewed as an inefficient update session. These meetings can be most effective when structured around three parts:

1. Organizational updates. The leader shares relevant information from other departments outside of commercial to help keep the team aware of the entire enterprise.

2. Cross-functional awareness. Each department leader answers: “What’s going on in your world that someone else needs to know to do their job better?”

3. Requests for help. “What do you need from a teammate to do your job better?”

The rule: if nothing material, “pass” is an acceptable answer. This keeps the meeting outcome-focused and avoids performative busy work.

AD: Lastly, is there such a thing as a secret sauce for commercial team development?

BS: I don’t know if it’s a secret, but I always liked to describe our team as “outcome aware, purpose-driven.”

As a public company, we were fully aware that we had investors with high expectations. As a commercial team, we were fully aware that we had a forecast to meet. We just didn’t want to be exclusively driven by that. At Travere, we wanted to be purpose driven.

The beautiful thing about our industry is that we can go to work every day with the opportunity to help change or save someone’s life. No one person can do that. Someone does something that allows someone else to do something that allows someone else to do something that eventually leads to an HCP writing a prescription that can be life altering.

Focusing on purpose leads to discretionary effort, high engagement and enviable retention. Focusing on purpose helps with a to-do list that is longer than we have time for. It helps us persevere when we don’t want to. It helps us disagree with colleagues in a productive way. Simply put: Focusing on purpose is the fuel to our extraordinary outcomes.

In the fast-moving, resource-limited world of emerging biopharma, leadership acts as the ultimate multiplier, translating strategic intent into human performance. By prioritizing culture and the recruitment of elite behaviors, leaders can ensure teams respond to market events with intentionality, not reactivity. Leaders can turn a collection of strong individuals into a cohesive, purpose-driven organization. Leadership is the difference between a ship tossed by waves and one powered by a disciplined, unified crew.

This is the fourth interview in a series where we talk to commercial leaders at emerging biopharma companies to understand the challenges they face in the industry.