Meet Linda Terry
Scientist | Scientific Leader | ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC)
I’ve spent more than four decades working in science, across academia, the scientific civil service and the pharmaceutical industry.
And I’ve experienced the challenges of scientific leadership myself.
Over the years, I received plenty of advice about how I should lead.
I was told I wasn’t assertive enough. At other times, I was told I was too assertive. I was told I needed to be a Rottweiler, and that I couldn’t possibly be leading my team properly if they liked me.
As I progressed into more senior leadership roles, I was also told I was too technical.
As a scientist, I found that rather puzzling. Surely being technically knowledgeable was part of the point?
It took a whole lot of trial and error before I began to understand what was really being asked of me.
I needed to learn how to communicate the significance of the science to people who didn’t share my technical background, particularly colleagues on the business side of the organisation.
That didn’t mean abandoning the detail or compromising the rigour. It meant learning how to make the science understandable and relevant to the people who needed to make decisions about it.
It’s an important leadership skill, but one I largely had to figure out for myself.
And when I asked for what I needed, sometimes the response was simply silence.
Trying to fit someone else’s idea of a leader
Early in my career, I didn’t really question any of this.
I hadn’t had role models who showed me what effective leadership could look like.
Growing up, I’d learned that being in charge meant being tough, giving orders and expecting people to follow them.
So I tried to adapt.
I took the feedback seriously and spent years contorting myself into someone I would rather not have been, simply to look like a leader.
But not too much of a leader, apparently.
But I learned
Discovering a different way to lead
It wasn’t until I began listening to Brené Brown that something started to make sense.
Leadership was about the people I was leading, not about me.
That might sound obvious now, but it was something I hadn’t properly understood.
I began to see the importance of asking people what they thought, listening to their reasoning and inviting their input, rather than feeling I needed to be the person with all the answers.
It challenged much of what I’d learned about leadership.
And it changed me as a person.
I discovered that I could still expect excellence without feeling I had to be harsh to get it. I could have honest conversations when someone’s performance wasn’t meeting expectations without feeling that I was punishing them.
Leadership became much more collaborative. I started asking more questions, listening to people’s reasoning and making space for their ideas.
And it changed the science.
People became more curious. They were willing to push the boundaries of what we were doing and speak up when something about an experiment didn’t seem right.
I could see the difference between what was happening in my team and what I was observing elsewhere.
My team was thriving, and so was the science.
That’s when I really began to understand that effective scientific leadership isn’t about being beyond question. It’s about creating an environment where people feel able to question, challenge and contribute, because that’s how we do better science.
Why coaching?
I originally began learning coaching skills because I wanted to become an even better leader.
What I hadn’t anticipated was how much that learning would change me as a person.
It gave me new ways to listen, ask questions, challenge my own assumptions and understand other people’s perspectives.
And I began to wonder why these skills weren’t more widely available.
They aren’t just useful for coaches. They can change how we work with people, how we lead and how we relate to one another.
It seemed such a shame that more people didn’t have the opportunity to learn them.
Today, I bring that experience, curiosity and learning to my work as a coach.
Helping women scientists lead their own way
I work with women scientists who want to lead with greater confidence, agency and influence, without losing themselves in the process.
Women who care deeply about their science and the people they work with, but who sometimes find themselves exhausted by the expectations and challenges of leadership.
I know how easy it is to spend years trying to become the leader other people think you should be.
And I know that there’s another way.
My coaching isn’t about giving you a set of behaviours to copy or teaching you to fit someone else’s definition of a successful leader.
We explore what’s happening for you, what you’ve experienced, what you believe about leadership and what might be getting in your way.
Sometimes that means questioning assumptions you’ve carried for years. Sometimes it means developing new skills or experimenting with different ways of responding.
And sometimes it means recognising that you don’t need to change simply because someone else thinks you should.
The goal isn’t to make you behave differently. It’s to give you the freedom to choose how you behave.
Because I don’t want women scientists simply to survive the leadership cultures they’ve inherited.
I want them to have the agency and influence to create something better.
For themselves. For the people they lead. And for the science that matters so much to all of us.
Get to know me
You don’t have to be ready for a coaching conversation to begin exploring whether we’d work well together.
You can start by reading my Leaders in Labcoats newsletter, where I share my thinking about the challenges of scientific leadership and what it might take to lead differently.
And if something you’ve read resonates with you, you’re welcome to get in touch.
I’d be glad to hear from you.