Why GSK’s Emma Walmsley ‘violently rejects’ the idea of ‘superhero’ CEOs

– Thick-skinned. Six weeks after Emma Walmsley became CEO of U.K. drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline in 2017, British fund manager Neil Woodford staged what became known as “Glaxit.” Frustrated with GSK’s “suboptimal business strategy,” he dumped GSK stock entirely. Walmley’s appointment seemed to be the last straw; he deemed the L’Oreal alum a “continuity candidate.” 

Four years later, another investor, this time Elliott Management, took aim at Walmsley, demanding that the CEO reapply for her job before the demerger of GSK’s consumer health care unit, citing “years of disappointing performance.” 

Walmsley has had a bumpy tenure—running GSK was a turnaround job from the get-go—but she remains CEO and understands that such attacks come with the territory. In a new interview with Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, she said that being a CEO is “an enormous privilege” and “a serious responsibility” that you should not take on “if you don’t have the courage of your convictions, the ability to listen, and sufficiently thick skin.”

Walmsley certainly pleased investors earlier this month when GSK earned FDA approval of its RSV vaccine for people over 60, the first drugmaker to do so. “It’s extremely meaningful in the sense that the world has woken up to the power and importance of adult vaccination,” she said. 

Beating Moderna and Pfizer in the RSV vaccine race was a significant feat for GSK given its stumbles in developing a COVID vaccine, an experience that Walmsley called “daunting.” 

Walmsley was the first woman to run a major pharmaceutical company back in 2017, a distinction she does not necessarily relish. 

“I have always tried not to define my career by my gender first,” she said. Walmsley touts the diversity of her team—50% of managers are women, as are 42% of GSK’s VP-level-and-higher execs and half of Walmsley’s direct reports—but she doesn’t characterize diverse hiring as an outright priority.  

“I violently reject the notion of CEOs as superheroes,” she says. Leadership, in her mind, is about doing more together than could be done alone. “And I think it’s a preposterous notion that we should restrict our universe of selection of talent to one segment of society that all looks the same,” she says. “It’s not the core of my purpose, as I said, but I just want to do the best I can for GSK. And the science shows, by the way, that diverse teams do better and the confrontation of ideas does better.”

You can listen to the entire interview on Apple podcasts or Spotify.

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

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PARTING WORDS

"The only voice that we really just don’t hear from is Rosalind’s."

—Madeline Myers on the inspiration behind Double Helix, her new musical about British chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was critical to scientific understanding of DNA