Formation Bio Leadership & Management

What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced?

“We care more about the team being right than being personally right.”

The best leaders at Formation Bio don’t take credit when things go right, and they don’t point fingers when something goes wrong. They celebrate the team effort and own the outcomes. This shows up in how we run projects, debate decisions, and navigate the inevitable complexity of drug development where the stakes are incredibly high.

We bake this into our processes deliberately. During hiring, we thoroughly interview leaders across multiple dimensions, screening for values and leadership alignment in every conversation. We ask candidates to walk us through times they changed their position based on someone else’s input, or how they’ve elevated others’ contributions. 

We reinforce it through how we recognize and reward performance. Our values are embedded in our leadership dimensions, and we build our upward feedback off of these dimensions. We also celebrate these behaviors through our recognition efforts, including our values awards, spotlighting leaders who exemplify what it means to put the team first.

Which forum or ritual keeps priorities and expectations clear?

At Formation Bio, we’ve adopted a multi-pronged approach to internal communications that keeps priorities clear and drives alignment.

We start by recognizing that people consume information differently. Some prefer Slack, others email, others live conversations or presentations. We’ve established norms around what should be communicated in each channel so people know where to look and what to expect.

For cross-functional visibility, we created the Leadership Exchange, which is a forum where leaders across the company can post updates, share context, and ask questions on a variety of topics. Leaders are expected to cascade information they receive to their teams, ensuring it flows across the organization.

We layer in live updates through all-hands meetings twice a month, quarterly town halls paired with written artifacts covering key updates, and weekly office hours with our CEO. The office hours are particularly valuable because there’s never a set agenda. It’s just a chance to talk in an informal setting, ask questions, and get direct access to leadership thinking.

What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?

Our mission is what excites and connects our people. It is to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently. As we’ve grown and our business model has evolved and the opportunities have broadened, we’ve focused on being explicit about what has changed, what hasn’t, where we’re going and where we are today. We have always connected our business model to our mission, ensuring that we have a clear vision for how we will achieve it. 

We’ve also always run employee engagement surveys, but in 2025 we made a deliberate shift. We shortened the survey to focus on the most important and actionable themes, then increased the cadence. We now run identical surveys twice a year, which enables us to measure progress on our action plans and see what’s improving or not improving more regularly.

Creating more opportunities for anonymous feedback and being transparent about the results reinforces our focus on improvement in a tangible way. People see that their input drives change. They see leadership responding. And they see how their work connects to the bigger picture. Excitement comes from momentum, and momentum comes from knowing where you stand and where you’re headed.