In this episode of The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Dr. Jerh Collins, chief technical operations and quality officer at Moderna, reflects on how cultivating talent and fostering personal growth have shaped his approach to building effective teams, emphasizing the role of mentorship and psychological safety. The conversation explores the discipline and balance required to maintain resilience, particularly when steering organizations through rapid change and uncertainty. Dr. Collins also considers the transformative impact of artificial intelligence, highlighting the importance of embracing innovation while caring for the human side of change.

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior level executive search, leadership assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture shaping. Every day we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Jeff Boyd: Hi, I'm Jeff Boyd, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles Washington DC office and the global managing partner of our Healthcare & Life Sciences Practice. Today, I am delighted to be joined by Dr. Jerh Collins, who is the chief technical operations and quality officer at Moderna. As the chief technical operations and quality officer, Jerh is responsible for the technical development, quality, and supply, preclinical, clinical, and commercial programs within Moderna's portfolio.

Jerh joined Moderna from Novartis where he held roles of increasing responsibility over the last nearly 30 years, focused on pharmaceutical production and manufacturing, including roles serving as head of global chemical operations and anti-infectives, as well as the head of global chemical operations.

Thanks for joining Jerh. To kick things off, we'd love to hear a little bit about your journey and what experiences shaped you most as a leader prior to joining Moderna. 

Jerh Collins: Thanks so much Jeff, and it's lovely to be with you and talking to you again. I think when I look back at my early childhood and teenage years, for me leadership was about curiosity. It was about constantly trying to make sense of things. The excitement, the wonderment, is what got me interested in science at the time. When I look back now, I see curiosity being a fundamental part of leadership.

I then remember you described my career, and I can't believe I've done all that actually, Jeff. But I remember starting off in my career that it was again, the curiosity of science that brought me into it. And if anybody had asked me in my early career, Did I have aspirations to be a leader? I think I can recall saying, absolutely no.

It was along the lines of: I'm looking at leaders, and I don't want to do what they do. I love the science. I want to be with people. I want to shape things together with people. Little did I realize that actually, that's what leadership is about: having a sense of ambition and bringing that ambition in our case, through science.

Jeff Boyd: Well, you have certainly seen a lot. Your current organization played a key role in a very pivotal time in our history, the global pandemic and Covid, and you stepped into leadership many years ago, after really never thinking about becoming a leader, and that curiosity leading you to where you are now. When you think about scale, Jerh, and you've seen scale globally for many years—building out facilities quickly, rationalizing global assets, leveraging capabilities—talent is always first and foremost. How have you, over your career, identified talent and transferred skills to be able to meet the needs of patients, ultimately? 

Jerh Collins: Talent is critical. You have this old saying that humans are your greatest asset. That's much overused. But when I now look back and try and make sense of my career and make sense of the word leadership, talent is one of the things that I think is one of the most important—or another way of saying it is that talent is the ability to bring the best out of the people and to nurture an environment where they become a better version of themselves day after day.

There's this element of marginal gains in leadership. I think I was smart enough early on in my career to realize that I don't have to have all the greatest answers in my head, but my job as a leader was to build great people around me who knew more than me, and to nurture an environment where they can be their best.

Jeff Boyd: Thanks. You are known for bringing an energetic and progressive approach to leadership and I, personally, was the beneficiary of that over the time that I was leading the cell and gene activities at Novartis, by having some of the members of my team who you mentored. What principles have guided you today and how do you view mentorship and apprenticeship in building the best team?

Jerh Collins: I love it. I love mentorship. I mean, I love the concept of mentorship as a point of view, of reverse mentorship as well. So, anyone I'm mentoring, I'm learning as much from them as I hope that I'm offering them. As a parent it’s your job in a way also to mentor and coach. And it's lovely because you're almost—there's this thought that comes to mind: you’re almost like an artist where you are trying to create value from the fantastic materials you have with you. And, in relation back to human resources, the fantastic materials that companies have is the people that have the diversity of talent, of experience. Again, leadership can be nurturing, can be mentoring, can be coaching, can be holding accountability, creating psychological safety to have candid conversations. It's all of that, and that ability of mentorship and coaching is just another way to connect with talent, to allow them to take a certain ownership and also to understand how they want to self-develop themselves.

Jeff Boyd: Thank you. Let's talk about change and, more specifically, leading change. We're certainly in an interesting time here in August of 2025 with some significant global and economic uncertainty from supply chain optimization to global asset rationalization, and we should say to evolving regulations.

First of all, what is helping you personally stay resilient and how are you leading change through these times?

Jerh Collins: Change is always happening, but the speed that it happens now and the volume of change that can happen in a short period of time is quite immense and can be sometimes overbearing for people. For leaders, it's very challenging because you have to try and make sense of a large volume of information in a short period of time during this change and bring it in a way to allow teams to make sense of it and be there in the moment. I see these moments of change as also being very tough for leadership. To your question then, How do I ensure resilience on it? I'm super disciplined on this element of balance, Jeff, on sleep, on nutrition, on physical health, mental health, time with friends, time with family, time by myself, hobbies. Now this, this might sound stressful to some people: my God, on top of it all, you add in all of this. But, for me, that gives me the balance to have the resilience, to have a spring in my step, to have my energy balance right as I start my day each day.

I remember someone saying to me many, many years ago that leadership is all about energy management. I really didn't understand what they were saying at the time, but I really do now because the better I become at managing my energy and knowing all of the aspects of how to do that, the much more effective I am.

Jeff Boyd: Understood. If we were to look at the tools in your toolbox in terms of leading change for the global team that you have responsibility for, how are you going about that and how are you coaching your leaders to navigate these dynamic times?

Jerh Collins: I think it's important in these times, and I mean everybody has different challenges in these dynamic times, but back to talent. I obsess about building great teams, and I am very fortunate to say I have an amazing team around me, and we keep super connected, not just through how we meet in weekly meetings or monthly meetings or daily one-on-ones. So, I think just staying connected with our teams, calling out where we're doing amazing work, creating the psychological safety to have tough conversations, and they're never easy to have, tough conversations. I can make it all sound very easy here now, but that is also very helpful as well: that you have that ability also to hold each other accountable and set the bar high and not use a lowering-the-bar strategy as a way to deal with tough times.

Jeff Boyd: Thanks for that. Moderna has been known to have a factory of the future in a best-in-class biopharmaceutical manufacturing site. This was at a time when artificial intelligence wasn't something that we were talking about seemingly every hour of every day. But let's talk about AI. Where are you seeing the biggest opportunities, the biggest risks? How are you using it with your teams and within your operations? 

Jerh Collins: Let me answer that several ways, even though it's a very specific question, and I'll answer the specificity of it as well, Jeff. I am at Moderna close to three years. We already had the culture and the environment to lean into it; we were curious, and we wanted to lean in, and we wanted to get messy on it. And we did. 

And I think that's the case, if you go back and look at the inflections of any new technologies that ever happened, is, Are you going to be an early adopter? Are you going to wait and get on the bus when the vast majority of people do? Or are you going to be a laggard? And that's a choice you make at the start. Thanks to the vision that Stéphane [Bancel] has set as a founding member of Moderna, that environment was there for us, always wanting to be the early adopters and to shape the environment, and so we continue to do that. 

To be more specific, we lean in, we get curious, but at the same time, we're hungry and we want to do more. It's going to change the game, Jeff. It's already changing the game. I think it's crucial. It's not something to be afraid of. I think the risks are being afraid of it and then stepping back and away from it and not engaging in it. I think the risks are not looking at it holistically, not understanding how to manage data, not asking What's the agenting system you need to set up? How do you want to use NCPs? How do you want to set up your cybersecurity around it? And just looking at the whole thing holistically. But it's got the ability to even increase the clock speed of change. And back to your question on change, we will need to look at the human element as well. How do we help people in the change management of that? How do we manage that appropriately? I think that will become critical, but it's going to be very soon that people won't talk about AI too much anymore because it'll be just the way things are done around here. 

Jeff Boyd: Well, I know Jerh, you have a passion for developing the next generation of leaders in biopharma who ultimately will make a difference, and, as we used to say at Novartis, reimagining medicine.  What counsel would you give them? What skills should they develop? What competencies should they refine? 

Jerh Collins: I think one of the fundamentals of leadership, when I look back, is cultivating self-awareness very, very early. You are the best leader of yourself, so how do you become your own critic? How do you become your own coach? How do you become your own mentor? Self-awareness is one of the key paths to that.

I would never say that I have the highest self-awareness, but I aspire to get there and try to learn from that every day. I think that that would be one of the things I would be counseling the up-and-coming leaders. And then how you develop rituals around it, I think is really important. I've got simple rituals that work for me. When I go to work in the morning, I just spend 15 minutes checking in with myself, OK, what do I want to achieve today? What will good look like? What are some of the opportunities ahead I want to shape? What are some of the problems ahead I want to own? And it's just a 15-minute ritual, because very, very quickly you get into the pace of the day as you very well know.

And then in the evening, just another simple 15-minute ritual: what did I do well today? How did I show up well? Where was I most proud of myself? What did I not do so well? Why not? What's my learning and how do I want to act differently? It doesn't have to be big philosophical answers to yourself; it's just micro moments. But, it's interesting—if you do that on a regular basis, you heighten your ability to be self-aware. You heighten your ability to be less critical of yourself in a negative way, and you heighten the ability to be kind to yourself, I think, which is also a sort of crucial element of leadership because most leaders who set the bar high, they also set the bar very high for themselves as well.

Jeff Boyd: Very insightful. As we wrap up, if you could leave our listeners with one leadership lesson that has carried you through your career, what would that be?

Jerh Collins: I'd love to leave you with about 10, Jeff, because it's very hard— 

Jeff Boyd: Well, you can have more than one, my friend. 

Jerh Collins: It's very hard to tease it down to one, and I think that is a good question. One would be to set the bar high and back yourself. Because I think if you set the bar high and back yourself, you'll be surprised where you'll be in a number of years. So, I think that would be one of them, Jeff.

I think the second one would be that it’s easy to lead when the sun shines and the sky is blue. It's amazing how many great leaders are out there when everything is going great. But leadership really shows when things have really gotten tough. And I don't know anybody in their life where they don't have moments where things have gotten tough, whether it's at work, whether it's private, or whether it's in communities, and that's where leadership shines; that's where you see character.

Jeff Boyd: Very good. Well, Jerh, I just can't thank you enough for joining our leadership podcast series and, I wish you a great day. 

Jerh Collins: It’s a real pleasure. Thanks for the invite, Jeff, and I wish you a great day and a great weekend as well. 

Jeff Boyd:  Alright, thank you.

Thanks for listening to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. To make sure you don't miss the next conversation, please subscribe to our channel on your preferred podcast app, and if you're listening via LinkedIn or YouTube, why not share this with your connections? Until next time.

About the interviewer

Jeff Boyd (jboyd@heidrick.com) is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ Washington, D.C. office and the global managing partner of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Practice.